Skinwalkers Redux

Thanks so much for sharing this, truly

I can tell it's hard for you to talk about and hope you haven't put yourself in a precarious situation for posting about it but I do find all this extremely fascinating!!

I never heard about them until a few years ago when our friend brought it up
I researched some back then but had stopped-- until now, I had forgotten about it


Thanks again for re-posting this thread~

Senona

@snarky412,

It's tough.  I both love the subject and fear it.  One heck of a duality going there.  Overall, things are likely to change in the meantime so it's not going to matter.  Those who threatened me drew a line in the sand.  I went silent.  My ex went into battle mode in a pretty major way. 

Interesting. I know of someone with a similar situation, but it involved bigfoot and she was attacked by some "crazies" .

bonhommearmonica,

It was a pretty nasty fall down a flight of stairs and when I hit bottom, I didn't even bother trying to move for at least 20 minutes as I knew that I had just screwed myself up royally.   I'm normally the type of person that can fall down a flight of stairs, hop up, dust myself off and be on my way so my family presumed I would do that this time as well.  Obviously that wasn't the case.  I always have double the electrical activity on EEGs without seizure activity (iow, no massive peaks, just same levels, double time) so that's probably why injury triggers off migralepsy.

If it does play out last time, they'll make themselves known here on the thread, too.  These crazies were different in that they did show that they could make good on their threats by targeting the head of our Navajo side for visits.  That's why my ex took a battle stance while I went silent and complied. 

The information that I left out would be information that is singularly identifiable.  What I saw and the stories is how my identity became uncovered as the source of the uncovering came from a Navajo family member.  He had always had issues and was retaliating for my departure from the reservation.  Last I heard, he went to the dark side so to speak. 

I guess there are three things that I think that I could add about when I was confronted with the reality of skinwalkers is that moment where I got close enough to actually feel her nature.  She hadn't done anything at all to stimulate that feeling.  Up until that point, she'd taken to moving in a softened zig zag, always moving forward but giving me time to catch up.  Despite that, when I got within that 10 ft range, I felt malice incarnate.  It literally was like walking into a wall of it and it was electrifying.  I felt it literally with every cell in my body.

Second, I was having strange dreams that I basically wrote off as having moved into a different culture and being exposed to that strange side of it.  My ex did not agree with me on that and felt that the skinwalker was sending them.  We disagreed on that point severely.  The longer it all went on though, the worse they got til I ended up having such a dream of one gaining entry to our home that I fell and developed a 6 inch long and 4 inch wide deep purple bruise from one.  My dream was that one had entered our home.

Third, the last thing that I left out due to discomfort is that the medicine man said that these string of visits were different form the others that family had experienced.  The woman's jealousy was about very specifically about me according to the medicine man.  I was the target.  The one time I've mentioned that only led to people accusing me of wanting to feel special.  Quite frankly, anybody who thinks that should probably try having skinwalkers visiting them sometimes night after night and tell me how "being special" really feels then.  lol  I make no claim to specialness personally and I still question that.

The animal was the woman.  Once I bolted, she stopped to watch me run to the porch and then, continued up the road to do her thing under the light.  She apparently wanted me to see all of it.  It was quite the mental trip. 

As far as stress moving into a new culture as that is precisely what happened, I was actually enjoying the area.  My travels outside of the country began at age 13 so being plunged, sans family, into a new culture was not a new experience for me.  Was actually raised for just that sort of thing. 

As for the whoops and viewing it as a prank, I ran inside and "wrote it off" as a prank.  I didn't think it was good.  I chose to view it as a prank. 

The net searches that turned up were in direct contradiction with what I observed myself.  I was confronted with declarations of their being werewolves and that was a total contradiction with what I saw for myself in the entirety of that initial sighting. 

Those who came after myself and my family were very specific in their demands.  They wanted the information that I had presented eliminated from the forum entirely.  Once that demand was met, they went away and all activity on the reservation stopped.   They had targeted the head of the family out there.  This was not simple online bullying.  It was more like a hostage situation. The one who gave them the information to identify was not my ex but a disgruntled family member.  My ex would not have put the children in that sort of harm.

What occurred was not from the tribe, itself.  Most of the Navajo that joined in on the conversation actually participated and shared more information, exchanged more stories.  There was a couple that warned against discussing it due to the taboo and danger.  Skinwalkers are not a part of the Navajo tribe.  They were evicted from the tribe over 100 years ago. 

It's been 6 years since I received any threat so pretty sure my tumble was me being a klutz.  I'm ambi and sometimes I forget which foot I'm leading with, lol. I'm usually a pro at falling down the stairs but not that time.  I flew like a bird.  Problem was, I wasn't a bird and went splat. :)

The need for speed

What a skinwalker is capable of actually depends on the type of skinwalker one is dealing with. There are three basic types of skinwalkers that crop up in firsthand accounts of visits. The first two types are most likely those who have been turned to skinwalkers or "recruits". You have the ones that may be running around on two legs just like a typical human being but are wearing skins. You also have instances where medicine men have turned to the side of skinwalkers and they may not even be wearing skins while they're playing their role of planting a medicine bundle. A few sightings of these "bad" medicine men have them not wearing a skin at all but instead, blue jeans and a plaid shirt. Then there is the third type, which is the most interesting, and that is the yenaldlooshi. These are the masters of their trade.

All three types fall under the term "skinwalker" because a "skinwalker" is precisely that--someone who walks while wearing a skin (though the curious jean/plaid shirt sans skin thing questions that rule). An even more general definition would be those who use their gifts to do harm and to profit off of others, which is a significant taboo. I was told several times that the easiest way to spot a witch was to see a medicine man driving around in a new truck. You just aren't supposed to do that. Gifts are meant to be gifts to the tribe. To use them for personal gain is to allow oneself to be corrupted.

Yenaldooshi (yeh-nal-glu-oo-shee) are the most traditional form of skinwalkers and, according to the medicine man, have a very long and deep history with the tribe. As I already mentioned in the prior post, the medicine man informed me that training for a yenaldlooshi begins at age 3-5, just like a medicine man. He also mentioned that yenaldlooshi are medicine men themselves. They know the same medicines (curatives) but also those poisons and have for a very, very long time. I will go into what those roles were and that history as purported by the medicine man in a later post.

Yenaldlooshi are trained in the arts of animal emulation and animal emulation also requires that they be able to run on all fours. They are quadrapedal and from an anthropological point of view, that is cool as all get out. Up until recently when a few marathon runners decided to learn how to run quadrapedally, the most common recorded instance of anyone running on all fours were feral children (and maybe a few oddball kids that opted to not crawl but move about on hands and feet like I did as a kid). A normal kid will eventually stand up to emulate their cohort around them (human adults). A feral child may stay quadrapedal if their cohort remains animal. The commonality between both yenaldlooshi and quadrapedal feral children (outside of the obvious human/animal similarity), based on accounts, is that they are fast.

This is one of those facts about yenaldlooshi that makes those who have seen one, particularly from a car window, tend to have their sanity viewed as being suspect others. How fast a yenaldlooshi can run is hard to determine but stories of them pacing vehicles are pretty common. Taking a look at the speeds that people are capable of doesn't hurt to make an estimate while using those firsthand accounts as well.

The world record for a bipedal runner in speed is around 27 mph (44.7 kph) set by Usain Bolt. A study a few years back pushed the realm of possible max speed at being at 35-40 mph.

Human running speeds of 35 to 40 mph may be biologically possible

That paper is based on bipedal running. Quadrupedal running is a whole other thing. Descriptions of yenaldlooshi running often compare it to that of a rabbit. They are essentially pushing forward with the full force of their legs and using their hands to propel that momentum in a kind of bounding motion. It's a completely different application of force. Kenichi Ito is the quadrupedal running record holder. In comparison to Bolt, he's pretty slow; however, Ito attempted to learn it as an adult. Yenaldlooshi have been doing it since childhood and learned to do it from those who already knew how to go fast with the human body. Not monkeys. I imagine that, if Ito were to attempt to run as described like yenaldlooshi, he'd probably face plant himself but good.

The accounts of the speed of yenaldlooshi are of two types--ones seen along highways and ones seen along dirt roads. As one might expect, the dirt road encounters sometimes are much longer than the highway encounters. While a car may be driving at 55-65 mph down a highway when the sighting occurs, the shortness of the sighting is probably due to the yenaldlooshi being unable to keep up. On dirt roads on the reservation itself, one tends not to drive over 35 mph on such a road unless one wants to replace all their shock absorbers the next day. According to firsthand accounts, they were able to keep up with vehicles going 35 mph.

Between the max speed possible for human movement as suggested by the above study and the length of encounter, it might not be unreasonable to say that a yenaldlooshi may be able to run at that 35 mph or maybe even 40 at maximum speed. That could explain why both types of encounters occur. Passing a car going 40 mph doesn't have the car just blip by if one is going 55-60 mph. Considering what they are seeing, it might actually provide a prolonged sense of duration to the event itself.

The following is a very brief video with terrible audio of a dirt road sighting. It might actually be a yenaldlooshi and the comments are a pretty good read, too. You get a quick glimpse of their speedometer in the vehicle towards the end where they are going about 15 mph so not too fast and it's hard to gauge if their vehicle speed is consistent. They definitely had come to a stop at the beginning and are speeding up. However, it's the only video I've ever come across that actually might be of a yenaldlooshi.