I thought I'd share a link to a story about the kushtaka myth in my part of the country.

http://esoterx.com/2013/01/09/the-fe...-its-an-otter/

I know people who have seen the kushtaka so you always wonder what's out there. I for one have gone into parts of this area that are CREEPY for no reason and then found out later it's an area where the kushtaka are.

Have a creepy Sunday!!

Very interesting!

Oh wow, I love these kinds of shape-shifter myths.
How did the people you know describe the kushtaka they saw?

That they look identical to real people that they know....that the "people" they saw wouldn't come out of the forest and beckoned them to come into the forest urgently...that the "people" caused the dog with them to growl and act scared yet protective at the same time...that the "people" wouldn't come close to the dog

one experience by someone I know recounts how he was walking one afternoon on a village road by himself...he was a teenager...and he saw his older brother come to the edge of the forest and urgently beckon him to come into the forest with him....his brother even held up a big baggie of marijuana to entice him into the forest...but he got creeped out and made an excuse to leave and go back and when he got home, just a short ways away, he told his mom and it turns out his brother had been in the shower the whole time this was happening...weird!!

Well if they're real then I'm glad I don't live there!!

one of the best books I've read is called "Raven Stole the Moon" by Garth Stein and is a fictional story of one woman's venture into the kushtaka world in search of her son who drowned at sea

and the article says it's really spelled kooshdakhaa which I think is right based on the spelling of other names around here....we have an alternative school named Yahkoosge Dakahidi and a middle school named Dzantiki Hidi lol

"Not cool. Bad otter"...

Hahahaha! I loved that!
We have a folklore here about "the Jersey Devil". The story is the Leeds family cursed their 13 child and it was born as a devil and ran off and still lives in the pine barens in NJ. The stories aren't clear what he does...scares people I guess, but I don't think he steals people lol..And there's always jersey devil sightings...and out hockey team is the devils!
I'm a skeptic though and I don't believe in anything like that but the history behind these types of stories are fascinating. In our case, the Leeds family really existed and their graves are down south, I've been to them. But the general idea is that the Leeds mother gave birth to a severely physically deformed child and it a time of ignorance stories came out of it. ( circa 1800s I think was when this all went down)