WENDIGO APOCALYPSE SETTING

I was re-reading this old thread in the archives: >suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/44551658/

And decided I wanted to go more in-depth into the concept of a Wendigo Apocalypse. For those of you who don’t feel like skimming over the old thread (though it’s worth it), an user posted some interesting wendigo folklore details, including:

>wendigos were thought to live on a series of islands far out in the Arctic sea, where they hibernated during most of the year
>wendigos are migratory, heading south and hunting in the winter, then going back to their islands when it gets too warm


The idea behind the Wendigo Apocalypse is that in the not-too-distant future climate change causes these wendigo isles to thaw, forcing out the old wendigos still hibernating, who then attack nearby human settlements. Wendigo spirits also awaken and start trying to possess more people. At the same time climate change causes increasingly violent winter storms that can carry into regions they previously didn’t. In this not-too-distant future scenario, thermohaline circulation shutdown also causes the North Atlantic to get much colder.

The result is that each winter human civilization in the northern hemisphere is besieged by wendigo hordes. Even if they’re all killed, the intangible wendigo spirits can create more. Wendigos are problem-solving intelligent in addition to being extremely hard to kill, with nothing short of a napalm strike killing the big ones. Even the smaller ones can only be killed with fire.

As apocalypses go this one isn’t too bad: it wouldn’t kill, but it would radically affect human civilization, causing mass migrations to the south and severely impacting the global economy. Humans who remain in wendigo-territory will have to endure a cyclical siege, hunkering down and preparing for the onslaught every winter.

ITT we discuss the changes caused by this scenario, from wendigo hunting tactics to large scale socio-political change.

Other urls found in this thread:

wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

It may be helpful to try and define wendigos here, because while I know Veeky Forums is familiar with them I’ve also seen them get confused with skinwalkers in a some threads. So here are the basics:

Wendigos are transformed human beings, created when an evil spirit personifying the North Wind or Winter possesses them. These spirits famously target people who have resorted to cannibalism during the winter, though they may also target people who are freezing or starving to death.
These spirits attack in dreams, tricking the unwitting into inviting them in. Once someone has been possessed they exhibit strange symptoms, including unusual hunger and chills and a compulsion to eat snow. During this time their heart is beginning to freeze solid. If the freezing is stopped (through a number of methods) the person may survive, but if it cannot be stopped the person must be killed immediately. If the transformation is completed the person becomes a wendigo.

Fully formed wendigos appear as seriously emaciated humans, as if in the late stages of starvation, with grayish or sallow skin. In their endless hunger, they often chew away parts of their lips and shoulders, and sometimes a few of their own fingers and toes. They have hearts of solid ice, are followed by blizzards, and every time they eat their body grows in proportion so that their stomachs are never full. They range from regular human height to 30+ feet tall. Despite their great height, though, they are still thin and emaciated, with long stick-like limbs. They can be mistaken for trees if they are standing in a forest.

Their only real vulnerability is fire. To be killed, a wendigo must be burned until its heart of ice melts and its flesh is reduced to ash. Any lesser damage will not kill it, and it will eventually heal and return. In the past it was believed shamans could combat them as well, through a variety of methods.

And now, here are some random wendigo pictures to set the mood.

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I had no idea they grew as they ate. How horrific.

They don't.

Wendigos were just insane humans (or possessed by an evil spirit after eating human flesh). They starting getting associated with the Abominable Snowman years ago and the concept of giant humans shape-changed as a result is some kind of amalgamation of those myths.

An interesting concept though. Instead of layers of fat from human flesh consumed, it transfers into height.

It's the other way around, user. The old Algonquian myths about wendigos depict them as giants and transformed humans personifying winter and the north. The idea that they were just crazy people came later, and was introduced by Westerners reacting to the native belief system.

Read Dangerous Spirits: the Windigo in Myth and History, by Shawn Smallson, or The Manitous: The Supernatural World of the Ojibway, by Basil Johnston, or The Wendigo in the Material World, Robert Brightman. There's a ton of documentation and research both on wendigo native wendigo folklore and later on the phenomena of wendigo psychosis.

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>walkers of a white-ish colour
>that emerge when it grows cold

Truly hasn't been thought of in modern fantasy. Good idea. You could also have them create minions. Infect humans or even resurrect the dead as a mindless horde.

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Don't be a jackass. It's not like GRRM wasn't drawing on similar ideas from myth and fiction. Wouldn't even be surprised if wendigo lore was a partial inspiration for his Others.

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Interesting, are Wendigos resistant to the cold they create? Or do they just exist to consume more flesh?

There was a lot more old wendigo lore in the thread I linked in the OP, but yes. Wendigos seem to be unaffected by cold, and hate warmth. There's an old folk story about a guy who turns wendigo one winter, runs off into the woods, and the hunting parties can't find him. Much later, in spring, some hunters encounter him, much more transformed, out in the woods. He doesn't attack them, just mutters something about how it's getting too hot. They last see him wandering off, heading north.

There are a number of old folktales like that, where the wendigos seems sort of confused and disoriented. They're intelligent, but their overwhelming compulsion to devour human flesh conflicts with their lingering memories of who they were. In myths the clever hero often defeated a wendigo by pretending to be a family member or something, preying on the wendigo's confusion about who and where it was. The hero would invite the wendigo in and offer it food as a delaying tactic. The wendigo would rapidly begin to eat him out of house and home (there's no sating their hunger) but it would buy time to think of a better plan.

In one story the hero and his wife do this, and as the wendigo eats they prepare a big pot of boiling water. When it demand more food they tell it there's soup in the pot, and as it goes to look they slam the lid down on its head. It thrashes and tries to get free, but they boil the head until it goes limp, then take the body outside and burn it to keep the wendigo from returning.

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No doubt. But you missed the point. Anything that 'arrives with cold weather' will get compared to white walkers.

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the gameplay was bad, but the story was pretty good.

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>Interesting, are Wendigos resistant to the cold they create? Or do they just exist to consume more flesh?

I wouldn't worry about it user

I live in Finland so I'd get fucked pretty soon.. There could be a "neighbourhood watch" of flame thrower equipped volunteers. People would invest in better locks and maybe CCTV would rise in popularity. There might be a widespread demand for self cheap self defense options, like single use batons that heat up like crazy with a chemical reaction when needed, and everyone would carry one. Every country on the northern part of the globe would start studying the shamanic rituals. Oil prices go up as demand for napalm and flamethrower fuel go up, assuming the apocalypse is that big. If it's really a pandemic on a nigh global scale some may decide to accelerate global warming as much as possible, even though it may not work long scale. People often don't think far. As a plot twist the intelligent wendigos might learn to disguise themselves as human and infiltrate a town or a city, creating an interesting murder mystery. If you want to go full strange/unrealistic/cool, boiling moat around a town.

I like the design of animalistic wendigos so I usually include them as gaining features of what they eat. Eating humans makes them large thin humans, elk/deer give antlers and elongated faces, eating bears would make them horrifying.

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So let's talk turkey about how this scenario would play out.

The wendigo isles thaw, but the lesser wendigos have been dead for generations. The ones that are left are the really old wendigos, bigger than average having eaten a lot of people over many centuries, who had basically stopped migrating and were permanently hibernating beneath the permafrost. Now they're awake. Once they realize their islands aren't going to freeze again, they leave during a massive polar vortex event that brings severe winter storms to much of North America. A few of the wendigos go further north, in search of lands that still remain permanently frozen. The rest go south, looking for food.

Because their movements are masked by blizzards, people don't immediately realize what's coming. Any isolated towns the wendigos find are rapidly consumed. They start heading for big population centers, like Anchorage. Some of the ones that went North cross the arctic circle and reach northern Scandinavia or Russia.

Let's say there's not a ton of them. Less than fifty. But each one is big, in the 30+foot range, maybe even in the 40-50 foot range or more. At the same time, the disembodied wendigo spirits that swarmed around the old wendigo isles in the spirit world are also abroad during this massive polar vortex, seeking new hosts.

Eventually, as the wendigos start hitting bigger population centers, and new wendigos emerge amongst the populace (with both the wendigos and the massive storms forcing people into dire straights that may result in them starving, freezing, or even cannibalizing).

It's not initially realized these monsters are supernatural, but when conventional weapons fail somebody cracks open a book and realizes these are goddamn wendigos. At that point, people start breaking out the molotov cocktails, flamethrowers, and napalm/thermobaric bombs. The wendigos are driven back. As the winter begins to end the creatures retreat to their old islands, not knowing where else to go.

Fire's the only thing that does any lasting harm, so it probably doesn't damage them.

While the wendigos are concentrated in one place and before they can leave the islands again to head deeper into the Arctic where they can hibernate again, the militaries of the Northern hemisphere bomb the shit out of them with everything short of nukes. Most of the elder wendigos are wiped out, save those that retreated further north earlier, or those that hadn't yet made it back to the islands.

This takes care of the worst of the threat, but destroying most of the sacred islands enrages the disembodied spirits. In the next winter, they go after the human population much more aggressively, attacking people in their dreams, trying to make more wendigos. As winter storms worse each year, a new crop of wendigos appears as well. Plus, a very small number of the elder wendigos have survived, and occasionally rear their ugly heads.

There's a mass migration out of the arctic circle. Entire communities pack up overnight. Larger towns and cities see a huge drop in their population. Northern industries like fishing and oil/gas extraction take a huge hit. The communities that remain fortify. Massive walls are built around fallback locations in urban centers. Armories full of flamethrowers and incendiary rounds/grenades are established. Public posters list the signs of potential wendigo transformation. Militias form. During most of the year they live their lives, but come fall they begin to prepare and come winter they hunker down and prepare for the worst. The siege starts in their dreams.

>They start heading for big population centers, like Anchorage.

Well then the Wendigo's are fucked. Alaska is essentially a military fortress, with close to a hundred thousand troops stationed in Anchorage and Fairbanks not to mention the entire population of civilians are a large part ex military and trained, and are heavily armed.

Hope they're all armed with flamethrowers.

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Meanwhile, the realization that this is a bonafide supernatural threat changes how humans view the world. People start wondering what other myths and legends are real, and if any others will rise in the modern era, bringing more death and destruction. Governments approach the First Nations tribes that still remember their wendigo lore, seeking out any religious leaders who remember anything of the old rituals. These people are isolated in think tanks with anthropologists and folklorists, who attempt to re-create the shamanistic counters to wendigos. Unfortunately, in the process, they also discover the old rituals that allowed a shaman to sic wendigo spirits on innocents who had not eaten human flesh, or suffered the usual triggers that invite possession.

These think tanks begin to train specialized black-ops shaman teams, to be sent into a location where any of the elder wendigos are still believed to be lurking or into any potential wendigo lairs, or into communities that have been overrun. The shaman-commandos are effective, but few in number and with a high fatality rate. A few of them become bitter and jaded. Some of them learn the rites to sic wendigo spirits on others. They must resist the temptation to use this knowledge for evil, but it's always there, both for them and for the scholar-shamans that helped train them.

Bullets and bombs won't do shit.

I like the idea, but I'm not sure how I feel about it being tied to climate change and thawing. I might instead have it related to oil drilling in the far north and the disruption of a sacred site on a lost arctic island.

Untrue, but if that's the case they can use Native Alaskans to cast a spell to banish the Wendigos

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>untrue

But only fire melting a wendigo's heart will kill it for good. Just shooting them or stabbing them, or even blowing bits of them up won't be enough. They'll eventually recover and come back for more.

Plus, it's going to be hard to shoot straight at a monster surrounded by a swirling blizzard.

You know, this would all be a pretty good premise for a delta Green game, if you tied it back to Ithaqua.

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How has no one mentioned the webcomic "Stand Still, Stay Silent" yet? It'd more Nordic mythology of trolls rather than wendigos, but there are similar concepts: humanity transformed is the source of the monsters, post apocalyptic society of small communities trying to clear out land of troll nests, specific sorts of warriors emerge to kill trolls, other mythological elements (ghosts, gods and their magic) beging to materialize and be taken seriously. Lot of good ideas to crib there.

That, and the art is just gorgeous.

I tried reading that one, and could never seem to get into it. The characters rubbed me the wrong way, but I could never put my finger on why.

>webcomic

about the time i stopped caring

Fair enough. Certainly doesn't help it takes ages to get to the actual story and cast. Something like 100 pages or more before we see a semblance of a plot, and more time before the gang is assembled and on their way to the old world.

The film "Ravenous" is about a type of wendigo.

Well worth watching. Men gain super strength and regenerative abilities by eating human flesh, but once transformed, you can never go back and feel the hunger to eat more human flesh...

Glorious soundtrack too

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>it's 2064
>living in Toronto suburb
>half the people in my neighborhood have moved away in the last five years
>my family didn't have enough money
>it's getting cold
>that time of the year again
>everybody in the suburbs and rural areas heads downtown
>pass through the 16 meter wall topped with barbed wire and flamethrower towers
>get assigned temporary housing
>pulled militia duty this year
>fml
>report to armory that night
>get assigned flamethrower, three liters of fuel, a flaregun, and ten flares
>pull night shift, but don't have to start till tomorrow
>get shitty sleep, keep dreaming about Colonel Sanders offering me fried chicken
>there hasn't been a KFC in town for years, they all pulled out
>wake up hungry as shit
>go to work at a local ration supply depot for half the day
>only have to work a half day because I pulled milita duty
>spend that night knocking on doors, making sure people in my district are okay
>next night have to walk assigned section of the wall
>it's getting cold as balls and I'm bored as shit
>a week goes by, keep having dreams about KFC
>second week we get our first storm
>that night I hear the howling, almost can't tell it apart from the wind, but the difference is there
>klaxon sounds
>run to the wall
>hear the big flamethrowers going
>get up top
>forty to fifty wendys, testing the defenses
>you can see some of them hanging back, watching, they're not serious about it
>we burn a bunch of them, but they all fall back before we can finish any off
>they retreat near dawn, thankfully I get rotated off the wall before that
>get some sleep
>fuck off, Colonel
>next day see military choppers going over city, heading for woods
>shammy teams must be trying to find the pack
>wonder if I can find a place that sells fried chicken before I have to go back to my militia shift

You're one of them already aren't you

One does wonder how wendigo spirits would trick modern people. If some wizened Native American man appears in your dreams and is very insistent about you eating all this roast duck he just happened to have cooked up in his lonely shack in the middle of a snow-bound wilderness... that's probably going to seem out of the ordinary to most people and their suspicions will be raised.

Fast food, though? Pizza? Hamburgers? Offered to you by friendly mascots? Targeting a population of people under siege, rationing their food? I daresay they might get a few people.

>Anything that 'arrives with cold weather' will get compared to white walkers.
So it makes a great pleb filter, then

Then buy/download the book?
Why is it serialized stories from way back when are fine, but use the same format online and people throw a snide fit? We even have some great complete reads, like Concerned or 8-bit Theater.

Just confounds me, anons.

I dunno. Global warming just seems a bit too far-fetched.

One thing not mentioned in this thread so far is an odd belief that, while wendigos can only be killed with fire, they can be warded off/stunned with menstrual blood.

This is a thing for a number of Native American monsters. Like in many ancient societies, there were various taboos regarding menstruation and menstrual blood. Wendigo would avoid it if they could, and if splashed with it would go into a temporary self-cannibalizing frenzy, biting and chewing on themselves, ripping open their own bellies, etc. It would wear off after a bit, and the wendigo would eventually recover from the physical damage. Still, it would be enough to buy you some time to escape or to find a way to properly kill the monster.

I know this sounds super Magical Realmy, but it's a genuine bit of folklore.

>"run!"
>Rapid fiddle music starts playing

That's interesting, but its social suicide to go "so guys I've been doing this setting where you fight wendigos with menstrual blood, want to play?"

Remember that there were whizzard story tellers in the olden days too, user.

Undeniably. But f you were going to make this a setting, it would be helpful for players to have some way to ward off or stun wendigos, considering that killing them is so difficult and time-consuming. If a dozen wendigos are on your trail, you're not going to have time to burn each of them individually, especially if they're big ones.

Perhaps there's some other fluid that could replace menstrual blood? Maybe the blood of some sort of animal?

I mean, you could always just hit them with a flashbang grenade or something. They still have yes and ears. They're still living creatures, just cursed/possessed.

>shaman-commandos

I want to discuss this topic more. How do the shaman-commandos combat wendigos differently than normal soldiers? What gear do they carry? What rituals do they use?

Flashbangs aren't as effective as cs would imply. They're more of a distraction than anything, imagine being tense in a room when suddenly a grenade flies in, starts emitting a loud shriek and shining a bright as fuck light. It doesn't stun you, and it wouldn't stun a supernatural entity

Well, any soldiers sent to combat wendigos would probably have specialized gear. Shotguns might be a safe choice, the stopping power of one of those could knock the more modestly sized wendigos on their ass, keep them off you for a bit. Incendiary rounds and grenades would be a must. Probably at least one to two soldiers in a squad would carry a flamethrower. I dunno, I'm not a /k/ guy, am I missing anything obvious?

How far south does these freezing zones go? Depending on that it shows you how fucked the United States can get. Sure, losing the east coast is bad, but you can always move the government to places like Florida or Texas.

Regardless of that, places like Australia, Mexico, Brazil, India, South Africa and a huge chunk of China would increase in power with places like Germany, Russia, England and the US mostly out of the picture.

Forgot my image

I always forget how far north Europe and the US actually are

Oh, yeah. Without the Thermohaline Circulation, anything north of Italy would get as cold as Minnesota and above. England would turn into Nova Scotia and most of Germany into something like British Colombia.

Shit, a few years ago we had a polar vortex that sent blizzards all the way down to Atlanta. It was all over the news, snow falling in this southern town that usually gets none, locals not knowing how to deal with it, roads getting backed up for hours, etc, etc. If the thermohaline circulation dies out most of the US and Canada will go pretty cold, but you could also have severe winter weather extending even further south from time to time.

Read this for more info on Wendigos. Menstrual blood makes them flip out.

This requires some sources on how shamans fought/controlled wendigos. Allow me to supply some:

>Windigos could be created through the action of evil shamans, the kind that might keep a bag of human tongues around his neck or threaten a woman's family in order to take her in marriage. It was believed that shamans could send windigo spirits as a curse, which the people might sense before they arrived and try to overcome through spiritual power. Similarly, shamans could cure people with starvation itself, and lack of game was often explained in this way. At the same time, only a shaman could overcome the most powerful windigos. One hunter in Labrador told the anthropologist Frank Speck it was only through a shaman that a powerful windigo could be defeated:

>"And through having eaten such powerful 'game' as man, his soul-spirit (mista'peo) becomes so strong that others less powerful are afraid to attack him. So the conjuror has to finish him with sorcery. He then tries to get the cannibal's spirit into his conjuring cabin by challenging it to a fight. He can induce the bear, for one, to get underneath the cannibal's spirit and send it off the earth into the air. Having succeeded in this the cannibal is without his spirit, and though still alive he is doomed.

>Many similar tales involve a shaman using a spirit helper (pawakan) to defeat a windigo, which helps explain why shamans were both mistrusted and viewed as indispensable. Their aid was essential to survive in the challenging world of the boreal forest.

>There are other stories of shamans hurling windigo spirits into the atmosphere. In one narrative, people near Moose Lake (not far from Le Pas in Northern Manitoba) called on a 'Saulteaux doctor' because a female windigo was camped nearby and killing the people's dogs. "The Saulteaux doctor began to sing. He called up a big storm like a whirlwind. The wind picked up the wihtiko woman and carried her off

Just get don't say what it is, but hint at it. That ought to help some of the more squeamish.

Mentioned above. Alas, you're going to get charged with Magical Realm really quick if you include that mechanic in your game. It'd be helpful to come up with a similar mechanic that used some other liquid.

Call it Anti-Wendigo water, have women sell it, and call it a day.

I suppose if you've got some central authority organizing militias, handing out flamethrowers, posting signs telling people to look out for the five symptoms of wendigo possession or whatever, etc, etc, then it's not unreasonable that same organization could be handing out bottles of "wendigo repellent" whose precise makeup is kept vague.

Exactly.

So, what I'm getting from this is shaman-commandos, in addition to their usual armaments, would be trained to:

>conjure whirlwinds with songs/chants to carry wendigo spirits off
>have their own individualized totemic animal spirit helper who can help them banish wendigo spirits
>both of the above scenarios only banish the wendigo spirit, dooming the monster to slowly die, but you still have to restrain/fight the physical creature until then
>in dire circumstances wendigo spirits could be redirected towards other targets
>the shaman could also help coach people on how to build up the own spiritual power in order to resist a possession attempt

I like the idea that, short of other options, a shaman could try to strength some people's ability to resist possession, then redirect the spirit towards that person, who then resists and forces the spirit off.

Why not just redirect the spirit into something like a rock?

I'll have to take a look at this movie sometime.

Know of any others?

I would assume the ritual in question requires a living target.

Trees then? They're alive.

Read the thread OP linked. It gives an example of two wendigo-creating rituals, presumably intended to direct the spirit to a given target:

>One is the story of the evil Shaman, Dark Sky, who despite having many wives lusts after another young woman. when her father refuses to marry her he enacts a strange ritual in which he puts a snowball in the crook of her neck as she sleeps while making her inhale the odor of certain herbs. A few days later she becomes a wendigo, killing and eating her entire family/village. Dark Sky returns to find his creation lurking in the ruins of the village. Since his power created the wendigo he is able to command it, and he has it follow him back to his village. There he puts her in a tent with heated rocks, which slowly melts the ice inside her. After a day of intense heat she is human again, but with no memory of what transpire. Dark Sky then forcibly marries her. She eventually learns the truth, though, and begins to relapse, turning back into a wendigo. She perceives this as the spirits using her as their instrument to punish Dark Sky, which she's okay with, but she doesn't want to kill everyone in his village too. She throws herself onto a pyre, and gets some small revenge in that she also kills Dark Sky's unborn son that she was carrying in the process.

>In a variant of the "Dark Sky" story the evil shaman doesn't put snow in the crook of the sleeping girl's neck, but instead fashions an effigy of the girl out of snow, then submerges it in water until it freezes solid, and then takes it outside and burns it while chanting and engaging in other (undescribed) ritual acts around the fire. This causes the girl to become a wendigo.

So the first requires you to do it to a specific person and the other works a bit like a voodoo doll. The most interesting line in there to me is that a shaman who creates a wendigo can then control that wendigo.

Are you trying to trick me?

>yfw Dark Sky is still alive thanks to dark arts
>yfw when he still has his bag of human tongues
>yfw he's still making wendigos so he can fuck hot bitches
>yfw he's out there in the wilderness of Canada, helping to perpetuate the wendigo apocalypse
>yfw it wasn't really global warming, but Dark Sky starting shit that brought the wendigos back

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There's a 2001 movie called Wendigo and a 2006 movie call The Last Winter. Neither are particularly great and both go with the weird idea that wendigo are part deer for some reason, but if you want more stuff ion that vein, those are your best bet.

On, and the Lone Ranger movie with Johnny Depp implied one of the villains was possessed by a wendigo, though it butchers the lore.

I love monsters like that, so much more interesting then mindless beasts that just kill everything in sight.

Just how much would be Wendi land? Would Canada and the northern US be lost?

Probably. Then the skinwalkers and other variants will take over anything the wendigos don't take.

Well, the idea here seems to be that the wendigos don't hold territory, for the most part. Climate change makes the northern hemisphere much colder in places, but it doesn't erase the seasons. Wendigos hide out in the parts of the arctic that stay permanently frozen until winter comes around, then they head south and attack human territory. If all these wendigos are killed, the spirits of the North are still around and will try to possess people to create an entirely new crop of wendigos.

It's like fighting orks in WH40k. You can kill all the ones you find, but it's nearly impossible to eradicate them completely. There will always be a few more each winter, and if their numbers aren't properly culled then they'll build up over time until you have a horde of them.

Not lost, but severely impacted. Canada would lose a lot of people to immigration, but would probably be able to eventually adopt a siege mentality and hold out each winter. Less of the US would be affected, but migration would still cause a ripple effect across the nation. IT too would probably begin to adopt a siege mentality, but Canada might absorb most of the wendigo attacks, so it may be relatively spared, aside from the wendis that pop up unexpectedly within its borders.

Gettin' real tired of skinwalkers here.
I was thinking of settlements that the Wendigos haven't wiped out yet because they wanted to revel in the fear of the survivors. And thought of one settlement that included metal crosses that sprayed fire on their barricades.

What is this from?

This reminds me. What would happen with cities vs towns?

I think we can assume a lot of people would head south, so towns in northern Canada of Alaska that were small to begin with may vanish overnight. But cities are big, sprawling, hard to fortify things while towns can more easily be walled off and protected. Rich and upper middle class people will have the most freedom to pull up and move, and most of them live in cities.

Do the cities just all become ghost towns? What does tons of small towns vanishing do to the economy? Or do the small towns fortify and the big cities empty out because they're too much of a target? Do highways get fortified to protect the economy and the shipping of goods?

I guess part of the question here is how many new wendigos show up each year. Look at this article:

wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/

Back in 2008 the US lost an extra 108,500 people during winter. Every nation that experiences severe winters has an uptick in fatalities during those months, usually amongst the homeless and elderly. If wendigo spirits can possess people who are starving or freezing to death, not just people who cannibalize each other, then they've probably got a lot of targets to choose from. Plus, the initial wendigo rampages damaging infrastructure, plus the massive climate changes of the thermohaline circulation cutting off mean that those winter fatality numbers will probably go up.

Granted, some of these deaths are from car accidents in bad weather and the like. So not all of those people would be wendigo targets. But if a sizeable percentage are? And if those winter fatalities got worse? You're potentially getting thousands of new wendigos each winter.

The game Until Dawn. Same as OP.

If you can't evacuate a city from the blizzards what do you do? I think maybe some cities could try to fortify down, create their own witch hunters, or be thrown into anarchy. Maybe small towns can fortify, become their own miltary bases, and loot abandoned cities for goodies, and take survivors in.