There are many abilities that seem to transcend reason when it comes to skinwalkers. My initial reaction when I was told by my husband that I would need to be careful because of witch doctors was laughter. My husband had lived in Phoenix for many years and he quickly learned that alot of people ridicule the claims made in regards to skinwalkers. Because I viewed it with such skepticism, my husband limited discussion of them to almost solely their activities. I knew that they liked to climb onto roofs of people's homes, ran on all fours and that to see one was mindbending but that was about it. This was to change dramatically several months later by my actually seeing one.

It is important to remember that skinwalkers are heavily associated with Coyote, the trickster. Just like Coyote, they are tricksters themselves and they have mastered their art. I am going to tell you what I saw that evening without interruption as I saw it ongoing. Keep in mind that I am (was) not a. insane, b. on drugs c. drunk. I was utterly sober and of sound mind, above all, I was highly skeptical. I knew that skinwalkers were called were-creatures and were shapeshifters but I absolutely did not believe it. I still don't. With that said, this is what happened:

I am, unfortunately, a smoker. Because I have children, however, I do not smoke inside our house but smoke outside on the porch. Hence all the warnings that my husband gave me in regards to unusual things outside at night. This particuliar night was exceptionally dark and the road that we lived on had very sparse housing and two streetlights--one on each end of the road. Our home was located in the middle, between the streetlights. When it was dark, it was very dark. I was out there only a few minutes when I saw something white sauntering up the road past our house. It looked like a small animal and its fur was beautiful--a pristine white that glowed in the dim light like fresh snow. I decided as I watched this white thing pass by across the street that it had to be a housecat because it didn't seem to be hopping like a rabbit. My rational mind figured that anything with white fur and of that size couldn't have been a wild or feral animal because its fur would've been dusty. I was concerned about this seemingly pretty thing-cat. There are numerous wild dogs on the reservation that would've found it a tasty snack and I decided to intervene, hoping that after catching it that I could locate its owner. With that in mind, I walked up our driveway to the street and started to approach what I had decided was a "cat", calling out to it in the usual way: "here kitty, come here".

The closer I got, however, the more it became apparent that it was not as I had perceived and rationalized. It seemed to be walking on a ground that was above me. It lacked a tail. What I thought were legs seemed only to be things swinging without much function. It sauntered even more like a cat, however, weaving back and forth slowly across the road before me. Finally, when I was 10-15 feet away from it, I kind of half called to it with unease and it turned to look at me. The movement was so absolutely wrong. Nothing about this "cat" was what I thought at all. I immediately turned and ran back down to the relative safety of our porch and clung to the screen door. I was terrified of this thing but curious as well. I wasn't about to go inside yet.

The "cat" thing watched me do this and then continued its journey back up the road, this time at a faster pace. It reached a tree near the streetlight at the top of the road and started rolling on the dusty ground there. It was far bigger than I had ever imagined. When it came up, it was the size of a very large dog but it wasn't a dog. It didn't look right. It moved on all fours, however, and parked itself directly under the streetlight to stare back at me, its white fur tinged reddish with dust. At this point in time, my husband realized that I was clinging to the door with a look of horror on my face and came out to see what it was that I was staring at. He recognized it for what it was immediately and dragged me inside. I was forever changed. Things aren't always what they would appear to be and our minds have the habit of rationalizing what we see.

For me, there was and is zero probability that I could've seen a creature that shapeshifted before me. If what I saw was an actual shapeshifting, there would've been no flaws for me to see that would've alerted me that it was wrong. The lack of tail, the lack of real mobility in the legs, the odd level that it was at in comparison to me when viewed at an angle would not have been there. What remains is trickery. Like a magician can fool the eye into believing that one is seeing magic, the skinwalker is adept at fooling the eye in the same exact manner. When we see a medium sized animal walking down the road on four legs with the approximate look of a dog, we believe it's a dog. Add in the dark of night and we're even more likely to say "it's a dog". We rationalize what we see and this is where the skinwalker plays. When confronted with reality, one has two options: to either believe that it's a shapeshifter or to look at the details and see it for what it was. Perhaps a fur bundled upon a head with pieces of it hanging down for legs. Moving on four legs with head bowed and in extremely poor lighting (emphasized by the white fur as visual distraction), it becomes a cat.

However, there are other problems that skinwalkers pose. I spent night after night searching for any shred of information about skinwalkers that I could find. Finally, I laughed to my husband about the rubbish that was on the internet--glowing red eyes, running at speeds far faster than what is capable for a human. What was a cold shock for me is that he had seen these very things for himself. He had looked a skinwalker in the face as it peered into a window above his bed and seen these red eyes. He and some friends of his--all in a car--were pursued by a group of skinwalkers running at speeds averaging from 35-45 mph. Both well outside the range of human speed, which I think the record is around 27 mph and was set by Olympics level athletes, Michael Johnson and Donovan Bailey. There is no question in my mind, however, that my husband was telling me the truth...not to mention the numerous accounts found in books and on the internet of these very same abilities. Out here, it is a fact that skinwalkers' eyes are red and they are exceptionally fast.

The seeming ability to shapeshift, having red glowing eyes and unnatural speeds when running on all fours are what have decidedly placed skinwalkers into the realm of the supernatural. However, as I explained in what I saw firsthand, the ability to shapeshift is up to question. The infinitely more likely explanation is that skinwalkers are adept at fooling the eye, using the cover of darkness to lead people to believe that they are seeing something else entirely. They are the proverbial trickster of Navajo lore. Are there possible explanations for the other two traits?

When one hears of some human like thing with "glowing red eyes", immediately the image of some possessed human comes to mind. However, the eyes do not glow in that way. On the contrary, they are much like a cat's eyes. When light is reflected into a cat's eyes, light glints back because it is reflected by the tapetum lucidum that protects the retina from light. Humans, however, lack a similiar feature in our eyes and it takes an extremely bright light, like that a flash camera, in order to get any similiar reaction. Hence why pictures of people sometimes turn out with red eyes. The light is hitting the capillaries of the retina and reflecting back out. The problem remains that this doesn't happen in a normal human's eyes in normal lighting conditions. In skinwalkers, this red glint is observed when even a flashlight shines in their direction. In the case of what my husband saw, it was the lighting within the home that triggered the red glint or nightshine. The question is this: is it possible for humans to somehow acquire this cat-like nightshine?

Well, there is another case where this phenomena has been observed. In the early 20th century, a minister, Reverend J.A.L. Singh discovered two little girls who had been living in the wild, perhaps with wolves and were almost totally nocturnal. According to Rev. Singh's diaries, the girls exhibited signs of extreme light sensitivity, substantially increased night vision and more importantly, one evening he saw one of the girls' eyes reflect back at him with nightshine. This has been a problem with Singh's account (one of several), however. Studies have been done and there is disagreement about whether or not it is possible for the human eye to develop in this manner. One observation is that if one lives nocturnally, the pupil might expand further and thereby, let in more light and increase the possibility of red being glinted back in normal light. This reaction would be more likely to develop in a young child as opposed to a grown adult. There are, however, similarities between Singh's report of his wolf girls and skinwalkers: both are/were reported to have night shine and both also are/were reported to have substantially increased night vision. I'm awaiting more information on studies in regards to this phenomena in the human eye but I think that it is much more likely to be an adaptation to nocturnal living than an actual supernatural force as being responsible.

Speed. Can a human being run on all fours at 35+ mph and even up to 45mph? Well, if you decide to try it yourself, don't expect much, lol. We learned to run on two appendages--not four. However, it is often said that when homonids made the switch from quadrupedalism to bipedalism, we gave up speed. Over and over again, however, there have been accounts throughout history of feral children that were able to run on all fours at speeds far faster than what people could run on just two. The method of running for a skinwalker is a clue as to their speed in itself. Instead of alternating legs like we do in a stride, a skinwalker runs on all fours by pushing off with the legs and then the hands, rather like a rabbit. My husband has seen them run with this style of gait several times as well as standing on two legs. After much discussion, we pinned down that there was abnormal musculature located around the knee caps as well as hyperextension of the knees themselves. The range of motion for the gait itself would be from bent position to full extension at push off in combination with pushing off from the hands (whether or not they use knuckles or palms is unknown because of darkness). The method of running is obviously traumatic to the knees as shown by the knee hyperextension but the existence of abnormal increased musculature in the legs probably acts to protect the ligaments of the knee cap from rupturing. Again, as in the night vision, this adaptation is more than likely to be successful in a child than in an adult that decides to make a transition from two legged running to all fours. For a skinwalker, they have the ability to move either on two legs or four. This would take considerable long term physical conditioning. The feral children that were found to run on all fours, although fast, had difficulty walking on just two legs. Obviously, the two methods of locomotion had to have been both trained from early on in life for them to both be successfully used.

Are these claims that are so diffuse through the Navajo and outsiders impossible? The shapeshifting is probably the least likely of the three but I feel that the other two do have some amount of possibility. I also feel that these attributes having also been seen in feral children to be rather telling. Feral children have long been held as human raised as an animal but they also often have problems with speech and other mental deficiencies as well as not having human like behaviours. In the skinwalker, however, the animal shaman of old, you have a perfect blending of both man and animal. You have what would be a feral child but one who is educated in medicine lore, can speak fluent navajo, and also behaves as a human--not an animal. There could be a great deal that we could learn in the fields of biology and evolution if we could study skinwalkers more closely. There is also the question that if this was the animal shaman for the Navajo, was this practice isolated or could it have been the norm for all animal shamans? The image of Le Sorciere comes to mind.

Stephanie



In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.--Ralph Waldo Emerson