![]() Suddenly, people from all across the country – who lived far from the desert and were certainly not Native American – confidently began sharing their knowledge and experiences with skinwalkers. Soto’s hope in sharing the videos was to bring awareness to the beliefs of his Navajo and Apache upbringing, and has found how many people accept his story as reassuring, but never could have predicted just how fascinated people became and how quickly interest spread. “I can just tell by the sounds of whatever is calling me out that it’s not right, like it wants to do wrong to me.” Since then, the disturbing sounds have not crossed the protective barrier, but he’s been warned that the skinwalker still wants something from him, perhaps his newborn baby. After his horses got mysterious injuries, his chickens were killed but not eaten, and the skin of a javelina was found near his house, Soto brought in his local medicine man to bless his home. “But there’s also ones who are saying it’s fake, and they trash talk Native American beliefs.” Commenters wave the sounds away as the cries of goats or mountain lions, but in Soto’s case, those kinds of animals don’t live near his property, and he hasn’t found any signs of harmless human pranksters. “Most of the reactions on TikTok have been positive,” Soto says. The skinwalker is a deeply terrifying figure for Indigenous peoples, and their threat is taken very seriously, but the legend isn’t always treated with respect in this wave of videos. It’s often personal, akin to having a hex put upon you, and they exist primarily on Native American reservations. They mimic sounds that might draw someone’s attention, like the voice of a loved one or a stranger that might be in trouble, in order to lure their defenseless victims to their death. Naomi ( a star of Indigenous social media subculture #NavajoTikTok, explains that a skinwalker is a “witch” – a close but inexact translation – that committed unspeakable acts to obtain the power to “change their shape into an animal in order to do harm”. The hashtag that was virtually nonexistent before, as far as social media numbers go, but skyrocketed in early October, leaving many people who did not grow up in the Southwest of the United States to wonder, “What the hell is a skinwalker?” Hundreds of videos of encounters with this mysterious creature, explainer videos about the folklore, and storytelling about previous run-ins with skinwalkers popped up in a matter of days, as Soto continued to occasionally update his now 350k followers. The video has 7.5 million likes on TikTok, and counting, and was the genesis of a veritable ‘skinwalker’ mania across social media. As he scans a cloud of vultures in the trees lining the road, we hear someone frantically call out, “Hey!” The horse stops, the voice cries out again, and the horse bolts in the opposite direction. John Soto ( on TikTok), has been speaking about possible encounters with a ‘skinwalker’ on his property for a few videos across several months now, but this is it – the first time he’s managed to record some evidence. Peering past a set of horse’s ears, we mosey down a dirt road just as the sun starts to sink in the sky. ![]()
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