Ooooowww! At the same time, coyotes started howling behind the building we had just come from.
“Help!” My coworker grabbed me and held on to me as tightly as she could—her nails dug into my arms.
Oooooowww! Now the coyotes were howling even louder.
In a flash, the lady took off, running to her truck. I watched as she jumped in, slammed the door, and tore out of the open gate. I was still standing back under the power lines—all alone.
Taking a deep breath, I walked calmly back to my truck, started it up, parked it outside the gate, then locked up the gate for the night.
All the way home I kept yelling at the owl and coyotes: “You cowards! Get out of here! Don’t follow me! You don’t belong here!”
In the driveway I raced out of my car and into the house. Inside, I burned some cedar for protection, and I said a prayer.
Nothing ever happened.
Maybe they were just trying to scare me—but they didn’t. Even if they had, I would never let them see my fear.
They feed off your fear.
Skinwalker
TOLD BY ART TRACY JR., NAVAJO, ARIZONA
My mom used to tell all kinds of stories to us when we were little kids. But I remember this one because it was a scary story to me. She said it was a true story that happened on the Navajo Reservation, a long time ago—maybe back in the 1920s or ’30s. It’s about an evil witch we call a skinwalker. A skinwalker is half person and half animal. It starts as a medicine man or woman who use their powers of healing for good. But for some reason they turn to evil. Not only do skinwalkers bring pain and suffering to their enemies, but they can crawl inside a person’s mind and control them. Skinwalkers often look like anyone else during the day, then at night they transform into creatures with glowing eyes. They can run like the wind and easily track down a person. Skinwalkers appear during the day, too—waiting and watching for their victims.
There was a Navajo guy working as a ranch hand for a rich Navajo who had a lot of horses, cattle, and sheep somewhere around the western part of the Navajo Reservation, in Tuba City, Arizona.
One day the man decided to go home to see his relatives and to check up on his family in the eastern part of the reservation—somewhere past Shiprock, New Mexico. So he talked to his employer and asked to take leave.
Soon he was on his way to see his family. Early that morning the worker had fastened his pack onto a good horse and started off on his long journey home. He rode cross-country through rugged canyons, mesas, and open range. Somewhere along the way he stopped for a rest.
While he was resting, he spied an old, mangy coyote sitting on top of a hill not too far away.
The man took out his rifle, aimed, and fired. The coyote slumped over and did not move again. Then the man climbed up to see his kill.
As he reached the top of the hill, he could not believe his eyes.
What lay before him was the dead body of a young Navajo man with long hair. The top half of his body was human, and the bottom half animal. His upper body was painted with designs and his lower half was covered with the fur of a coyote.
He had shot a skinwalker. It must have been resting like he was when he shot it.
Now he got scared. He didn’t know what to do with it. He walked around, and then he saw a deep crevice along the canyon’s edge. So he dragged the creature’s body to the cliff’s edge and threw it off.
Thud. He heard the body land somewhere deep down in the dark crevice. As his fear grew, he knew he needed to distance himself as far as possible from the creature and the place.
Quickly mounting his horse, he rode over Black Mesa, across Chinle Valley, and up the big Chuska Mountains. He rode all day and into the night, pushing his horse to the limit. He finally made it across the Chuska Mountains and past Shiprock, New Mexico, to his relatives’ home.
There he told the family what had happened to him. They listened, their fear growing.
“You must never go back to your employer,” they told him. “You have to stay here. The relatives of the skinwalker will be looking for answers—and they’ll be out looking for you!”
Filled with fear, the man took their advice. Then one day, after several months, the visitor felt safe enough to come out of hiding. He had heard there was a traditional healing Yei bi chei ceremony happening near Shiprock. He decided to attend it.
When he got to the ceremony it was packed with people. Many were camping, and their wagons were parked here and there. On the central grounds, rituals with singing and dancing were being performed by healers wearing elaborate masks.
Just as the visitor was beginning to enjoy the ceremony, he saw an old Navajo man walking around among the crowds of people. This old man was talking loudly and making an announcement to anyone who would listen.
“My family is looking for a son who went missing a couple of months ago,” he called out.
He told of his son’s journey in full detail. He told where his son had last stopped, where he was last seen, and his last known destination. After that, he had gone missing. He never showed up at his next expected stop.
The visitor grew cold as he listened. Next, the old man described exactly the features of the young Navajo skinwalker’s face. Then the old man described the area of the reservation where the visitor had shot it.
Next, the old man said: “There is one man who knows what happened to our son—and that man is here among you today!”
The crowd murmured and looked around uncomfortably.
“We are camped over there”—the old man pointed—“and we would like for you to come over to our camp and tell us what you know happened to our son.”
The visitor knew the old Navajo man was talking about him.
He left the ceremony as quickly and quietly as possible and made his way home. There he stayed in hiding for many years.
He never went back to work for his employer, and he never again went over to the western part of the Navajo Rez. After many, many years in hiding, he finally told his story only to a few people he trusted.
Coyote and the Turkeys
TOLD BY DAN SASUWEH JONES, PONCA
My people tell stories from long ago about animals. Coyote is a famous trickster, a loner, always in trouble and getting himself into situations that backfire. Turkeys are a symbol of strength, showing the power of family. They are animals, it’s true, but as you listen to the storytellers, you can’t help but think they are really talking about us.
I was commissioned to build a bronze sculpture from one of our old mythologies. The story I chose was called “Coyote and the Turkeys.” It goes like this:
Coyote befriended a group of turkeys by singing to them of their beauty. As he sang and played his hand drum, he convinced them to close their eyes as they danced to his song—so they could better hear the music. They did so, because it helped them concentrate on how beautiful they were. Meanwhile, as they danced around him, he secretly grabbed them one by one and pushed them into a bag. Suddenly, they caught on to what he was doing—and they were furious! Then he had to run for his life as they chased him, trying to kill him.
My sculpture would show Coyote sitting on a rock, playing his hand drum to the turkeys. The sculpture would be quite large: six feet from the base to the top of Coyote’s head.
One early morning while working in my studio, I had thrown the doors wide open so I could look out to see the nature around me. My studio is in a remote area of Oklahoma, on a large lake, and it is common to see deer and turkeys right on my property. But never a coyote.
The initial form of the statue was almost complete, and I decided to take a break to do some much-needed lawn mowing. With the studio doors wide open, I could easily see the statue of Coyote as I mowed. At six feet tall, the statue was the most visible thing in my studio. I wondered what the animals in the woods must have thought as they peered out or passed by—especially the turkeys. After all, Coyote was one of their archenemies. Then I laughed; after all, the animals most
likely didn’t care.
So, I went about mowing along the road in front of my house—a gravel road nobody uses but us and a neighbor who only comes in the summer. So pretty much no one was around—except me and the wildlife.
As I was mowing, I happened to look up. To my surprise, a coyote was walking straight toward me. He had just stepped out of the thick brush on the side of the road. And to my even greater surprise, a few seconds later, two turkeys came out right behind him. They stopped just thirty or forty feet in front of me. There they stood: Coyote side by side with two large turkeys.
I was in shock. I had never seen or heard of turkeys and coyotes being anywhere near each other. Now, to my greater surprise, the three were walking together, straight toward me, looking at me. My brain was crying out: Where’s my camera? I didn’t even have my cell phone with me.
But wait a minute: My mower was loud! Why were these wild animals walking toward me instead of fleeing for their lives? Next, the two turkeys turned up my neighbor’s road and walked away. The coyote stopped and stayed there, just looking at me. Then it walked even closer. When it got within ten feet of me, all my feeling of wonder vanished.
Now I was worried. Something is wrong with this coyote! He is not acting scared of me or this loud mower. Does he have rabies? Those animals aren’t afraid.
But he didn’t look sick or crazed. He wasn’t even acting funny. This was not normal at all. He was so close that I could see the color of his light brown eyes. He turned his head from side to side like a dog will sometimes do.
After a minute or so he slowly walked off. I watched him, and he watched me, as he retreated down the road and off into the brush again.
“I need to take a break after that!” I said to myself.
Driving the mower back up to my studio, I could see the sculpture of Coyote. A very strange thought crossed my mind.
“Could he really have stepped down?” I asked myself. “No! It’s just a coincidence.”
Later that day my neighbor pulled up while I was working on the statue. We greeted each other, and started to chat.
“Funny thing,” he said. “I was looking out my window this morning, and a coyote went running across my front yard. It kept looking back at something as it ran, like it was scared.
“Then,” he added, “I saw a flock of turkeys chasing him—darndest thing I have ever seen!”
I looked up at the Coyote statue. His ancient story had played out in real life.
I want to acknowledge all the storytellers of the Ponca Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, in my lifetime, for instilling in me a rich tradition of oral communication refined from Ponca storytellers since time immemorial. In my travels, I would like to thank the other tribes and their members who I have heard and shared stories with and who allowed me to experience the beautiful traditional elements of their cultures. I thank my traveling companion, Brenda, from all those years ago. People like Floyd Tiny Man Heavyrunner, Chief of the Blackfeet Crazy Dog Warrior Society, helped shape my views of this world and others hidden. A longtime friend and teacher, he was a legendary storyteller, fluent in the Blackfeet language and guided by his grandparents, Alfred and Agnes Wells, who were Spiritual Medicine People. I know all are at peace together on the other side of this life now. I need to thank my own mother and father, Lee and Velma Jones, who were my first story teachers. It was their stories of the old ways that first influenced me to understand the wealth in history and the power of the art of communication through the spoken word. Also a special thanks to my wife, Antje, and our son Lio and daughter Diamond. As well as my son Buck and daughter Meka. A special thanks to Barbara Brownell Grogan for all the work she did on this book. Also to Kevin Mulroy and Olivia Valcarce for their editorial input and Carol Norton for her design. To Weshoyot Alvitre, Tongva, for her wonderful art. Greatest thanks to all those storytellers who contributed to this book. And to Scholastic for publishing these works to further the voice of American Indians. Most of all to the stories themselves, whose spirits are in fact alive.
—Dan SaSuWeh Jones, 2020
Living Ghosts and Mischievous Monsters: Chilling American Indian Stories would not have been possible without the contributions of so many talented storytellers and collectors who have shared tales both traditional and present-day. The author and editors would like to thank Lavonne Rodriguez, administrator for Ghost Stories of the Wind River, at facebook.com/groups/ GhostStoriesoftheWindRiver, for her support in this project and for introducing us to several storytellers whose work appears in these pages: Luis Wicho Aguilar (“La Lechuza, the Owl-Witch”); Solange K. (“Pa Ki Sko Kan, the Bones”); Maggie Marie Miller (“Twin Child Was Arapaho”); Eugene Redsteer (“Warning”); Stephanie Slim (“The Dark Figure”); and Art Tracy (“Skinwalker”). Thank you also to Paul Burke, administrator for the website First People of America and Canada–Turtle Island, at firstpeople.us, for sharing traditional versions of “The Chenoo: The Cannibal with an Icy Heart” and “The Deserted Children”; to Laura Redish, administrator for the website Native Languages of the Americas, at native-languages.org/legends, for sharing access to many traditional ghost stories and her knowledge of the history behind them, including access to “The Lost Hunters” and the story behind the Skudakumooch’; and to Glenn Welker, administrator for the multilingual website Indigenous Peoples Literature, at indigenouspeople.net, who shared a traditional version of “The Mashpee Sailor” and to Samantha Hatch, who shared her own chilling version of this story, printed here. Thank you to storyteller Vernandria Livingston (“The Garage Sale”) and Kyler Edsitty, her editor at the University of Arizona Lumberjack student newspaper, where her story first appeared (in time for Halloween 2019). To Brock Battenfield, whose website Small Town Myths at smalltownmyths.com, shares “myths, legends, and scary stories” from around the world, including the versions of “La Llorona,” “The Stikini,” and “The Kushtaka” published here. Thank you to Ellen Baumler, longstanding historian for the Montana Historical Society, whose story “Sleeping Buffalo Rock” appeared in her 2016 book Ghosts of the Last Best Place, published by The History Press, Charleston, South Carolina, and whose abridged version of “The Vampire of Sleeping Child Hot Springs” appears on the historical plaque near the Montana springs. To author, historian, and consultant Herman Viola, curator emeritus for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and senior adviser to the National Native American Veterans Memorial at the National Museum of the American Indian, for his guidance on the project and for his contribution, “You Don’t Live Here Anymore.” And to student consultant William Albea at the University of Wisconsin LaCrosse, contributor to the Catalyst literary journal, whose ear for a suspenseful tale guided us throughout.
—The Editors
“Rock Baby”: This story was based on a summary of the Kawaiisu tale in “The Supernatural World of the Kawaiisu,” by Maurice Zigmond, 1977, in Flowers of the Wind: Papers on Ritual, Myth, and Symbolism in California and the Southwest, Thomas C. Blackburn, ed., pp. 59–95, Ballena Press Anthropological Papers, Socorro, New Mexico, out of print, but now at Open Library, at https://openlibrary.org/publishers/Ballena_Press.
“The Lost Hunters”: This story, accessed through native-languages.org, was told to anthropologists at the University of Maine by Mrs. Solomon, on Nov. 14, 1962, and published in the University of Maine Folk Life Center collection Northeast Folklore, Vol. VI, “Malecite and Passamaquoddy Tales,” Edward D. Ives, ed., Northeast Folklore Society, Department of English, University of Maine, Orono, 1964.
Books
Baumler, Ellen. Ghosts of the Last Best Place. The History Press, Charleston, South Carolina, 2016.
Bond, Ruskin. Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories. Penguin Books, New York, 1993.
Bruchac, Joseph. When the Chenoo Howls: Native Tales of Terror. Walker and Company, New York, 1998.
Bruchac, Joseph and Sally Wern Comport (Illus.). Whisper in the Dark. HarperCollins, New York, 2009.
Bruchac, Joseph. Skeleton Man and The Re
turn of Skeleton Man, HarperCollins, 2006.
Esparza, Lupe. Haunting Stories: Native American Tales on Reservations and Rural Areas. Independent, 2018.
Fourstar, Jerome. Ghost Stories: The Indian Reading Series: Legends and Stories of the Northwest. Pacific Northwest Indian Program, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, Portland, Oregon, 1978.
Garcez, Antonio R. American Indian Ghost Stories of the West. Red Rabbit Press, Moriarty, New Mexico, 2010.
Gideon, Amos, and Darren Zenko. Native American Ghost Stories. Lone Pine Publishing International, Auburn, Washington, 2006.
Jennings, Joe. Ghosts of the Buffalo Wheel. Sam and Gunny K9 Adventure Series. Independent, 2018.
Millman, Lawrence, and Timothy White. A Kayak Full of Ghosts: Eskimo Folk Tales. International Folk Tales. Interlink Books, Northampton, Massachusetts, 2004.
Mullins, G. W., and C. L. Hause (Illus.). Ghosts, Spirits, and the Afterlife in Native American Indian Mythology and Folklore. Light of the Moon Publishing, Colorado, 2019.
Quinn, Drake. Campfire Stories for Kids: A Collection of Scary and Humorous Camp Fire Tales. Hope Books, 2019.
Websites
First People of America and Canada–Turtle Island
firstpeople.us
Indigenous Peoples Literature
indigenouspeople.net
Native Languages of the Americas
native-languages.org
Small Town Myths
smalltownmyths.com
Welcome to the Nest of the Snow Owl
snowwowl.com
Former Chairman of the Ponca Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma and member of the Producers Guild of America, Dan SaSuWeh Jones is a filmmaker who has produced work for Sesame Street, NBC, TBS, and other national and international networks. He worked as an honorary Imagineer and consultant for the Walt Disney Company’s Disney America theme park and as a field producer for the television miniseries 500 Nations, produced by Kevin Costner. As a bronze sculptor, he was a finalist in the competition for the National Native American Veterans Memorial at the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall in Washington DC. He holds a seat in the House of Warriors, a traditional Ponca Warrior Society. He was storytelling author and consultant for National Geographic Encyclopedia of the American Indian History and Culture.
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