Chenoo

The Chenoo are cannibalistic ice giants from Algonquin folklore that serve as a parallel to the Wendigo, often described as former humans who were corrupted by dark magic and cursed to consume human flesh. These entities are characterized by their immense size, which increases with their hunger, and their horrifying appearance: they possess wolfish eyes and sharp fangs that remain visible because they have gnawed away their own lips and skin in their madness. Their internal bodies burn with an excruciating heat that forces them to seek refuge in the snow, and they can only be truly defeated by destroying their icy heart through specific methods such as tricking them into eating salt, forcing them to overeat until they vomit the ice, or firing seven arrows into their chest.

Folklore highlights the duality of these creatures, as seen in the story of The Girl and the Chenoo, where a monster is treated with familial kindness and eventually uses a sweat lodge to cough up its icy core and return to a human state. While some accounts by Charles Godfrey Leland introduce themes of redemption and baptism after a Chenoo defends humans from its own kind, other legends like the Girl-Chenoo depict the transformation as a tragic curse of revenge where the victim chooses death over becoming a predator.