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For the uninformed the wendigo is a native American legend of tall pale humanoid creatures that posses the capability to mimic human speech and that primarily hunt people. According to legend a wendigo is created when a person resorts to cannibalism, from there their humanity is lost and they suffer an unrelenting craving for human flesh. (This is different from skinwalkers which are people who voluntarily allow spirits to posses them and who require training to skinwalk.)

Now of course I'm not going to try to argue that wendigo are literally people who resorted to cannibalism in the present and transformed to hideous monsters in the process. Instead I think they might be a sub species of human who have been living underground for millennia likely driven deep into caves because of some extinction level natural disaster, possibly the younger dryas impact event.

A lot of missing persons cases in national parks have a lot of things in common. People disappear randomly and without a trace, often no body is ever recovered but clothing and possessions may be found. Often these disappearances occur in areas with known cave systems. When people are recovered alive they're almost exclusively children who offer tales of "bear men" or similar who stole them and took care of them. These children are very often found in places they could not have reached on their own such as the tops of cliffs or deep in swamps and they're too young to reliably recount what happened to them.

Inhabiting caves would be a very good way to avoid detection since we don't even have information on many of the caves out there. Only a handful have been explored by people and we only have information about the caves that people have emerged from. There are many incidents where people go to uncharted caves and completely disappear (Kenny Veach and his M-cave for example.) You also have places like the Nahanni Valley where there are hundreds of caves covering the walls of the valley and where people routinely wind up being found with their heads missing. The natives in that area specifically have a lot of superstition and legends about the valley.

Just a thought, discuss