In Native American and Norse legend, a skin-walker is a person with the supernatural ability to turn into any animal he or she desires. Similar creatures can be found in numerous cultures' lores all over the world, closely related to beliefs in werewolves (also known as lycanthropes) and other "were" creatures (which can be described as therianthropes). The Mohawk Indian word "limikkin" is sometimes used to describe all skin-walkers. It is also known as the Yenaldooshi.
When I was about 12 years old, I was driving with my dad on a road from Window Rock, Arizona toward I-40 junction near Sanders, Arizona, and this road is located on the Navajo Nation. All the reservation is trees and high desert, and houses aren't found for miles and there isn't any electricity or running water. My dad and I were driving south and it was snowing and it was about 2 a.m. We were driving for about 40 minutes from Window Rock and my dad and I saw a woman beside the road with no shoes and no jacket. When we saw her, she was walking about 25 feet from the road. When we saw her, she didn't even look back to see who it is or even try to hitchhike; she just kept on walking like nothing was wrong. Then my dad says, "Damn, she must be freezing!" I started laughing because I thought she was drunk or something walking in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
Then my dad pulled over for her and she was still walking, so my dad shouted in Navajo and English, "Hey, do you need a ride?" As soon as my dad yelled, she turned around slowly to look at us and her long hair was covering her face. You couldn't even see what her face looked like; her hair covered her whole head like a mop head. She slowly started walking toward us, stepping on rocks and branches and snow. She walked up to the truck on the passenger side where I was sitting and just stood by the window for like 15 seconds just looking at me. My dad said open the door, jump in the back. As soon as I opened the door, she just took off running away into the dark forest.
My dad and I were stunned because it was freezing out there and there wasn't civilization for miles. So I just closed the door and my dad closed the door. We just took off and thought "what the hell is her problem" because she looked like a regular person.
A couple weeks later, my dad was visiting some of his friends who lived within five miles of the area and my dad just mentioned what happened to them and their faces just looked stunned and they said, "Was her hair covering her whole head and had no shoes?" My dad said, "Yeah" Then they said, "It wasn't a real lady. She's a ghost."
My dad and I were like, what? She looked like a real person. My dad's friends weren't surprised because the Navajos are used to hearing weird stories like that.
Hope everyone enjoys the Skinwalker Blog and that you will check back often for more.
I live in Oklahoma, but I'm from Gallup, New Mexico. My son Anthony and daughter Alicia had just moved here in from Gallup. They found a house to rent in the same town I live in. So Anthony and I drove back to Gallup to get their stuff out of storage. It was the beginning of March and was very windy. We pulled a horse trailer behind the pickup. It was empty on the way there. We could only drive 45 to 55 mph without the trailer starting to swing all over the road. So a trip that normally took 11 hours took 17 hours.
We were traveling on I-40 west of Albuquerque, N.M. There are several different Indian Reservations there. It was late at night and Anthony was driving. He needed to go to the bathroom. So he exited at the bottom of Nine Mile Hill, just west of Albuquerque. He drove behind the gas station because it was closed and there were a few semis parked in front. I told him not to stop there because I saw someone by the trash dumpster. He pulled up a little further and we looked back. There was no one there. I figured that I was tired and was just seeing things.
He started to get out and I told him to hurry, that something didn't feel right. He agreed with me. After he got back in the truck, he said it felt like someone was standing behind him while he was taking a piss. He was afraid to look back, so he ran fast and jumped in the truck. My son started driving west again on I-40. Maybe 10 more miles down the road, he started slowing down in the middle of the road. There was a vehicle quite a distance in front of us. We could see the brake lights, and the car looked as if it were turned sideways in the middle of the road. I looked at my son and asked him what he was doing. He said, "Do you see that car?" I looked again and it was driving perfectly down the road like it had never stopped. I told my son to pull over to the side of the road. I asked him if he was tired and he replied, yes. So we both got out of the truck to switch places.
I walked around the front of the truck and Anthony walked around the back and stepped over the tongue of the trailer. Right when I was getting in on the driver's side, a car passed by. I glanced at it as it drove by. At the end of the car on the pavement, right by the tail lights, was a man. He was hunched over on all fours, feet and hands on the ground. He was covered with a buckskin. It almost looked as if he had jumped off the back of that car right as it passed us. The next second he was gone. I thought I had to be seeing things. It was late and I was really tired.
My son got in on the other side and I started driving down the road. I didn't say anything about what I saw. I glanced in my rear view mirror to see if the trailer was keeping steady. I didn't want it to get out of control. When I glanced back, I noticed something flapping in the wind off of the trailer. It looked as if it were the bottom of a jacket or maybe the bottom of the buckskin I saw draped over the man in the road. Then I asked Anthony if he had seen the man in the road behind that car. He said yes and explained what he saw. It was exactly what I had seen. Then he asked me if I had seen a man leaning against the back of the trailer. I said no, that I hadn't looked in the mirror on that side. Anthony said that when he was getting in on the passenger side, he had glanced at the back of the trailer and saw a man leaning against it. He said his face was hidden but he could see blue glowing around his face. He described it as the color of blue that you see light up on a cell phone. I then told Anthony that there was something on the back of the trailer or maybe even on the tongue of the trailer.
Anthony eventually fell asleep. I kept paying attention to the rearview mirror instead of the road. In the mirror I could see a shadow of three stick-like fingers. At one point I almost missed a curve in the road. It was a good thing that I was driving slowly, because there was a good 100-yard drop-off on that curve.
We made it to Gallup around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. I woke up my son to go unlock the gate at his dad's house. When I opened the door, the cab light came on. It was flickering as if someone was moving their hand back and forth underneath it. Anthony saw it too. I lifted the seat to get our stuff out of the back. I noticed that the seat was down in the extended part of the cab. When we left on our trip, the seat was up and can't be put down unless someone is releasing a lever from both sides of the pickup. I shouted at Anthony to come back to the truck to witness the seat. I kind of felt like I was going crazy. We went in the house and went to bed.
The next day, we loaded up the trailer and drove back to Oklahoma. When it got dark, I looked in my rearview mirror and could see the side of the trailer perfectly from the brake light of the truck. The night before, I couldn't see a brake light reflection at all. So whatever was riding with us was on the back of the bumper covering up the tail light. Anthony's theory was that a skinwalker saw us pulled over on the side of the road and knew we were tired and was going to try to make us wreck. He thinks that the light flickering inside of the pickup and the seat in the back being down was his grandmother that had recently passed away. Anthony was very close to her, and he felt that she was protecting us from the skinwalker.
Navajos growing up all their lives on the reservation hear about skinwalkers from time to time. For this reason, nearly everyone is cautious about who they trust, or what kinds of things they talk about, because yeenaadlooshiis are dangerous people that have the abilities of animals, yet retain their cunning human minds. My mother has many tales to tell of yeenaadlooshiis (skinwalkers). She tells us because she wants us to be aware that there are people out there that may want to hurt us, or play with our minds. She sometimes tells it to assure me that there is a God, and He watches over everyone, even little Navajo children.
This true story, which happened around the 1960s, is one of them. One night, she and her four sisters (my aunts) were at home after a long day of shepherding and doing chores. My mom and her sister needed to use the bathroom before going to bed, and so they decided to go to the outhouse together. (They didn't have plumbing back then, or running water, as they were living in a traditional hogan.) The outhouse was far away, and they didn't want to walk there alone in the darkness, so they decided to go together.
It was relatively late. The sole light source was moonlight. As the two finally neared the outhouse, they thought they heard some faint sounds like that of whistling. It was birdlike, but whoever was whistling was following them and was circling the area. They clung to each other, chilled by the sound, and continued on. Oddly enough, the outhouse door was open. Usually when people use the outhouse, they always latch or wire the door shut.
As they came close enough to the outhouse, they saw a large black "thing" sitting inside. Though they couldn't see its features, they could make out that it was human in nature. Terrified, they screamed in horror, and ran back to the hogan as fast as their legs could carry them. They could hear someone chasing them from behind, and that it was gaining on them. As soon as they reached the hogan, they dashed in and slammed the door. They hurriedly told their other sisters what happened, and they sat in silence, waiting for something to happen.
The hogan door wasn't secure. It was only an old, worn-down door with no knob; it had a rickety latch nailed to the inside of the door to keep it closed. Nothing was barring the smoke hole where the chimney rose out; it was open to the air and you could see the night sky. The person outside began banging on the walls, making all five of them huddle in the middle of the room near the stove. There were heavy objects being thrown now, and a lot of noise. Soon, they heard it climb onto the roof. Whoever it was, was walking back and forth, and every now and then, it would peer through the smoke hole at them, its face hidden by darkness. There were adults present, but being a rather rude foster family with kids of their own, they lived in another hogan some distance away. Though they tried calling out to them, they became angry and didn't answer.
Finally, in pure desperation, my mom's three older sisters, being raised Catholic in boarding school, told her and her younger sister to get down on their knees. They began praying to God for protection. One of them had acquired holy water from the church, and she sprinkled it near the door.
All night, the skinwalker would circle the hogan, pound on the door, and make that whistling noise, but even though the hogan was improperly secured, that skinwalker never got to break in and hurt them.
My mom never found out who tried to hurt them that night. Medicine men can hold a chant for you, to see who tried to hurt you, but this was never carried out. Looking back on it now, my mom says that nobody was protecting them that night. Nobody but Heavenly Father, and that he kept them safe from harm's way. The yeenaadlooshiis would bother them on and off, but not once were they harmed.
Is the Navajo Skinwalker the same as the white man's werewolf? Yes, if the Navajo witch wears the skin of a wolf. But the Navajo witches can mimic any animal they choose, not just the wolf. They can be a cat, a coyote, a dog, a bear, whatever the Navajo witch wants to be. The Navajo witches pick their skins for the type of job they plan to do. The coyote skin is for high speed, accurate sense of smell, and the acute agility. The bear skin is for brute strength, however the bear is not as fast as the coyote.
Along with their new abilities, the Navajo Skinwalkers still retain their full mental capacities. If the Navajo witch is a fairly or highly intelligent person, when he or she changes into a Skinwalker they carry that intelligence with them and you have a very dangerous opponent. Unlike the wolf man, the Skinwalker will use their whole bag of tricks - mind control, disease, and immobilization powder. Sometimes Peyote or other mind altering plants and herbs were used by the medicine man to alter his mind set.
Here's a great story about a recent sighting of the elusive swamp ape known as Skunk Ape. This one went as far as to raid the BBQ grill of a man and woman who were in their back yard cooking BBQ ribs
Werewolves is just another way of meaning lycanthrope. Also using the term skin walkers and shape shifters are fairly common. When most folks here this terminology they think oh something out of a horror movie impossible no way etc.. But its very possible and I will tell you why. There are many animals out there like jelly fish, chameleons, etc that can change its form, color, even shape so why is it not possible that occasionally a human being can do this. What it boils down to is our DNA make up and molecular structure. By simple reorganizing them we are able to change our make up, look, and body structure. The native Americans believed in skin walkers Indians that could change into the wolf which was very sacred to them. Today we call them lycanthropes a legend about people changing into one when the moon is full. The moon plays a big role in our lives it causes tides to change, people to become strange perhaps because its pull has some bearing on our brain cells. Legend has it that the moon causes something to happen to the person creating a change or activating one thus a werewolf transfigures. I myself have not seen one but these are not new legends but are 100s of years old. We have the old German legends or how about the one medieval one about the boy who wore a belt and changed into one. The start of lycanthropes began in the Greek mythology days about a god who was changed into half of a wolf. In today's society they are still around we just don't pay much mind to it. Often we categorize it as a disease where a person takes on wolf characteristics. But often you hear about half man and half wolf creatures. But they are around even sasquatch is said to be a shape shifter with the ability to change into a tree or blend with a tree for camouflage.
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