Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I'm sure some of you have heard of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. If not, it's a Lakota reservation that's near the Black Hills of South Dakota and it's one of the places that help perpetuate the stereotype of Native American reservations being bad places to live due to the poverty, homelessness, crime such as rape and murder, drug use, alcoholism, child abuse, and the most infamous of the problems, suicide. Sadly, it's mostly teenagers or younger who commit suicide.
One of the beliefs in the Lakota tribe is a type of suicide spirit called "Walking Sam" or "Tall Man" as he is also called. Walking Sam appears as a 7 foot tall man, who has a lean figure, long arms, he has eyes, but he lacks a mouth and nose. When he lifts his arms, the souls of both Lakota men and women hang from them.
Sometimes they say he wears a stovepipe hat along with his appearance, was sent to Earth as a punishment and wants company. With the help of the living conditions such as abuse, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, racism and murder, Walking Sam tells those who are affected the most by these things such as people between 12 and 34 to kill themselves and even though he resembles "Slenderman", he's actually been around for centuries while Slenderman was made in 2009. The first known reference in the modern age is in the book In "The Spirit Of Crazy Horse" by Peter Mathiessen. In 1983 and in 2009, Walking Sam was spotted around the city of Pine Ridge and in that year multiple teenage suicides happened.
My personal belief of Walking Sam is that he goes to any place that has pain and suffering and feeds off of it, and since Pine Ridge is basically the Detroit of South Dakota, he will continue to entice those who have been affected by the terrible conditions to commit suicide
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
For the Native Americans of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, there are many major issues facing their community. Unfortunately, one of those issues is group suicide, and it has been particularly bad in recent years. Because of long-standing legends and stories, these mysterious suicides in South Dakota have sometimes been attributed to a malicious spirit. He is called Walking Sam, and while that name may sound harmless, the being that embodies it is anything but.
Walking Sam the shadow man convinces teens to commit suicide by whispering to them that they are worthless, not deserving of affection or life. While we don't know much about this spirit, because those in the tribe keep his stories quiet, we do know that his existence supposedly brings on lots of suicide. And whether it's supernaturally caused or not, suicide has been a growing problem for Native Americans of South Dakota.
