Editing Wendigo (section)

== Folklore ==
The Wendigo is a creature of the winter famines; those who succumb to desperation in the face of hunger and feed themselves by dining on the flesh of their own kind are possessed by an evil spirit that kills them and twists their body into a new form. For obvious reasons, the Wendigo are associated with greed, cannibalism, murder, and cultural taboo.

Folklore often serves to enforce a practical lesson, and with the Wendigo, that's obvious: don't eat other people! Besides that being incredibly antisocial, there's also legitimate health reasons to do so, as at least one kind of prion disease, Kuru, is transmitted through this kind of act -- basically, if you eat an infectee's brain, your own brain may begin rotting as infectious prions convert your neural tissue into yet more infectious prions. Granted this prion is only found in Pap New Guinea, but still.

The wendigo is actually ''so'' ingrained into First Nations culture that there exists a mental illness called Wendigo Psychosis that ''only affects Native Americans'', wherein the afflicted either has a pathological craving for human flesh or has an irrational fear of becoming a cannibal .