There Is a Wendigo in Northern Minnesota
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How did Wade first notice the mysterious pattern of missing people and removed boots?
In 11 years of ground search and rescue in the Kettle River District, I helped recover five people from the same stretch of country, and four of them had taken their boots off before they died. Not kicked off. Not lost in deep snow. Taken off, set down side by side, laces tucked into the shafts the way a careful man leaves his boots by the door of a house he intends to come back to. Two of those people were found more than a mile from their boots. One of them was found 11 miles from his boots, in February, in country where a shoeless man should not have covered 1100 feet. I explained it away every single time. There is a name for it in the cold weather literature, and the instructors mention it in every winter operations course.
People in the late stages die confused, and confused people undress, paradoxical they call it. I sat in a folding chair in a community center in Moose Lake and nodded along with everyone else, and for 11 years that word did all the work I asked it to do. Then my brother's truck was found at the sturgeon flowage landing with a plow berm standing unbroken against its bumper, and the word stopped working, and it has never worked since. My name is Wade Larson. I am 54 years old now. I fix heavy equipment for a living, mostly loaders and skidders for the logging outfits north of Sandstone, and for 11 years I gave my weekends and a fair number of my weekdays to the county's volunteer search and rescue unit.
I was never anything special on paper. I held a ground team leader certification and a wilderness first aid card, and I could read sign in snow better than most, because my father raised Danny and me tracking deer on foot, the slow way, and that skill turns out to transfer. What I want understood before I tell the rest of this is how ordinary the work was. People here search and rescue, and they picture helicopters and cliff faces. What I mostly did was walk gridlines through swamp at 30 feet of spacing, calling a stranger's name until my voice went, and then drive home and eat supper standing over the sink. We found drunk snowmobilers. We found deer hunters who had walked in a circle for six hours and were mostly embarrassed.
Nine times out of ten, the lost person walked out on their own before we finished staging. And we packed the trucks and went home. And that was a good day. And I am telling you all of this because I need you to know that I know what normal looks like. i stood inside normal for eleven years i know its exact dimensions five cases sat outside it the first was in my second year a grouse hunter fifty-eight years old last seen at the net river forest road on the fourteenth of october We found him 19 days later, seven miles north of his last known point, which was wrong twice over. Lost people do not travel seven miles in that country, and lost people do not travel north into the roadless block, when every road, every light, and every sound of civilization lay south.
he was found uphill on a granite spine above a cedar swamp and the deputy who worked the scene told me at the bar afterward quietly that the man's stomach had held moss and bark and something they never identified there had been meat in his pack the meat had not been touched by him Something else had opened the pack, though, and had eaten the meat and left the chocolate. The second was three years after that. A woman in her thirties, a wildlife survey tech, out on snowshoes doing a winter count. Her trail went in confident and came back never. We found her snowshoes standing upright in a drift, planted, crossed at the tails. We found her four miles farther on. Her boots were side by side on a beaver dam, laces tucked, and she was another 800 yards past them, and she had been walking on frozen open ice in socks, in a straight line, toward the middle of the flowage, and the line of her tracks did not wander once.
Lost people wander. It is the one thing they can be counted on to do." Her tracks ran ruler straight for 800 yards toward the emptiest place on the map, and then they stopped.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How did Wade first notice the mysterious pattern of missing people and removed boots?
0:22–12:51
2
What evidence tied multiple disappearances to the Sturgeon Flowage interior?
12:51–41:30
3
How did Danny Larson’s truck being found trigger a new investigation?
41:30–1:17:58
4
What did tracking, dog teams, and early field signs reveal during the search?
1:17:58–1:24:25
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Just Creepy: Scary Stories
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