Skinwalkers
| Skinwalkers | |
|---|---|
| Also called | nothing of our own; see the note on the name below |
| Class | Other — parasitic, requiring a qualified host |
| Dwells | in a man, and only in a man |
| Feeds on | human beings, materially, and never enough |
| Approach | none; the door is opened from the inside |
| Earliest account | ours are American and recent; the name is neither |
| Claimed by | none will claim them, including the ones that claim daemons |
Consensus among us The hunger is the whole of it. We are confident about the mechanism and we are not confident that we have any right to the word we are using for it.inherited
⚠ warning | |
A class of Other that cannot feed where it lives, and solves this by riding a man. contested
The mechanism is simpler than most things on this wiki and worse for being simple. In The Dark the hunger cannot be satisfied — there is nothing there to eat and no mouth to eat it with. It can only be sated in the material world. So the Other requires a body, permanently and repeatedly rather than once, and what it does with that body is eat, and it does not stop, because the appetite it brought with it was never a material appetite and cannot be filled by material means. unverified
It is worth being exact about the horror here, because it is not the obvious one. The thing suffers. The hunger is described in every account as unbearable and unrelieved, carried by the Other before it ever reached a man and carried afterwards undiminished. It eats constantly and is never once full. What it inflicts is not sadism. It is a permanent condition being taken out on whatever is nearest. contested
The door is opened from the inside
This is the part that separates them from everything else in Category:Others, and it is the reason the entry exists. ⚠ warning
They do not take anyone. There is a qualification, and it is moral rather than psychic: the host is a man who was already heartless, and who had already done heinous things. Not a man who is vulnerable, not a man who is grieving, not a man short of sleep — the ordinary openings described under Daemon do not apply here. The opening is what he has already chosen to do. inherited
So there is no innocent victim at the start of this, and the wiki wants that stated plainly rather than softened: by the time the Other arrives, the man has made himself a door. Whether he is still present afterwards, and in what condition, no account we hold can say — and the accounts are notably uninterested in the question, which may itself be evidence of how the people telling them felt about him. contested
What it then does with him:
- Wearing
- It takes him for a ride. The face, the voice, the history, the walk. Nothing about him announces the change to people who knew him.
- Impersonation
- Beyond wearing him, it can present as others, and the accounts are consistent that this is used to draw people into reach rather than to escape. It is a hunting method and not a disguise.
- Trapping
- Prey is isolated first. Every account describes a person taken somewhere, or kept somewhere, before anything else happens.
- Never enough
- It continues. There is no account of one that stopped, was satisfied, or moved on. There are accounts of them being ended and none of them ending. unverified
On the name
We took this word. It was not offered to us. ⚠ warning
Skinwalker belongs to a living Native American tradition — principally Diné — in which it is not folklore, not entertainment, and is widely held to be genuinely dangerous to discuss, particularly by outsiders and particularly casually. Ours is not that tradition, we have no standing in it, and nobody in it gave us this term. inherited
What most readers arriving here will actually be carrying is the American popular version: ranch stories, podcasts, campfire material, a construct assembled over the last few decades by people in roughly our position. That construct is what this entry is built from, and it is at best a distant relative of the thing the word properly names. astroturf
The wiki uses it because it needs a word and has not got one, and it records the borrowing rather than quietly keeping it. A recruit should hold two things at once: that we are describing a real pattern in our own accounts, and that the name on it is almost certainly wrong and is not ours to have taken. If a better word exists, we want it.
Competing accounts