Supernatural the book of monsters, demons, spirits and ghouls

Wendigo, part 1

Wendigo stories break down into two categories. In one, the wendigo is created when a proud warrior trades his soul for the power to destroy a threat to his tribe. Once the threat is gone, he is driven into the wilderness and vanishes. In the other, the wendigo slowly loses its humanity through some combination of dark magic and cannibalism. In either case, the end result is one fearsome monster.
Cryptozoologists have seized on the wendigo legends as evidence for everything from Sasquatch to the survival of D. B. Cooper, and although they're wrong-don't get us started on cryptozoologists-there is some variation in the appearance of individual wendigo. They don't look like Bigfoot. More like a yeti, maybe, that's eaten nothing but snow since 1850. They're typically larger than a human, but not too much, and skeletally thin. Often, especially in the north country, they are missing some of the body parts that are most vulnerable to frostbite: toes and parts of the ears and nose. Sometimes they're covered in matted white fur, and other descriptions characterize them as practically hairless. What all of the descriptions have in common is inhumanly long teeth, claws instead of fingernails, and glowing eyes.
Often they hunt by simply running down their prey, but sometimes there's a difference approach, one that for our money says that the wendigo enjoys what it does. A lone traveler in the forest starts to hear things, say. He looks around and never quite sees anything, except every once in a while he catches a glimpse of something moving fast out of the corner of his eyes. After a while all of these glimpses add up, and maybe the wendigo gives him a growl to get things going a little faster. The traveler snaps at last and begins to run, and then the wendigo pounces.
They don't have to do it that way. Wendigo are stronger and faster than any human alive and can kill you before you know they're in the same time zone. They do it that way because they like to.
And if you survive an encounter with a wendigo, don't think you're out of the woods yet (ha). There's plenty of lore claiming that the wendigo can possess the spirits of hunters, jumping bodies, perhaps, when its own has started to break down.
So how do you kill them? Part of the final transformation from human to wendigo is the heart changing into pure ice. Shatter that icy heart with a blade of iron or silver, and you kill the wendigo.
Maybe. The only way to be sure is to cut its body parts. Us Winchesters, we're of the opinion that it never hurts to burn them, too.