right now i use two propdr 46 inch skinny’s as my set up. i enjoy the lamps themselves and the stands are okay. i’ve been using them for like 4-5 years now but now i want to look into some other brands. any recommendations?
i’m watching his old videos and he would mention here and there a big ww2 project he was going to release.
I’m going to preface this by explaining that this story is not mine - I’m just the one who wrote it all down. I’m not Diné (the actual name of the Navajo, and this is how I will refer to them from here on out), never lived on a reservation, and know very little about their folklore. I actually was a skeptic in all things paranormal for a really long time until something happened to me a few years ago that made a believer out of me. Nothing to do with skinwalkers or things of that nature, but it definitely made me at least believe in ghosts.
I will also be releasing this parts for easier reading (it’s a long one).
This story was told to me by my Diné friend Sam (name changed for his privacy), and comes from his own experience. I met Sam on a photography gig a few years after graduating art school and we connected through our shared interest in the paranormal. We would swap stories about our personal paranormal experiences (well, I only have one experience, so it wasn’t nearly as reciprocal), and what I’m about to tell you is probably the most memorable of his. All names have been changed at Sam’s request for privacy, and I’m using an alt account. Sam also gave me permission to write this and fully cooperated with me as I put this together. According to him, he’s too lazy and I have too much time on my hands, so he was cool with me putting this together.
Sam is full-blooded Diné. His mother and father grew up in the Nation near New Mexico. They had Sam out of wedlock, at a very young age, and broke up a few years after he was born. His mother moved to Illinois with his now-stepfather, who is white and catholic. Sam grew up in a Chicago suburb and lived there most of his childhood and teenage years. He would visit his dad for a couple weeks a few times a year, but never really spent a prolonged amount of time out on the reservation.
It was at 20 that Sam moved in with his dad on “the rez” to “get a better understanding of my heritage” as he said it, and stayed there til he was about 24. He was very interested in his Diné heritage, especially when he started developing his art practice as a painter and photographer. As he spent more and more time on the rez, he grew a deep interest in Diné superstition, I guess as a way to connect to his culture that he felt he didn’t do enough to be a part of in his childhood and teenage years, since he essentially assimilated into midwestern, suburban, white culture due to his mother and stepdad.
While on the rez, he made friends with and eventually dated a girl whom we’ll call Jess who had fully grown up on the rez. She was a little older than Sam and got her teaching degree in another state before coming back to the rez to teach high school. She was basically agnostic (more on that in a bit), but had a very superstitious family. In fact, her great uncle, whom we’ll call John, was a medicine man. I’m not super familiar with the details surrounding this practice and Sam didn’t go into a ton of detail in regards to this either. But basically, he was a very respected elder, and was extremely superstitious. He often spoke of Diné folklore, creatures, magic, etc, and took it all very seriously.
John was pretty old and often needed help around his property, so Sam was often over there helping him out with odd jobs. Sam felt weird taking money from the old man, especially since Sam already had a part time job as an art teacher and sold his paintings and photos in Santa Fe art markets for pretty good money. So as payment, Sam would ask John to share some of his knowledge with him. It was Sam’s way of connecting to his heritage, he told me. They’d talk for an hour or two every night that Sam came over to help. Sam would basically grill him on every random, Diné-related thing under the sun and would, generally, get an earful about it.
Except when it came to one specific topic: “yee naaldlooshii”.
Sam, having spent most of his childhood with his mom and stepdad off the rez, didn’t have the same outlook on skinwalkers that other Diné did; the whole “don’t speak of them” thing wasn’t something he subscribed to, mainly because a.) Sam grew up in the Chicago area where no skinwalkers would be around anyway and b.) he was raised catholic, and didn’t believe in Diné superstitions. He was pretty interested in this part of Diné lore because of how common skinwalkers were in “creepypasta”, on boards like /x/ and, of course, reddit.
So naturally, his interest in them disturbed John, and he generally shut down any discussion of them.
When he brought this up to Jess, she got visibly upset and asked him to never speak of them to her or her great-uncle ever again. This was weird to Sam, since Jess wasn’t superstitious, or even religious for that matter. He thought his agnostic girlfriend wouldn’t be so weird about these things. She explained to Sam that, despite her general agnosticism, that was one thing she knew was real, because she and other members of her family had experiences.
She told him a very similar story to the types you’ll see posted online: late at night on the rez, driving home, and seeing what you think is a coyote or a sheep following you at an alarming speed, only to, upon closer inspection, see what appears to be human underneath animal skin, or a half-man, half-coyote kind of creature. This happened to Jess when she was a little girl, while being driven home by her father. Great-uncle John came and performed some sort of protection/cleansing ritual that they thought protected them, at least for a few years.
It wasn’t until Jess moved back after getting her degree did she encounter one again, this time running along the rooftops of some homes and buildings in town. She thought somehow someone’s dog got up on their roof, but it would then get on two legs and jump to the next building. After landing, it would perch up there, sitting cross-legged, staring her down with yellow eyes. She sped home so fast she got pulled over by the tribal police. When she explained what she saw and why she was speeding, the officer shushed her, tore up the ticket he was writing, and told her to get her ass home. Uncle John came by again and performed a ritual. Jess said that according to John, though, the creature wasn’t after her, and was caught in the act of stalking someone else. That made it “set its eyes upon her”, so she was to be extra cautious, and - her words - “shut the fuck up about them forever”. She only told Sam all of this to keep the things off her and her family. But wouldn’t you know it, that just made him more interested! And who could blame him, really?
It seems as though Sam kind of whittled down John’s resolve on the issue, because eventually, the old man budged a little bit. He revealed to Sam a few bits and pieces of information over the years. I’m just going to copy and paste from some instagram DM’s he sent me while I put this whole story together. Note that the only changes I have made to his messages were the names of those involved. Also, in case it isn’t obvious, Sam abbreviates “skinwalker” to “sw”.
“the 1st thing john told me about sw was that they cant actually read minds like they say in the stories and stuff.
it was basically what youd call an old wives tale because they didnt want their kids talking about that shit and spreading the idea that this was something ppl could do.
i think they wanted the practice of being sw to die out completely, so they thought by forbiding ppl from talking about it nobody would be curious enough to try out black magic and shit. i think because diné are so steeped in oral traditions that they basically believed if enough ppl stop talking about a thing it dies forever. but you know you cant tell ppl not to talk about something, lol. so they said that if you talk about sw it will make them interested in you and seek you out. it was just them trying to scare kids.
the other thing is that they are just regular ppl not monsters. they dont have any special powers. just knew a lot about certain things that a lot of us dont. like how there are things you know how to do as a video guy [author’s note: I’m a videographer by trade] that regular ppl whove never done it dont. like when you show them a really cool edit you did or shots you pulled off and they’re woah how did you do that? same kinda stuff
they just spent a lot of time learning about stuff that makes them able to do what they do.
they studied animals and how they move, making suits, studied poisons, hallucinogens, shit like that. theyre medicine men just like john. in fact a lot of them are openly “good” medicine men in the community and nobody knows they practice this stuff. its just another form of their medicine men stuff but they use it for ppl who want to harm or scare others. Like they get hired to fuck with ppl
john told me this one story about a close friend who was also a medicine man in the tuba city area that had an asshole in the neighborhood who kept bitching about his property lines or something like that.
he was building a fence and there was a big fuss about it.
the guy harassed the shit outta his next door neighbor because of it but the neighbor knew where his land started and ended and so didnt budge. eventually some weird shit started to go down. the asshole’s neighbor was talking about how there was a gigantic coyote in his backyard that would look in the windows at night and scare the shit out of him and his gf.
He would hang in his backyard with a shotgun around sundown which ofc weirded out everyone in the neighborhood and a lot of folx were saying that he was mentally unstable. But then ppl in the neighborhood started hearing fucked up noises and someone saw the coyote stand on its hind legs and look in the windows. then one day the guys girlfriend drove him to the emergency room because he was having a really bad trip apparently, like hallucinating and talking about this coyote man who was threatening to kill him. john doesnt know what he was on if it was like peyote or something. he came down a few hours later and a lot of ppl in town laughed it off but johns friend and a few other ppl in the neighborhood like i assume the ones who actually saw the coyote man knew that it was probably a skinwalker fucking with him.
john said that sw know a lot about hallucinogens, how to get the results they want from them, and how to administer them to their victims without them knowing. like they know so much about the compounds and shit that they know exactly how it will affect you and how to fuck with you when you’re on them.
so johns friend came by to bless the place and perform a ritual and the weird shit stopped. because skinwalkers are medicine men themselves they also believe in the power of the rituals that are used against them. thats how i would say these things work. Nothing super magical or paranormal about it, they just have strong beliefs and know not to fuck with certain shit.
anywho so he thinks that the asshole neighbor sicced a sw on him to get him to move outta town or something like that.
the last thing john told me for a really long time was about how sw were actually good guys at one time, they created that whole practice to fuck with the colonizers. they protected other diné and scared away white ppl trying to take land and assault ppl and stuff. but some started using the practice for their own gain and once the treaties were signed and we got land back and all that they just started exclusively using it to do bad stuff to other diné.”
After this, John basically put a kibosh on skinwalker talk. Sam told me he thought it was weird that John didn’t want to talk about them. After all, John said it himself that skinwalkers can’t read minds and talking about them didn’t draw their attention to you. As Sam said, it’s an old wive’s tale. He even told this to Jess but she shot him down. She actually kind of insulted him apparently, telling Sam that he’s not culturally a Diné so he wouldn’t understand and him trying to get this deep into skinwalker stuff was offensive their heritage. Basically he was culturally a white boy and should shut the fuck up. Now, I know some reactionary types on the internet would probably take offense to this, but it’s not unfounded. How would you like it if some cultural outsider came into your town and started grilling you about your long held beliefs while directly contradicting them?
And that’s part 1! Will be posting 2 shortly (hopefully tomorrow!). That part will begin to cover some more elements of skinwalker lore that I thought was a lot more interesting than what John initially let on.