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What’s the newest creepy trend on TikTok? Skinwalkers In October, the Navajo witches became quite popular on the video-sharing app Halloween has come and gone, but spooky stories about things that go bump in the night linger on ... especially on TikTok. One of the most recent hashtags to pick up steam on the video-sharing social network is #skinwalker.
attention-starved Gen Z-ers. (We’re going to take a shot in the dark and suggest that if you see something weird in a cornfield in Nebraska, it’s not a skinwalker.) Soto, on the other hand, seems pretty
In Navajo culture, skinwalkers are a kind of witch-like people who can turn into or disguise themselves as animals. Yee naaldlooshii, which directly translates to “with it, he goes on all fours,” are said to travel in secret and harm the innocent. Traditionally, Navajos don’t discuss them or other types of witchcraft with non-Navajos. Nevertheless, when John Soto — @ that1cowboy on TikTok – posted a video of a supposed encounter with one on Oct. 3, it went viral. (As of our writing, it had been viewed 7.7 million times.) In the video, Soto is riding a horse down a dirt road at sunset. Birds perch on some nearby trees and Soto looks around. As he approaches an intersection, someone (or something) off-camera
convinced that a mysterious force is haunting him. He had a Navajo and Apache upbringing, and his ranch looks to be somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona – he definitely has javelinas on his property. But he told Dazed magazine that the noises he has heard could with the voice of a woman or child says, “Hey.” This spooks the heck out of the horse which spins around as if to get out of there. And the video ends. Soto posted a number of videos in which he talks about his suspicion that there is a skinwalker on his property, but the Oct. 3 video is the first one in which it makes an appearance, so to speak, and that seems to have made all the differ-
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ence. Since then, hundreds of videos have been posted with the hashtag, by both Navajo and non-Navajo users, accounting for over 39 million views of videos with the hashtag.
not be, as commenters have suggested,
That latter group is pretty far-ranging, and their videos are usually just vaguely eerie. They describe random sounds at night; shadowy, barely-seen things behind rocks and trees in the wilderness; and finding dubious evidence of creatures outdoors. If you switched out #skinwalker with #bigfoot, #skunkape, #werewolf, #ghost, or #thealienfromSignsbyMNightShyamalan, the videos would be otherwise completely unchanged.
things retreating to the outskirts of his
It seems pretty plausible that many of the video-makers are just clout-chasing, From page 7
contact lens that records human sight to replicate memories, to do something nefarious. • “Ruthless Souls,” directed by Madison Thomas, follows Jackie as she grieves the death of her partner, Toni, resulting from a complication during gender-affirming surgery. This process is complicated, however, as her pillars of support break up at the worst time possible. We’re also interested in “Rez Dogs,” directed by Steven Tallas, which takes place on the Navajo Nation. In it, a group of friends tries to find a better life for themselves but encounters adversity along the way. Speaking of the Durango Independent Film Festival and indigenous films, by the way, DIFF has teamed up with the Du-
goats or mountain lions because they don’t live anywhere near him. He also said that he had a medicine man bless his home, which resulted in the creepy property. The evil presence still has it in for him, though, and may be after his newborn baby. Will the rise in skinwalker videos on TikTok lead to incontrovertible evidence that they exist, or will the trend amount to little more than a mild form of cultural appropriation among ghost-story loving teens? Only time — and social media — will tell. —— Nick Gonzales rango Farmers Market to provide a free online screening of the documentary “Gather” from Nov. 1 through 15. It takes viewers to tribal communities where members are actively working on Native food sovereignty issues, and a link and password can be found on the festival’s website at durangofilm.org/native-american-heritage-month-celebration. Oh ... and if you’re dead set on attending a film festival in person this November, you’re in luck. Head to Florida, where temperatures are still in the 80s (or at least the high 70s). The Key West Film Festival is having all of its screenings at outdoor venues where people can socially distance across the island. —— Nick Gonzales
