"It Tastes Far Better than Fish or Pork" - The Horror of Wendigo Worldwide

0:00 Warning. Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening now. Hello everyone, and welcome to Kind of Murdery, a true crime podcast that's mostly about murder and always about the strange and compelling stories that arise when the path less traveled twists to darkness and those who walk its shadows surrender to violence and moral corruption. We have a perilous journey ahead, so thank you for lending me your courage and good company.

0:42 I'm Zevan Odelberg, and this is kind of Murdery. Let's do a quick list and some of our favorite things. Coffee, tea, ear wine, booze, cigars, green olives, vegamite. One of these things all have in common. Well, people love these things, but I think most of us can agree that they all fall under the umbrella of acquired tastes, meaning, however much you like them all, now when I do the first time you tried any of these chances are you thought they tasted terrible. But once you've gone back to the well a few times, suddenly the switch flips and each of these items undergoes an extreme recalibration.

1:23 In other words, they go from being nasty to utterly delicious. They are acquired tastes. I should mention that an article written by Kieran Conleft for headstuff dot Org was instrumental in putting together today's episode, and that, as per usual, all my sources can be found in the show notes. All right, back to our list of delicious acquired tastes coffee, tea, beer, wine, booze, cigars, green olives, vegemite. I doubt it escape your notice that everything on this list of acquired tastes, with the exception of green olives and vegemite, has an intoxicating effect, even vegemite, with its naturally occurring MSG and high levels of B vitamins which tend to have an energizing effect.

2:05 Even vegemite, it could be argued, is intoxicating. Now. The thing about acquired tastes is, generally speaking, they aren't acquired immediately. It's unlikely that the very first time you ever took a sip of your dad's beer or you said to yourself, oh my god, that's delicious. It tastes just like a cold glass of sunny d after soccer practice. No, I don't think that's what you thought. If you're like the rest of us, you had to subject yourself to the nastiness repeatedly and with purpose, before that magical moment when the gross suddenly became permanently delicious.

2:38 And of course, it's hardly coincidental that nearly all of these acquired tastes are also intoxicants. As our brains come to desire or even rely upon the desired effect, it's all that much easier to convince our taste buds that they're encountering something delicious. Mind over matter and all that, you know. Meanwhile, our body is still attempt to warn us that we're ingesting poison. That's why they all taste bad for a while. Even with the added carrot of a buzz, we must still be beaten with the stick of yuckiness over and over before our taste buds do the eventual one eighty flip and we become a craver of that particular flavor.

3:19 Well, today, I'm here to talk to you about an acquired taste that may not be acquired at all. In other words, at least some evidence suggests that this forbidden food is scrumptious from the first bite and forever after. And the evidence, well, that would be the stories I'm telling today, the stories of Native American guide swift Runner, and of Irish born Australian convict Alexander Pierce and the scrumptious food. I'm referring to why human flesh? Of course, in fact, ask swift Runner and Alexander Pierce what they think of human flesh, and they may sound a lot like Will Ferrell in the Seminole early two thousands comedy Old School.

4:01 Once it hits your lips, it's so good. Indeed, so now, if you're ready, please join me as we uncover what truths we can and solve what mysteries we may, kind of murderies. It tastes far better than fish or pork. Swift Runner, Alexander Pierce, and the Horror of Windigo Worldwide starts now.

4:38 You may be familiar with the legend of the Windigo. The windigo is a cryptid belonging to the Algonquin speaking tribes of North America. They are described as impossibly gaunt, almost skeletal creatures, extremely tall seven feet or more, with the antlers of a buck or reindeer. Rising above their heads, making them impossibly even taller. They have long arms, long claws, and eyes that glow red. It is said that a windigo is created when a person, driven to the brink of madness by starvation consumes human flesh.

5:16 Upon consumption of human flesh, they will be transformed into a windigo, forever ravenous, never sated, and always and only hungry for human flesh. Their ever present cannibalistic urges drive them to kill again and again, and from the legend of the windigo was borne a psychological disorder known as windigo syndrome. Windigo disorder describes a person who believes they are a windigo, or, more to the point, a person who behaves in all ways like a windigo and lacks only the physical appearance of a windigo.

5:58 In other words, once this person has sated their hunger on human flesh, they find that they are starving, always and forevermore, consumed by a hunger that can never be sated, and that they desire to eat only human flesh and nothing else. They find the lure of consuming the flesh of their fellow humans to be irresistible, the flavor of that flesh to be delicious, and yet even when they have crammed their bellies to bursting, they find that their hunger can never be put to rest. One such true story of Windigoe derangement syndrome.

6:41 The story of swift Runner, is where we begin today, and once we've finished with swift Runner, will travel from the frozen tundras of Canada to the much warmer temperatures of the Australian Penal Colony, where one convict, Alexander Pierce discovers that his cannibalistic urges, the desire to eat people, cannot be repressed. Welcome to Windigo worldwide. The first legal hanging in Alberta, Canada, took place on December twentieth, eighteen seventy nine. Almost one hundred and fifty years later.

7:22 It is still remembered as one of the province's worst and strangest crimes. The hangman was a native Cree known as swift Runner, who was on good terms with frontier authorities. They trusted him as a guide for the Northwest Mounted Police. That is until swift runners violent whiskey benders unbalanced him so much that the police sent him back to his tribe, and then his tribe kicked him out too. When swift Runner was expelled, he took to the wilderness for the winter of eighteen seventy eight and seventy nine, and he brought his family with him a wife, a mother, a brother, and six children.

8:01 But only swift Runner would return from the winter camp. When police were alerted to the suspicious absence of swift Runner's family, the former guide himself escorted investigators to the scene. One of swift runners six children had died of natural causes and was buried at the camp. The other eight humans had been reduced to bones strewn about the camp like the set of a slasher film. They had all been gobbled up by a windigo. As mentioned at the top, a windigo is a frightful supernatural beast of Algonquin mythology, so ravenous it is said to devour its own lips.

8:39 If you'd like to give yourself a fright go ahead and google it. According to swift Runner, the windigo spirit had entered him and compelled him to slaughter and eat all of his relations. Swift Runner became the poster child for wind to goo psychosis, a mental disorder thought to be particular to the northern algonquin people's in the psychosis, which was diagnosed in the early nineteen hundreds but hotly disputed in psychological literature, people are said to have experienced themselves possessed by the windigo and racked by violent dreams and compulsions to commit cannibalism.

9:15 Windigo psychosis is importantly distinguished from famine cannibalism, for although it was the wilderness during winter, swift Runner had access to other food when he turned windigo. The author of a nineteen sixteen report on the phenomenon said he had known of a few instances of this deplorable turn of mind, and not one could plead true hunger, let alone famine as an excuse for it. The disorder, whatever it was, was nevertheless surely connected to the precariousness of life in the wilderness.

9:46 Windigo cases vanished in the twentieth century as afflicted populations came in closer and closer contact with encroaching sedentary civilization. In other words, as soon as there were reliably villages, sounds, and cities nearby, cases of wind to Go psychosis dried up for Canadian authorities. In eighteen seventy nine, however, there was no x files case or philosophical puzzle. Here there was simply a man, swift Runner, who had shot, bludgeoned, and or strangled his whole family. And this is gnarly, guys.

10:18 He also snapped open all of their bones and sucked them clean of marrow, which indicates someone who was not eating just for sustenance necessarily, but who was truly enjoying his repast. But if the verdict and sentence were clear, the logistics were less, So hangings were virgin territory for Fort Saskatchewan. Swift Runner, repentant by the time his day of execution rolled around, had to wait in the cold on the frigid morning of his hanging while the old pensioner hired to hang him, retrieve the straps he'd forgotten to pinion his man, and fixed the gallows trap with a bit of gallows humor all his own.

10:58 Swift Runner was reported to have said, I could just kill myself with a tomahawk and save the hangman further trouble. Yikes, that's dark, but hanged he was now. The story of swift Runner is a quick a swift if you will, snapshot of a man gone mad in the winter woods who devoured his family. It is the literal text book example of wind to ghost psychosis. Now we'll move on to another story. One will spend a little bit more time with the story of a different man from a different culture on the other side of the world, who, nevertheless, like swift Runner, found that he had developed a taste for human flesh that he simply could not or did not want to shake.

11:46 We now travel from Alberta, Canada, to the island of Tasmania off the coast of Australia for the story of the Tasmanian cannibal Alexander Pierce. Although it's true that the European settlers of Australia were largely convicts, it was far from a lawless place. In the early nineteenth century during the heyday of transportation. The sentence of transportation was a compromise by a British government, moving away from the old quote bloody code unquote that some people hanged for stealing anything worth more than a shilling.

12:31 They didn't want to go to the expense of building prisons, so instead they settled on sending people to the fringes of the empire, wild unsettled lands, where they might be able to quote civilized unquote things through forced labor. So throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, men, women and children were transported for crimes like stealing cheese, carrying a burglar's tools, bigamy, and pretending to sell somebody wine petty crimes. In other words, some convicts made their sentence into an opportunity and built a new, better life on the other side of the world.

13:08 Most served their time in colonies quietly and then returned home when their sentence was served. And then there were those who refused to abide and found themselves sentenced to a prison within the prison. Alexander Pierce, the Tasmanian cannibal, was one of these. Alexander Pierce was born in County Moynihan, Ireland, sometime in seventeen ninety. Very little is known of his early life, except that he was poor. He mostly found work as a farm laborer and probably supplemented his income with petty criminal activities.

13:40 In eighteen nineteen, those activities caught up with him and he was convicted by a court in Ireland for stealing six pairs of shoes. He was a shoe thief. Ladies and Gentlemen twenty nine year old Pierce was sentenced to seven years of transportation, loaded onto a ship and then take and halfway around the world to the island of Tasmania. At the time, Tasmania was called Van Diemen's Land, after the Dutch governor who had sent the expedition that founded it. Up until eighteen hundred, convicts had been sent to New South Wales on the Australian mainland, But as New South Wales transitioned into a more standard colony, the residents objected to the constant influx of convicted criminals, and so the criminals were diverted to Tasmania.

14:24 Given the non violent nature of Pierce's crime stealing six pairs of shoes, he was probably assigned to work as a farm laborer, not that different from what he'd been doing back in island. Also not that different was Pierce's tendency towards shall we say, side hustles. He committed various offenses, starting with stealing ducks and turkeys and then working his way up to forging a work order hold on a second. So, this horror of a guy that I'm in the process of telling you about, the cannibal of Tasmania, the New South Wales, Windigo.

14:59 Initial criminal offenses were stealing six pairs of shoes and stealing ducks and turkeys. He was a shoe, duck and turkey thief, and he somehow wound up being a cannibal boy. Talk about a prison system having a rehabilitation problem, huh woo, All right back to it. After stealing ducks and turkeys and shoes, he worked his way up to forging a work order. And this was a serious enough offense that when it was discovered in May of eighteen twenty two, he absconded. Absconded was the official term for when a convict abandoned their sentence.

15:32 A ten dollar reward was offered for his arrest, and the Hobart Town Gazette gave the following description of him. Alexander Pierce, a convict number one oh two charged with various misdemeanors, is five foot three and a quarter inches tall, brown hair, hazelies, age thirty. A laborer tried at Armagh, Ireland in eighteen nineteen, sentenced to seven years. Arrived in the colony at Castle Forbes in eighteen twenty born in County Moynihan, and he's covered in pock marks. So he's a pockmarked duck, turkey and shoe thief who got seven years a little more than one year per each of the six pairs of shoes that he's stole.

16:10 And it's also a note that he's a much smaller than average man at five foot three and a quarter inches. Okay, so when he first absconds leaves the colony escapes from his sentence, although since most prisoners in Australia weren't actually locked up, I think that's why they called it absconding as opposed to breaking out, if you will. Pierce's recaptured, but since he had violated the trust placed in him as a prison colony laborer, he was not sent back to work as a laborer, but instead he was sent to Macquarie Harbor on the west coast of the island of Tasmania.

16:48 This was considered the ideal place to hold incorrigible convicts, as it was surrounded by waters so treacherous that even ships approached with great care. In fact, more more than a few convicts never made it to the prison on mcquarie Island because their ships strayed from the narrow Sea passage and were wrecked. So what we're talking about here, guys, is the Australian Alcatraz. Five foot three and a quarter inch Alexander Pierce stole six pair of shoes, some ducks, some turkeys, and then he forged a work order.

17:19 Oh boy, and he winds up at mcquarie Harbor, Tasmania, the Australian Alcatraz, with a seven year bid. I mean, if that kind of sentencing overkill isn't enough to drive you to eat people, I don't know what is a kid. So here we are Mcquarie Harbor. The harbor on the land side was surrounded by mountainous wilderness, with hundreds of miles of travel to the main settlements on the other side of the island. So it's not exactly Alcatraz, but functionally it is. On one side you have nearly impassable ocean waters.

17:53 On the other side you have hundreds of miles of Tasmanian bush. There's nowhere to go if you get out. Mcquarie Harbor was considered entirely escape proof, so naturally, less than two months after he arrived on the island, Alexander Pierce tried to escape. Pierce was part of a work gang with seven other men cutting down trees on the edge of the settlement on the twentieth of September eighteen twenty two, when they made their escape attempt. The ringleader was Robert Greenhill, a former sailor who came up with a plan to steal a whale boat and head out to try to reach either mainland China or one of the Pacific Islands.

18:31 Their exact destination never became an issue because the boat was too heavily defended for them to steal it. Before scouting the boat for a potential hijacking, however, they had overpowered their overseer. Even though they couldn't steal the boat, they were already committed to some form of escape, so Pierce, Greenhill, and the six other men headed off into the impassable wilderness with the idea that anything was better than mcquarie Harbor. Although Greenhill, who as a sailor was used to navigating, took the lead, none of the escapees were used to living outdoors.

19:03 Green Hills leadership may also have come from him commandeering the overseers acts when they fled. That sounds about right, frankly, Even if Pierce and the seven others had all been practiced survival experts. The Tasmanian wilderness was so bleak that there was almost no life to be found. After eight days, the men were starving and desperate, and that was when the cannibalism began. Pierce later claimed that the reason they chose to kill Alexander Dalton was because, in prison, he had been one of the volunteers who issued floggings to those who broke the rules.

19:38 Boy takes balls of steel to be the guy who volunteers to whip other prisoners when you're a prisoner yourself, Jimminy Christmas, balls of steel or brains of none? I guess. Floggings were a regular occurrence in mcquarie Harbor in the year following Pierce's escape eighteen twenty three. It's estimated that nine thousand, one hundred lashes were given to the total prisoner population. Men who volunteered for that type of duty were generally despised, so the only question would be if they'd decided on the cannibalism before or after one of them murdered Dalton.

20:16 Either way, the deed was done, and the seven starving survivors feasted. The next morning, there were only five of them, Edward Brown and William Kennerley, had decided that some things were worse than Mcquarie Harbor, so they fled under the cover of darkness. They did manage to find their way back, but they both died within a few days of returning. Officially, both men died of exhaustion. Unofficially, their deaths might have been helped along by the rough discipline. Meeted out to escape ease like them, but if it was the latter, it wasn't recorded.

20:48 Obviously, there are some inconsistencies in Pierce's account of the escape. In some accounts, he says that it was actually Thomas Bodenham who they killed an eight after he lost the drawing of lots, and that Dalton fled the camp along with Kennerley and Brown. If that's true, then Dalton didn't make it back to mcquarie Harbor with them. But if he was the first victim, then Bodenham was the second that left Pierce, Greenhill, Matthew Travers, and John Mather trudging through the wilderness. Mather was the next to go.

21:18 Five weeks into their journey, now there were three men left, and things were looking bleak for Alexander Pierce, because Travers was close friends with Robert Greenhill and Greenhill was the one with the axe. But things weren't as bad as they could have been because by now they'd made it through the mountains and were in an area where they could scavenge some food. But the new terrain brought new dangers that the three men were ill equipped to deal with. Now, remember there are three men left. Eight escaped.

21:47 Originally two got freaked out by the initial case of cannibalism and ran back to the prison. So three men have been eaten thus far. But while drinking water from a creeks, was bitten on the foot by a tiger snake, one of the deadliest snakes in Australia. The bite of a tiger snake invariably causes death unless treated with antivenom. This is where another inconsistency in Pierce's story comes up. He claimed that he and Greenhill brought Travers along with them for five days before mercy killing him in his sleep.

22:20 But if it was a tiger snake that bit him, he wouldn't have survived that long, And however it happened, Travers died and the two survivors fed. After Travers's death, things got somewhat tense. I bet Neither green Hill nor Pierce trusted each other, and they did their best to avoid sleeping. After eight days, green Hill finally was too exhausted, and Pierce took advantage. He managed to get the act without waking green Hill, and then killed him with a single blow to the head that left Alexander Pierce as the sole survivor of the eight men who had escaped mcquarie Harbor less than two months earlier.

22:54 Somehow, Pierce managed to make it the rest of the way to the edges of the Tasmanian colonies on the east coast. He knew he'd made it when he found sheep grazing in a field, and, in an unlikely coincidence, the first person he met in those colonies was an old friend who was working as a shepherd for those sheep, and who found him eating one of them that he'd killed. The friend pointed him towards a local gang of bushrangers, escaped convicts like him who survived by rustling sheep. Pierce joined the gang, but unfortunately for him, a month and a half later, they were all captured by the Tasmanian authorities.

23:27 The examining magistrate in Pierce's case was the Reverend Robert Knopwood. Knopp would had been born in England as the third son of a wealthy family who became an Anglican priest at the age of twenty six. He inherited a fortune when his elder siblings died before his parents, and then lost it all gambling beyond his means when he fell in with the Prince Regent's Crown. Forced to find employment, he took a post as a navy chaplain and then became the official chaplain and later magistrate for the town of Hobart.

23:54 He served in that post for twenty years, and his diaries are now one of the best primary for early conditions in Tasmania. Pierce's case must have been one of the last ones he ever heard before his retirement. The sudden appearance of a convict who should have been in Macquarie Harbor, the unescapable Australian alcatraz, caused some consternation, and Pierce was pressed to give an account of how he made it across the island. Perhaps out of guilt, he made a full confession. The details of their escape, how they'd turned on each other, and the multiple instances of cannibalism he had committed.

24:27 In fact, his confession was so frank and shocking even by rough frontier standards, that Knopwood didn't believe him. I would imagine that the fact that Pierce was five foot three and apparently had managed to overpower seven other convicts and eat them or five other convicts the two ran back to the prison still, I imagine that also contributed to the fact that Knopwood didn't believe him. Magistrate Knopwood came to the conclusion that Pierce had invented his story in order to cover for the others who had escaped with him, and some of them must still be out there as bushrangers.

25:01 So instead of the death sentence he expected, Pierce was sent right back to mcquarie Harbor. This is not the end, folks, Because he had escaped once, Pierced was ironed, made to wear restrictive iron shackles on his legs so that he could not escape again. This did more than restrain him, though it also marked him out as a symbol to his fellow inmates that escape was possible. One man who was entranced by that promise was Thomas Cox. Cox was an Englishman who'd only been seventeen years old when he was sent to Tasmania.

25:32 His crime must have been a severe one, since while most were only transported for seven years, Cox was sent for quote the term of his natural life unquote. This was reflected in his conduct in Tasmania, as he quickly became an absconder. When caught. He managed to break out of prison, but he was caught again and sent to mcquarie Harbor. Despite his confession. It's likely that Pierce hadn't mentioned his cannibalism to the other prisoners. Even if there were rumors, Cox would have been desperate enough to ignore them.

26:02 He was facing the rest of his life in mcquarie Harbor, a place as close to Hell on Earth as could be imagined. He had a plan, and he had equipment, stolen fishhooks, a piece of flint to start a fire, and scorched rags to use for tinder. Cox spent months trying to persuade Pierce to escape with him. Eventually, after he'd been flogged for stealing a shirt, Pierce cracked while they were north up the coast from the harbor on a foraging expedition. They bolted into the wilderness. Eleven days later, Pierce was recaptured at the mouth of the King River after he lit a signal fire and surrendered to a passing boat.

26:37 He told the pilot, who recognized him, that Cox had drowned in the river. When they searched him, they found a piece of flesh in Pierce's pocket. Pierce admitted that he'd cut it from Cox's corpse to prove that Cox was dead. Then he changed his story and admitted that he had killed Cox. The next day, Pierce was taken out to retrieve Cox's body. What they found was horror. Cox's head and hands had been removed from his body. He had been disemboweled, which any butcher will tell you was the first step in turning a body, hopefully an animal body, into meat.

27:14 The flesh had been carved from his flanks, legs, and arms. There was a bloody axe nearby, which Pierce admitted was the murder weapon. Back at the prison, Pierce made a confession. He told them that he and Cox had planned to go round the coast to the north to reach the settlement of Port Dalrymple. Since Pierce knew how barren the mountains were. When they reached the King River, though they'd hit a problem. One thing Cox hadn't told Pierce was that he didn't know how to swim. When Pierce found this out, he lost his temper and killed Cox with an axe.

27:44 They'd stolen the axe in order to break off Pierce's irons. Then Pierce had butchered the corpse, but he'd been overcome with self loathing and thrown the meat into the river before eating it. He'd kept a piece in his pocket to prove his crime and signaled the boat. Pierce said at that time that he was ready to die for his crime, but when the case went to trial, he'd changed his mind. Charged with murder, he pleaded not guilty. The grounds for his defense was that he had killed Cox during an argument and was only guilty of manslaughter.

28:12 By now, his confession to Knopwood was well enough known that the jury had to be told by the judge to disregard it, but it made no difference to their verdict. They found Pierce guilty of murder, and he was executed a month later. Before he died, he made one final confession, which differed in details but was largely identical in content to his previous ones. His last words were recorded as being and I quote, man's flesh is delicious. It tastes far better than fish or pork. Yes, Holy Molly. Before I let you go, please let me remind you of the free three digit lifeline number nine to eighty eight that you can call any time twenty four hours, seven days a week to receive immediate assistance for mental health, substance use, or suicidal thoughts.

29:06 So God forbid, but if you find yourself an acute crisis, please do call nine eight eight. Program it into your phone now, and please do always remember that the world is a better place with you in it, and you are loved. Now, if you're in a cute crisis, I'm not the right person to reach out to because I'm not qualified to help you with that. But if you'd like to reach out to someone just to make a connection, to tell your story, to share your thoughts, to let me know what's going on with your life, please do feel free to reach out to me at kind of Murdery on all social media, kind of Murdery at gmail dot com, or you can call the kind of Murdery hotline eighty eight murdery.

29:47 That's eighty eight six eight seven three three seven nine. Or you can leave a message and tell me what's going on with you, or you can tell me your kind of murdery story and inspire an episode of the show. But what I want you to know is that I'm here, I care, and I would love to connect with you. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time. I'm Zevan Odelberg and this has been kind of murdery.