Wendigo

Alternative forms

 * windigo
 * wiindigoo
 * windago
 * windiga
 * witiko

Etymology
From the Ojibwe wiindigoo.

Noun

 * 1) A malevolent, violent, cannibal spirit found in Anishinaabe, Ojibwe, and Cree mythology, which inhabits the body of a living person and possesses him or her to commit murder.
 * 2) * 1905: Ernest Thompson Seton, Woodmyth & Fable
 * [N]o man can meet with the Wendigo, / No man can face him or see him; / Only his track in the snow is seen, / And lost is the hunter that sees it.... The heart that ne'er quailed on the war-path / Turns to stone at the name of the Wendigo.
 * 1) *2003: Sidney Harring (edited by Louis A. Knafla), The Wendigo Killings: The Legal Penetration of Canadian Law into the Spirit World of the Ojibwa and Cree Indians (in Violent Crime in North America, 19th edition)
 * Machekequonabe, an Ojibwa, was found guilty of manslaughter in an 1896 trial for killing a “wendigo,” an evil spirit clothed in human flesh.... There is an extensive anthropological literature on the wendigo and on wendigo killings in Native Canada. The wendigo...were cannibal spirits that could inhabit the bodies of living people, causing them to kill even members of their family.
 * 1) *2004: Michael Jensen, Firelands
 * Once there, however, I found no signs indicating the way John and the wendigo might have gone.

Anagrams

 * widgeon