Behind The Skinwalkers of TikTok

[00:00:00] Fear filled this guy's body. No coyote could do that, and whoever was in that room was about to have a very bad night. Get ready for a campfire story. I'm Edwin. I'm Michelle, and we'll share spooky stories with playful banter that'll keep you up at night.

[00:00:23] So throw some wood on the fire and put a wiener on a stick. We're telling you a campfire story tonight. Edwin, have you ever heard of a skinwalker? I have. What would you say it is?

[00:00:39] I had a concept of skinwalkers until this one guy, he's like a Native American YouTuber.

[00:00:44] He started talking about skinwalkers and he was like, for him it's like a sacred thing or something, but also like there's legend and there's lore attached to it so it's still eerie, but it's different.

[00:00:55] We don't necessarily need to know all the facets of it in order for it to be like scary and also to respect it. I wrote, it's a legend. I don't think white people are supposed to know. A skinwalker?

[00:01:08] I 100% believe that but I'm glad everybody is educating themselves on a culture. Probably the easiest translation, a skinwalker is a Navajo witch that wears the skins of animals and can turn into any animal they want, which doesn't sound scary on the surface. Sounds kind of cool.

[00:01:27] Yeah, I know it sounds kind of cool. But first we're going to start with a story I heard from a friend of a friend of a friend's cousin who told me to never talk about this around a campfire.

[00:01:39] This friend of a friend of a friend of a cousin he was visiting a friend on the res one day after graduation.

[00:01:47] You know they've gone to high school together, they were hanging out on the porch talking about what they were going to do now that school is over and just you know like wasting the day as we all have done.

[00:01:57] Then they noticed a coyote just wandering a few yards away from them. In this neighborhood there weren't any like fences dividing the yard so he could see it walk from yard to yard.

[00:02:11] He nudged his friend and nodded over to it and they just got really quiet and just watched. Then it stood up on two feet. It was pressed up against a house in the shadows and just shuffled along on two feet like a human.

[00:02:27] He was so shocked he just whispered I didn't think coyotes could do that. And his friend whispered back that's not a coyote, that's a skin walker. Once it was next to the garbage can it hopped up on it and then leaped up on the window ledge.

[00:02:44] The window was open and fear filled this guy's body. No coyote could do that and whoever was in that room was about to have a very bad night. Then they heard his friend's neighbor screaming from that room.

[00:03:03] Then his screams were drowned out by a scream that was somewhat of a mix between an animal and a human. They ran inside, they locked all the doors in the windows and hid as the screams echoed through the night.

[00:03:21] I mean clearly that's true because it's a friend of a friend of a cousin of a friend. That is creepy though like... I wouldn't enjoy seeing that. I absolutely would not enjoy it. I'd be like, ah what the fuck? Boom, gone, I'm out of there.

[00:03:37] Yeah if I saw any animal do the hide legs walking thing just be a little too surreal I think. Now that I think about it whenever I see a bird walking like really fast I get kind of weirded out. So imagine seeing a thing like a coyote just...

[00:03:52] All of it's disturbing. Skinwalker is a huge tag on TikTok and social media right now. It's huge. You can find millions if not billions of videos but I was curious about where it all started, how this happened

[00:04:09] because skinwalkers went from being not a smaller legend but like a localized legend in the southwest to being like a global phenomenon. So it all started back in 2020 when this TikTok user named John Soto and he goes by at that one, number one, Cowboy on TikTok

[00:04:32] and his upbringing was Navajo and Apache. And he's been talking and posting other videos about a possible skinwalker on his property but in this video he captures something.

[00:04:44] He's on a horse and the video starts and he's like you see the horse's ears and they're writing down a dirt road and the sun's starting to set. And as he scans a cloud of vultures and the trees lining the road you hear someone frantically call out,

[00:04:58] Hey! And the horse stops and the voice cries out again, Hey! And the horse bolts in the opposite direction. What? Like you can watch this video now. The horse's reaction makes it very credible. That's creepy. But that's what did it? It just said hey and like...

[00:05:16] Yeah, it was just that Hey! Hey! And then the horse took off. Which I think if it was a human why would the horse take off? The video has 7.5 million lights on TikTok and counting and basically generated skinwalker as a hashtag

[00:05:37] because it didn't really have any videos until then. People would comment and be like oh it's the cries of a goat or a mountain lion but in Soto's case those kinds of animals don't live near his property and he hasn't found any signs of harmless human pranksters either.

[00:05:55] So after his horses got mysteriously injured and his chickens were killed but not eaten, Soto who is Navajo and Apache brought in his local medicine man to bless the home. And since then the disturbing sounds have not crossed the protective barrier

[00:06:13] but he's been warned that the skinwalker still wants something from him perhaps his newborn baby. And then there's a quote from him I can just tell by the sound of whatever is calling me out that it's not right. Like it wants to do wrong to me.

[00:06:31] Wow. Okay, yeah that's creepy. Super creepy. And so I found this quote from Naomi Summer. It was from an article from Days Magazine but she's an indigenous social media hashtag Navajo TikTok I guess is her thing but she explains what a skinwalker is and she says that which

[00:06:52] is a close translation but not an exact translation. So it's like as close as you could get to it in English which I found pretty interesting. Skinwalker is a quote unquote witch that committed unspeakable acts

[00:07:07] to obtain power to change their shape into an animal in order to do harm. They mimic the sounds that might draw someone's attention like the voice of a loved one or a stranger that might be in trouble in order to lure their defenseless victims to their death.

[00:07:23] It's often personal akin to having a hex put on you and they exist primarily on Native American reservations. A skinwalker is deeply terrifying for indigenous peoples and their threat is taken very seriously but the legend isn't always treated with respect

[00:07:40] in this wave of videos that have come out because suddenly people from all across the country who live far from the desert and certainly not Native American confidently began sharing their knowledge and experiences with skinwalkers. Many if not most of these videos were ambiguously scary

[00:08:01] spooky sounds at night, shadowy figures in the trees, items that seemed to be talisman left as warnings. Months ago these videos would have easily been attributed to ghosts, stalkers or a generic witch but now the culprit is solidly determined to be a skinwalker

[00:08:20] as the likes and views of their videos grow by the millions. I'm not from a reservation and I just told the skinwalker story but you know these things happen. And I get people calling in to tell me a ghost story all the time

[00:08:34] with skinwalker stories where they hear something mimicking a voice. I can imagine that, I think I'm more sensitive to sound than seeing something. No thank you. I think there's something to it. I don't know if all the skinwalker videos on TikTok are correct

[00:08:51] but there definitely seems like there's something and we're never gonna actually get the full story because culturally we probably shouldn't. So this woman was walking around and she's kind of investigating this area known as Pressman's Home in Tennessee.

[00:09:11] Now the place itself was a creepy town just all on its own. It was a place known for, it was just housing printing workers like people that in the printing press and like all that stuff and they had a labor union there.

[00:09:25] The union changed its headquarters in the late 60s and the town was just abandoned. But basically this woman's driving around this place doing what teenagers do in Tennessee because it's Tennessee and I don't know what there is to do over there. You know Sarah's a Nashville, right?

[00:09:42] Hi Sarah. What do you do over there? Yeah. Tell us. So like in this area, like you know when teens just go and they drive around and they want to go to a haunted place or just like a place. But anyway this woman she goes, she's driving around

[00:09:58] when suddenly something runs right in front of the car. The thing stops, looks at her in the eyes and then it starts running. It stayed there for a bit, right? Like just kind of stops, looks over.

[00:10:13] So just in that instant you kind of know what it looks like, right? So she described it as a dog kind of but it ran with this fist like a gorilla. It had a pink tail just like a rat.

[00:10:25] She had no idea what it would have been, right? So she started asking around the town and she was told that the same creature had been seen at Stone Mountain right next to where she was at Preston's home. Now what she saw wasn't a skin walker

[00:10:38] but people say that it sounds a lot like a wampus beast. So it said to look like a panther with glowing yellow eyes and it roams around Tennessee. Now people also reported seeing it in North and South Carolina and West Virginia.

[00:10:57] They say that it might come from Cherokee culture though. I'm not from that culture, I'm not aware of it so anything that I say just comes from the internet and that's it. A version of this story says that there was a woman

[00:11:09] who thought that her husband was cheating on her and put animal hide on and followed him to a meeting. At the meeting, the men were talking about hunting stories and then a medicine man saw that this thing that was nearby

[00:11:23] was not an animal but a woman in animal skin. So it was like shame and then put a spell on her and the skin fused with his woman and she became a beast. So now she was doomed to roam the forests.

[00:11:40] This other story, another version from a Cherokee legend this woman who is her husband to a beast. The husband was a warrior and he dies so she puts on the skin of a mountain lion to go after him, after the beast

[00:11:55] and after roaming the woods for a while she finally spotted it and the beast actually got scared. I started to run and it actually escaped but the legend says that to this day she's still running around trying to catch that beast

[00:12:08] and that's what we see, the Wampus Beast. The third story for the Wampus Beast is pretty creepy and it talks about a witch who lived in the hills of West Virginia who would go around killing animals just for the heck of it.

[00:12:22] Like you know, you see a cow, ah ha cow instead of tipping it, it would kill it. I don't know if she chased them to get their blood, ate them, bully around the farmers the people around there. But anyway one night they heard noises out in the hills

[00:12:35] the people from the town and they suspected the witch was out there so they're like, let's go, right? So they gather around they ran toward her and they see her like she's there and she's about to kill another animal and this woman, this creepy woman

[00:12:49] realizing that she was caught started to turn into a cat with her witch powers. The people got near her she was like halfway through when they caught her and she stayed in that half cat half woman state and then ran away and that's how she's been forever.

[00:13:06] If we move on to today though according to exemplor.com how this information is coming from by the way the Wampus Beast is rumored to live in sewers so that's why it stinks and that's another thing about it by the way

[00:13:22] they say that it really smells like really really bad and that when you hear Well you know, if it has like a weird possum tail that's not a stretch for some reason I just imagine anything with a tail like that really smells. Yeah, I don't know why

[00:13:35] They say that if you hear one of those things cry someone will die within three days. Oh that took a turn. In the sewer does it call up through the toilet? See that's creepy Have you heard that snake thing? Like a snake coming up through the toilet? Yeah.

[00:13:52] Didn't that happen once? It sounds like it happened in Florida. If it happened it for sure happened in Florida. Back to Tennessee Back to Tennessee When I think of Tennessee I think of the Wildman story Wildman of Tennessee? Have you ever heard of that? No.

[00:14:08] The Tennessee Wildman, no? Way back back back to like the 1800s in McNary County They say that a freak show owner caught a beast and charged for people to go see it until it just escaped The creature was said to have dark gray hair

[00:14:21] It was about seven feet tall red glowing eyes super aggressive so don't get close Plus it's supposed to stink really really badly kind of like the skunk ape Supposed to leave this Tennessee Wildman likes dogs and women and tries to take them away

[00:14:37] but for some reason he always fails at it just can't manage to take him away so that's why the victims always speak up Hey put me down Hey I'm not going with you Okay You just imagine it walking all disappointed just walks away back into the woods

[00:14:54] just punched over Even the dog said no But there was a sighting about this thing from Rob Phillips and his cousin who were hiking to be cliffs a few decades ago by the way This is in Elizabeth 10, Tennessee when they noticed that

[00:15:14] it suddenly become really really quiet in the woods Now I don't go into the woods a lot especially not anywhere that's not like you know a small parkish area but I can imagine if it gets really quiet that's not good

[00:15:28] because that probably means like all the other animals ran away there's something there but in that silence suddenly there was a twig that broke and then they heard a scream that wasn't human and not something they had ever heard before

[00:15:41] so they got scared and ran in different directions I always imagine this happening when we get scared it's like ah Rob found a spot behind a tree and he looked up and he saw about five yards away a wild man holding onto a tree

[00:15:57] it was about nine feet tall had red beady eyes claws and it smelled really badly but this was 150 years later like after the sightings of this other beast so was it the same one? what are we looking at? is this like the grandchild? I don't know

[00:16:17] what else lurks out in the woods Don't forget the desert too ooh Fan Corner Fan Fan Corner okay so in one of the previous episodes I asked what should we talk about next Wicked Wendigo says how about the rake or maybe hide behinds what? What's a hide behind?

[00:16:42] I think we looked that up the hide behind Michelle do you remember the episode The Man with Two Faces yeah it was an oldie but a goodie yeah we had a comment on that a year ago and I can't believe we had it read it read it

[00:16:56] it's from Heathwell it says Michelle thank you for your unique and sometimes dark humor Edwin love the office quotes you're a scholar and a gentleman it's the only show I watch and I've ever seen so really it's the only thing he can do is office quotes

[00:17:16] anyway write in with a comment we love to hear from you stuff happens man in the woods but I'm scared now I think we should call it put out that fire campfire story is hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Covarrubias this podcast was edited and sound designed

[00:17:35] by Sarah Voorhees Wendell a VW sound make sure you follow us wherever you get your pod