In Episode 434, Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger explore the forests of Maine searching for the Skudakumooch, a cannibalistic ghost witch from Wabanaki legend. This dark and scary story endures through the ages where so many other legends have been lost.
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CREDITS:
Produced and hosted by: Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger
Edited by: Ray Auger
Theme Music by: John Judd
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
*A note on the text: Please forgive punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. Like us, the transcripts ain’t perfect.
[HIKING THROUGH THE WOODS]
RAY: This is the second week in a row we find ourselves hiking through the woods of New England.
JEFF: It is. This time we’re in central Maine. Not terribly far from Mt. Katahdin.
RAY: The last time we were on Katahdin we were searching for a winged creature called the Pamola.
JEFF: That’s right! The Pamola guards the top of the mountain. This time we’re not climbing up. We’re exploring the surrounding forest instead.
RAY: Got it.
JEFF: What we’re looking for is something dark and scary, Ray.
RAY: Ohhh are we hunting some kind of different monster?
JEFF: I’m not sure what you call this one, other than bone-chilling. We’re searching for something ancient. We’re looking for a Wabanaki ghost witch they call… Skudakumooch.
[INTRO]
JEFF: I’m Jeff Belanger. Welcome to Episode 434 of the New England Legends podcast.
RAY: And I’m Ray Auger. Thanks for joining us on our mission to chronicle every legend in New England one story at a time. We can’t do it without you! That’s where we get so many story leads about ghosts, monsters, UFOs, roadside oddities, and more. Please reach out to us anytime through our website with your story ideas. We love hearing from you.
JEFF: Also, check out the latest issue of my Shadow Zine. Issue 11! I wrote this issue, and it’s called Time Travel. From time slips to paradoxes, I ask: Can time travel explain the paranormal? You can find this and all of the back issues at shadowzine.com
RAY: We’ll go searching for the ghost witch of Maine right after these words from our sponsor.
SPONSOR
[HIKING IN WOODS]
RAY: So we’re looking for a ghostly witch called a Skudakumooch?
JEFF: We are. This one is dark and frightening. It’s the stuff of horror movies. A Skudakumooch is an evil, undead being who hunts the living. We’re pulling this one from ancient Wabanaki legends.
RAY: Here’s some background as to where we are in Maine near Mt. Katahdin. There have been people living here for roughly 12,000 years. The Wabanaki Confederacy is actually a group of First Nations people who lived in what is now Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Brunswick, Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and parts of Quebec. The Confederacy was comprised of the Abenaki, Maliseet, and Micmac, just to name a few.
JEFF: That’s thousands of years of people witnessing all manner of mysteries and strangeness.
RAY: A lot of that history and lore has been lost because their stories were passed down through oral traditions. There’s not much for a written record. A lot of legends are gone forever.
JEFF: Which makes what survived even more interesting. A legend endures because people keep it around. They see something they don’t understand. Something that falls outside of how they thought the world is supposed to operate, and they assign a label to it. Their best guess. Which makes the legend of the Skudakumooch, or ghost witch, even more interesting. This one survived. Maybe because it touches on the darkest and most sinister part of humanity. Let’s head way back on this one, and explore the Skudakumooch.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: It’s the summer season here in the land of the Wabanaki people. The year is 1327. We’re standing in the forest near the southeast slope of the big mountain. This is a forest most people avoid because they say it’s cursed.
JEFF: The story passed around is that there was a mean and nasty sorcerer who lived not too far from here. When he finally died of old age, his corpse was brought deep into the woods and placed in the crux of some tree branches where the birds and critters could pick his flesh clean.
[FAINT CRY IN THE DISTANCE]
JEFF: Ever since then, people believe these woods are haunted and cursed. It’s a place to be avoided.
[WALKING IN WOODS]
RAY: While locals know these woods hide something sinister, those passing through have not heard the legends. We’re walking with a young married couple as they head east through the forest near the big mountain.
RAY: Something is bothering the young woman.
JEFF: She keeps looking over her shoulder. Something has her uncomfortable.
RAY: Yeah. She looks nervous.
JEFF: The young husband dismisses her fears. He feels like she’s just a bit jumpy being in an unknown place.
RAY: The woman doesn’t see it that way, though. She’s scared. Still, without much choice, the couple press on eastward.
[WALKING IN WOODS]
JEFF: Pretty soon, both of them see darting shadows flitting around the tree branches above. Being so far in the woods, and with the sun setting, they have little choice but to make camp for the night.
[CRACKLING FIRE]
JEFF: The couple make a small fire, and lie down on a bed of ferns.
[CRACKLING FIRE]
RAY: The woman can’t sleep. She’s too nervous. She protests to her partner, but he waves her off. After all, there’s not much they can do before morning. The woman tries to sleep, but she can’t. Soon, the man dozes off to sleep as the woman cowers on her side watching the dark woods around them.
[CHEWING SOUND]
RAY: Sometime in the night, the woman hears a strange chewing noise. Their small fire died out hours go. She’s petrified. But there’s nothing she can do but shiver in fear and wait for the sun to rise.
JEFF: As the sun rises and light seeps back into the world, the woman rolls over to see…
[WOMAN SCREAMS]
JEFF/RAY: Oh my God!
JEFF: The man’s face and the left side of his body have been eaten away. He’s a bloody, oozing pulp…
RAY: (INTERRUPTING) It looks like his heart is gone! Like it’s been ripped out of his chest!
[WOMANS SCREAM FADES]
[RUNNING THROUGH WOODS]
JEFF: The terrified woman runs east as fast as she can. She has no idea where to run to, but she wants to get far away from the horror scene she woke up to.
[RUNNING THROUGH WOODS]
RAY: The woman eventually stumbles upon a small group of Wabanaki people. After explaining what happened, they’re suspicious that maybe this woman murdered her husband. Once she calms down, they agree to return with her to see the body.
[WALKING THROUGH THE WOODS]
RAY: When the group arrives at the husband’s half-eaten corpse, they’re shocked. And now find themselves nervously looking around for darting shadows and monsters.
JEFF: They’re especially frightened because they’ve heard the stories about these woods being haunted and cursed. And one of the Wabanaki is old enough to remember the sorcerer’s body being placed in a tree nearby.
RAY: The group are frightened. There’s a bloody horror scene on the ground in front of them. They nervously look at one another.
JEFF: Skudakumooch. One Wabanaki says it in almost a whisper. The others were thinking it, but he said it. An undead ghost witch who eats human flesh. They weren’t certain before, but now it’s clear. That old sorcerer’s body should have been burned, not left in a tree.
RAY: It’s a mistake they don’t intend to repeat. They begin to gather wood for a fire. They’re going to burn what’s left of this man’s half-eaten corpse in the hopes they can either break the Skudakumooch spell, or at the very least prevent this man from also becoming an undead monster.
[FIRE STARTS TO CRACKLE]
JEFF: The group watches as the flames consume the body in front of them. Once they’re satisfied the half-eaten corpse has been destroyed, they head east again toward their village. They vow to tell others these woods must be avoided in case the fire didn’t break the curse. And that brings us back to today.
[TRANSITION]
JEFF: We’ll never know whether the curse was broken or not. After enough time drifts by, and the stories are no longer passed down to the next in line, some of the details and locations were lost to time.
RAY: Kind of like the telephone game we played as young kids where one kid whispers the story to the next and so on. By the last person, it sounds nothing like the original.
JEFF: True, but sometimes a nugget or main point of the original survives all the way around the room. In this case, a cannibalistic ghost witch survived the ages. That’s kind of incredible considering how many other legends were lost. Why did this one survive?
RAY: Maybe someone saw something—or some people continued to see something in the woods that they couldn’t describe with any other word?
JEFF: Maybe. Still, the Skudakumooch is the stuff of horror films, and maybe that’s why it endures. It touches on the darkest and most sinister of human fears—an evil person who can’t die, who feeds on the living literally by eating them, and who can turn others into another of these soulless ghostly monsters.
[OUTTRO]
RAY: And that takes us to After the Legend where we take a deeper dive into this week’s story and sometimes we veer off course.
JEFF: After the Legend is brought to you by our patreon patrons! We couldn’t do this without them. They kick in just $3 bucks per month and for that they get early ad-free access to new episodes, plus bonus episodes and content that no one else gets to hear. And they get to help us continue to grow and find new stories. We appreciate this group of insiders. Just head over to patreon.com/newenglandlegends to sign up.
To see some pictures related to this week’s story, click on the link in our episode description, or go to our website and click on Episode 434.
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We’d like to thank our sponsors, our patreon patrons, and our theme music is by John Judd.
Until next time… stay legendary.