The spirit of insatiable hunger from Algonquian tradition: greed given teeth and frostbite.
Documented
Hunger with a legal record
Wendigo possession was taken seriously enough to enter Canadian court records, most starkly in the 1879 Swift Runner case in Alberta, where a man was tried for killing and eating his family during a starving winter.
Assessment: Documented in ethnography and law. The tradition's stakes were never abstract.
Stories
Greed is the infection
The teaching stories: a wendigo is made, not born, when a person breaks the deepest taboo, consuming human flesh or letting greed replace kinship. The monster grows with every meal and is never full.
Assessment: A moral engine in monster form. The folklore polices the community's worst winter fear.
Interesting claims
The syndrome that maybe was not
The claim in reverse: twentieth-century psychiatry packaged 'Wendigo psychosis' as a culture-bound syndrome, and later scholars argued the diagnosis was largely manufactured by outsiders flattening a complex tradition into a case study.
Assessment: The critique is published and serious. The spirit is documented; the syndrome is the contested text.
Sources and further reading
1879 Swift Runner trial records, Alberta
Teicher, Windigo Psychosis (1960)
Marano, Windigo Psychosis: the anatomy of an anthropological controversy (1982)
Algonquian ethnographic collections
Worth asking
Which is easier to believe: that winter makes monsters, or that outsiders invented the doctors who diagnose them?