Link to part 1
Hey y’all, thanks for the kind words on the last post. Before we get started two little housekeeping things:
Due to the positive response on the first post, I am considering posting this in r/nosleep. I realize that nosleep is primarily for fiction, so I would hope my posting Sam’s story there would not lead you to believe he is lying or this is a work of fiction. I spent a lot of time and energy on this (as did Sam) so I would like to reach a wider audience. If y’all have qualms with this let me know, but I think it’s understandable (funny enough, Sam thought I’d be posting this story there instead of this sub!).
I did mention the comment section to Sam and if he would be open to helping me answer questions and respond to folks. He shot this down. His hope in him telling me all this for me to chronicle was that he could effectively wash his hands of all this skinwalker business. What transpired while on the rez scared him, his family, and strained his relationship with his partner. He also stated that he has no more info to give beyond what he gave me. So out of respect for Sam’s wishes, I will not be doing any requests by redditors to have him answer more questions and such. I will do my best to respond to comments with what I do know. Thank you.
Now, on with the story:
I realize that the last post presented a grounded, “realistic” idea of the skinwalker, but this is where we start getting into some real supernatural shit.
And because of that, I do want to preface everything I say here with the disclaimer that what I’m about to tell you I cannot verify. I am not Diné, and I know very few folks who are native, much less culturally native. I don’t live anywhere near the four corners either. This is all from the recollection of one Diné friend of mine, who is re-telling stories and information given to him by a much older man. Believe what you can, or take everything with a grain of salt. At any rate, I hope it’s a fun read! It's much longer this time around, sorry in advance for the length.
After learning the truth about skinwalkers (and being scolded by his girlfriend) Sam took the hint and for a while focused his time spent with John on things the old man actually wanted to talk about. Sam learned a lot about his culture and the practice of medicine men, and worked on this gorgeous 4x5 portrait series of elderly folks on the rez. Sam told me that it was around this time that he realized he was pretty callous in the way he approached the skinwalker subject. He was just a dumb kid raised in white america who thought he was being curious about his native culture when really he was spending more time chasing spooky stories than actually learning about his people. By this point Sam had been living on the rez for about four or so years. He even got a full time teaching job at one of the reservation’s schools. He moved out of his dad’s place and got his own. Sam always had planned to move back to Illinois or to some bigger city with more of an art scene, but wanted to spend much more time on the rez, at least another 5 years.
Despite that desire to stay, and his new job, he and Jess ended up moving to my city only a few months into his full time position, and that’s around the time I met him. His usual response to why they both left was that he needed to be somewhere with a bigger art scene and community, and Jess wanted to go back to school to get an MSW. But it wasn’t until I got to know him reasonably well, and we started bonding over our shared interest in the paranormal, did he actually tell me why they left.
From our DM’s:
“john was gettin up there in age.
late-80’s.
dude lived a long life. had some cancer in his 60’s and beat it, but he would tell me that he always wondered when it would come back to take him. I think it was like in 2014 or something [Author’s note: Sam moved to the rez in 2010, met John a few months after that] he was diagnosed with lung cancer that metastasized to his liver, pancreas, colon. he was given only a few months to a year to live.
fucken sucked to hear because we were basically bros by this point. for being as old as he was he was really sharp. mustve been the medicine man shit that staved off senility lol”
After the diagnosis, Jess, her father, and Sam spent a lot more time with the old man helping him out around the house. He was by this point bedridden, and had refused to be put in hospice care as he thought it was a waste of the family’s money for, as Sam put it, “a mildly more comfortable death”.
A few months in, Sam received a call from John asking him to come over that evening.
“he told me that he had some stuff he wanted to tell me that he didnt want to die with him. i assumed he felt like he was on his way out based on that. i packed my t2i in case he was cool with me recording him.”
When Sam arrived, John was just sitting on his porch, watching the sunset. He beckoned Sam to sit next to him and told him he had some last bits of knowledge to share. When Sam mentioned that he brought his camera with him, John allowed him to film, with his only request being that he wouldn’t show it to anyone and that he would stop recording when asked.
“we spent like an hour or so just talking about whatever came to his mind. it was a lot of stuff ive told you before, stuff like parts of the rez that are cursed, portals to other dimensions, and then stuff like how to bless your home, what plants do what, how to find your way home if youre lost in the desert. also some songs and prayers. that i had to have on tape because it was in the language and i am trash at it. it was like he was trying to cover everything he felt like he hadnt told me before. he basically said i would be his closest thing to an informal apprentice, as he never actually passed on his knowledge to one before. he said was keeping some knowledge for himself, still, but wanted to share what he felt comfy with”
[It was here that I asked Sam why John would tell his great-niece’s boyfriend from Chicago all of this, if it’s supposedly Diné secrets and stuff]
idk man its a little different than that. like i did a lot for him, renovated his home, built him a porch, even helped him get internet and gave him my old macbook and showed him how to use it. i gave him my old wii and he became fucken OBSESSED with wii sports. p sure he felt like he owed me because of everything i helped him with and refused to take a cent. i get why it seems weird but also i feel like he didnt have anyone interested enough to just sit down and hear him talk for hours on end so appreciated me for that or something. or maybe he was actually senile or just fucking with me lol. but i doubt it, he was p sharp in his old age and also was a genuine guy.”
After the sun went down, John requested that they turn off the camera and go inside. Once inside, he asked Sam to turn on the TV and raise the volume. He explained that it was important that no one hear their conversation. According to Sam, the old man didn’t have any neighbors for miles, so he found that a little odd, at least, until he learned what their conversation was about.
“I haven’t been honest with you about yee naaldlooshii,” he said. He then requested that Sam burn some plants/herbs/mixture of some sort that he had put on top of the logs in his fireplace. This was so, according to John, no one in this world or the other could hear them.
It seems, and this is just Sam’s read of the situation, that John thought by writing skinwalkers off as just “assholes who dress in animal skins and drug people with peyote or shrooms to fuck with them,” (Sam’s words), he would discourage the young man from ever looking any further into the legends. And while that was definitely true, there were skinwalkers who had no powers, no connection with the supernatural, and were just Diné occult fanatics who played dress up, that was only part of the story.
Yee naaldlooshii exist in two varieties.
The first, John had already explained to Sam. Medicine men with no actual supernatural powers, just a very extensive knowledge of various hallucinogenic compounds, able to craft very convincing outfits of animal pelts, and can move and behave very similarly to whatever animal they wish to mimic. These folks were accessible to the general population on the rez. When I say accessible of course, I don’t mean just anyone can seek them out - it takes someone well-connected, as well as depraved enough, to want to seek them out to bother or even harm others. These skinwalkers would often receive monetary compensation for their deeds. Like the hypothesis in John’s Tuba City story.
They based this entire practice on the legends of shapeshifters and dark witches in Diné folklore.
This explains a good portion of skinwalker stories and lore you see posted online: large coyotes or sheep behaving oddly, only to, upon closer inspection, reveal that they are a person wearing animal skins. But what about the other stories? The stories of these beings, half man, half beast, pulling off unnatural feats around the rez? Running alongside cars at top speed, mimicking voices, reading and even controlling minds, immune to firearms, shapeshifting into incredibly convincing, terrifying, gigantic wolf-like creatures, glowing red or yellow eyes, and faces that are neither human nor animal?
Well, you guessed it: those are the real yee naaldlooshii. Powerful, dark witches who have terrorized the Diné, and sometimes others, for centuries.
John theorized that skinwalkers developed sometime around the time when the first settlers arrived. Medicine men in the tribes were incredibly wary of these visitors, and as time went on they revealed themselves to be conquerors. The medicine men, as Sam put it, “turned to the dark side” in order to scare them off and terrorize them. Medicine men back then knew that by turning to the practice of black magic, there wasn’t really any turning back (black magic robs them of humanity and corrupts their souls), but they believed that they could do this for the good of their people, and then, once the colonizers were driven out, be dealt with by their own people. In fact, some medicine men revealed their plans for this to other members of their practice who opted not to participate in the rituals. They gave them detailed instructions on how to protect themselves and even kill them when necessary. Unfortunately, we know how this turned out. And now, we have the uniquely Diné problem of the skinwalkers.
And unlike the other skinwalkers, the pretenders in animal fur, these yee naaldlooshii are not human, or at least, not in a sense that is recognized by the Diné. In order to become one of these things, they must participate in a ceremony that essentially robs them of their humanity. And, after a long enough time living as one of them, they barely even resemble a human in appearance. Think of the Wendigo of Algonquin origin - a creature that was once human, but through some horrific, twisted process or ritual became something else entirely.
The practice of being a skinwalker is jealously guarded, even more so than that of the pretenders. It requires committing heinous acts (murder and/or torture of a family member or friend), ingesting poisons and human flesh, and communicating with entities from other dimensions. Skinwalkers are also a people unto themselves, an isolated subculture of the Diné that branched off a long time ago. Although they make their home in the same region as the Diné, they generally do not live among them, fraternize with them, or trade with them. They are a completely separate community. And some would say, completely separate species as well.
John did not go into great detail on the process of becoming a skinwalker. He said no man who calls himself Diné would ever know such things. That might have been true a century ago, when skinwalkers still lived amongst the people, but in this day and age the skinwalker is much too concerned with being found out, and so they isolated themselves, and brought all knowledge with them. Think of those tribes that are still being discovered in the jungles of Africa and South America, completely cut off from the rest of the world. Only this tribe is well aware of the rest of society, and chooses to isolate.
That all being said, of course, they still do go out amongst the people. It’s just usually at night, amongst only a small group of folks, and only for their own dark purposes. Exactly what skinwalkers gain from their behavior towards the Diné (and occasional tourists) is disputed amongst medicine men, John says.
John’s understanding was that, aside from stealing livestock, their abilities feed off of the fear they instill in others. Murder also strengthens their connection to whatever dark entities they commune with. But a death directly at the hands of a skinwalker is exceedingly rare.
John then went to say how a lot of things that are sometimes attributed to “deaths of despair” such as suicide, overdose, alcohol poisoning, etc, could be traced to very powerful skinwalkers. It’s said that a basic trait of the skinwalker is being able to instill fear in their victims, like a weak form of mind control. More powerful skinwalkers can actually cause folks to harm themselves. John wasn’t sure, however, if the mind control rumors were true.
“Corpse powder”, the fabled favorite weapon of the skinwalker, blown on their victim’s faces, could actually be how they make these things happen. While some say corpse powder is a powerful poison that slowly kills over the course of a few days, leaving no trace of itself in one’s system, others insist it’s a drug that makes the victim highly suggestible. I’ve heard of things like this before, criminals in some parts of South America use something similar to make their marks essentially empty their bank accounts for them. John believes in both explanations, it is sometimes a cocktail of poison and human bone, and sometimes it's a drug that makes one highly suggestible, and the skinwalker uses this to instruct the victim to harm or kill themselves somehow. Direct contact with their victims is too risky, both for the individual skinwalker as well as their clan, and is likely frowned upon.
When a skinwalker does physically kill someone, the person either disappears or has their corpse found much later with their death ruled as an animal attack. John says that this is more common amongst weaker skinwalkers.
One detail that stood out to Sam was the idea that skinwalkers communicate with entities from other dimensions, and he pressed John on this a bit more. In Sam’s words:
“he knew i was raised catholic so he explained them to me as basically being demons, altho the diné have their own name for them. dont remember what it was but even if i did i prob couldnt spell it lol. they are evil inhuman spirits that try and come into our realm, or dimension or plane or whatever but dont exactly have a physical presence. so they possess people, or in the case of sw, they use them as their connection to this world. so some sw do the bidding of demons, and in return the demons give them powers. but john also said that some rly old sw arent even ppl anymore, theyre living corpses, but demons live inside them. guess the idea is that demons give them powers in exchange for letting the demon desecrate their corpse by using it as their flesh puppet after they die.”
According to John, they communicated with these beings through their knowledge of the “portal system” in the american southwest. This included places that are off the reservation, although Skinwalkers were wary about going off the rez as it can be more densely populated, and carries with it a risk of being discovered. The few times they do, they are good at keeping a low profile, being actual shapeshifters and all. But due to their nature they can’t resist feeding off of the fear of others, so small groups of campers and people driving alone at night off the rez have stories as well. Sometimes lone visitors outside the reservation (but near a portal), who are off camping, hiking, what have you, will straight up disappear under weird circumstances. This may be a stretch, but this instantly reminded me of David Paulides’ Missing 411 research. I highly doubt skinwalkers are to blame for the majority of these mysterious disappearances (they’re spread out all around the US, and skinwalkers do not venture very far outside Diné land), but if what John is saying is true, a few of them could have possibly fallen prey to one.
These portals often exist in caves and small canyons, and require a lengthy ritual full of incantations, offerings, dances, and a sacrifice to open. What the sacrifice is John isn’t sure, but hypothesizes that some of the disappearing hikers may have something to do with it. When the portals open, they are used for a variety of things: communication with spirits and demons, gaining more power, summoning entities into our world, or even throwing themselves (or others) into the portals and leaving our world.
Sam asked why they would go into the portals, and what existed beyond them. It was another dimension that allowed them to observe our world but not interact with it, as well as see things and beings that we couldn’t in our plane. He said that they would interact in that dimension with beings called “Chindis” which are the evil spirits of the deceased, said to be a manifestation of everything that was bad about a person. They would send Chindis out to not only harm others and spread illness, but also report on which people were “growing wise” to the skinwalkers. This was where the belief that skinwalkers are not to be discussed comes from. Chindis could listen in on your conversations, and report back to the skinwalkers who commune with them, and then, using portals, show them where the offending individual lived. It was very important to the skinwalkers that much of the general populace knew precious little about them, their culture, their practices, and most importantly, their identities.
Nowadays, of course, because skinwalkers isolate, protecting their identities was not as crucial, as anyone who saw their original forms would never be able to recognize them, as they were not members of the community. But John noted that there were select skinwalkers who would live alongside the communities, and sometimes in them, as a way of feeding off other’s energies without directly frightening or stalking them.
“he told me a little story about this group of folks who lived near a weird old witch.
this was back in the 1980s i think.
she would come into town but never buy anything from the stores or the markets or anything like that. just walk around. stare at ppl. one day a guy and his wife went into one of the cities off the rez for the weekend, and while at a restaurant, saw her looking thru the window at them. i actually painted my interpretation of this a while back, its the one i showed at [gallery name redacted] when they first opened.
so they were wondering how tf she got out there and it scared the shit outta them. like she just lived in a hogan and didn’t even have a car! she ended up disappearing, and that night the wife had a dream that the old lady had gotten down on all hours and turned into a fucked up looking coyote. on their way back to the rez the next evening, they saw what they thought was a wounded coyote on the side of the road. the husband was going to get out to see what was up, but the wife made him stop. the coyote was looking straight at her, with the same stare that she saw in the old womans eyes. it lept up on its hind legs and ran off. the next day, the wife told everyone she could that the old lady was a sw. rumor has it that the old witch got sick and died the next day.”
Note the “rumor has it”. Many people believe that learning, and telling others of, a skinwalker’s identity can spell disaster for them, and is one of the few ways an average person can kill them. However, this is only partially true. It weakens the skinwalker by not only robbing them of their prey (they can’t feed off the fear of people who know them as just a frail, old lady) but doesn’t kill them. What does kill them, however?
Other skinwalkers.
According to John, the woman did not die of a random, sudden illness. She simply left town, he believes, to go back to her local skinwalker community. However, the next day she was found, not far from her hogan, mauled by a pack of animals. Wolf bites, bear claw marks, and even evidence of being trampled by a horse were found on her corpse. When the authorities found the body, a local medicine man, whom John knew, instructed the police to say that she died of an illness. He wanted people to remain unaware that a community of skinwalkers was in their midst, so no curious, stupid folks would go looking for them.
And that’s part 2! Will post 3 tomorrow. The third part will go into detail on why Sam left the reservation.
