Wendigo sketch

I’ve written dozens of reports in my career. Clean ones. Sanitized ones. The kind that make bad things look manageable.

This isn’t one of those.

My name is Richard Munderson, Marine officer, 2nd Recon Battalion. What I’m about to tell you didn’t happen in training, and it sure as hell didn’t make it into any official log. But it happened. I watched it unfold, piece by piece, like a machine breaking itself apart in slow motion.

It started during winter deployment—northern sector, mountains so cold they felt personal. The kind of place where sound dies before it travels ten feet. Snow stacked like concrete. Trees stripped bare, like something had already passed through and taken what it wanted.

We weren’t there for folklore. We were tracking insurgent movement—ghost signals, scattered intel. Easy on paper. Nothing is ever easy out there.

The first sign wasn’t visual. It was silence.

Not normal silence. Not “snow absorbs sound” silence. This was absence. No wind. No birds. Even our own gear seemed muted, like the world was buffering.

Corporal Hayes was the first to notice the tracks.

Not boot prints. Not animal tracks either. They were… wrong. Long, narrow impressions, too deep for how light the snow was. Like something tall and thin had walked there—but the spacing didn’t match a human stride. It was stretched. Unnatural.

We joked about it at first. Rookie mistake. When your brain doesn’t understand something, it tries to laugh it off.

Then the smell hit.

Rotting wood. Wet fur. Iron.

We followed protocol—tight formation, weapons ready. But there was this feeling… like we weren’t tracking something.

Like it was letting us follow.Night came fast.

We set camp in a shallow depression, shielded by rock. Standard perimeter, low light, no fire. Temperature dropped like a cliff. Breath froze mid-air. You could hear your own heartbeat if you focused hard enough.

That’s when we heard it.

A voice.

Not loud. Not distant. Just… there.

“Hey.”

It came from the tree line.

Private Ellison turned before anyone could stop him. “Who’s out there?”

Silence.

Then again.

“Hey… over here.”

Same voice. But slightly off. Like a recording played through damaged speakers.

Ellison took a step forward.

I grabbed his vest. “Nobody moves.”

Training kicked in, but something else was fighting it. That voice—it wasn’t just sound. It got under your skin. Familiar. Almost comforting.

Then it changed.

“Help me.”

Same tone. Same rhythm. But now it sounded like Hayes.

Hayes, who was standing right next to me.

That’s when the shape moved between the trees.

At first, it looked like a man—tall, hunched. But as it stepped into the clearing, your brain started rejecting what your eyes were seeing.

Its limbs were too long. Joints bending at angles that made no mechanical sense. Skin stretched tight over muscle like it didn’t fit properly. The head… God.

It had the skull of something else—elongated, jaw split too wide. And those antlers… they weren’t just bone. They looked fused, grown into it like a crown it couldn’t remove.

It didn’t charge.

It studied us.

Like we were the unfamiliar ones.Don’t fire,” I said.

I don’t know why I said it. Instinct, maybe. Or something deeper, something ancient telling me that pulling the trigger would be a mistake.

Ellison didn’t listen.

He fired three rounds.

The sound cracked through the silence—and for a split second, everything felt normal again.

Then the thing moved.

Not fast. Not like an animal. It just… was somewhere else.

One moment it stood ten meters out. The next, it was right there.

Ellison didn’t even scream.

He just vanished from where he stood. No blood. No struggle. Just gone, like someone had cut him out of reality.

That’s when the panic hit.

We opened fire. Controlled bursts turned into chaos. Rounds hit it—I know they did. But it didn’t react like anything alive. It twisted, absorbed, stepped through it like physics was optional.

Then it made that sound again.

“Help me.”

Only now it sounded like Ellison.

We retreated. Not tactical. Not clean. We ran.

And it followed.

Not chasing—no. It paced us. Staying just close enough to remind us it was there. Always just out of sight. Always just behind the trees.

Every now and then, one of us would hear something different.

A mother’s voice. A brother. A friend.

For me, it was my old CO.

“Stand your ground, Munderson.”

I almost stopped.

That’s how it gets you.

By the time we reached extraction point, there were four of us left.

Four.

Out of twelve.

And here’s the part that messes with me the most—we didn’t lose them in a fight.

We lost them because they answered.

Every single one who disappeared stepped toward that voice.

Every. Single. One.

Command didn’t believe us.

Official report says “hostile engagement, environmental casualties.”

Clean. Simple. False.

They don’t mention the tracks that circled our LZ after we left.

They don’t mention the recordings—yeah, we picked something up on comms. Fragments of voices that weren’t ours.

Or maybe they do know.

And they just don’t want anyone else knowing.

So I’m sending this out myself.

Call it a ghost story. Call it stress. I don’t care.

But if you ever find yourself in a place where the world goes quiet—too quiet—and you hear a voice calling your name?

Don’t answer.

Don’t look.

And whatever you do—

Don’t follow it into the trees.

(Me:This report was given and distributed to me yesterday,and surprisingly it was actually chilling for a marine,to survive as what the native Americans call it a Wendigo,a monster from folklore that canablizes,and basically it would pick off people one by one,but this one instead went all out on a battalion,so I can conclude that this is a different variant,and a beserker type.More research will progress as attacks continue.)