🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº0555
ACTIVE
Yee naaldlooshii
In Diné (Navajo) belief the yee naaldlooshii is a person: a witch of what Clyde Kluckhohn called Witchery Way, a neighbour with a name.
Where and when was Yee naaldlooshii sighted?
- Location
- Navajo Nation, Arizona, United States
- Date sighted
- Unknown
- Coordinates
- 36.5, -109.5
- Last updated
LOCATION
What is Yee naaldlooshii?
Even the word is ordinary. In the Navajo-English Dictionary that Leon Wall compiled with the Navajo linguist William Morgan in 1958, yee is "with; by means of" and naaldlooshii is glossed "quadrupeds; animals; beasts; livestock", the everyday word for four-footed animals, livestock included. No candidate species has ever been put forward, because in the tradition there is nothing zoological to look for. The English word skinwalker is younger than the belief and can be dated. It is absent from the Franciscan Fathers' Navaho dictionary of 1910 and from Kluckhohn's Navaho Witchcraft (Harvard, 1944), which says were-animal throughout. By 1970 it was in ethnography, in quotation marks, in Mary Shepardson and Blodwen Hammond's The Navajo Mountain Community; in 1984 it gave its title to Margaret Brady's study of the stories Navajo children tell, and in 1986 to a Tony Hillerman bestseller. Most English speakers meet it through a ranch in Uintah County, Utah, in Ute country, about 340 km from the Navajo Nation. The 1996 newspaper reports that made the ranch famous never use the word: the name Skinwalker Ranch was fixed by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp's book of 2005, and in 2006 the Deseret Morning News still headlined the property as the "UFO ranch".
What is the history of Yee naaldlooshii?
The yee naaldlooshii is not an animal. In Diné (Navajo) belief it is a person: a witch, a neighbour, someone with a name.
The fullest field study remains Clyde Kluckhohn's Navaho Witchcraft, published as volume XXII, no. 2 of the Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, in 1944, and reissued by Beacon Press in 1962. Kluckhohn sorted the material into four headings — Witchery Way, Sorcery, Wizardry and Frenzy Witchcraft — and then, in a footnote, undercut his own scheme: "So far as 'conceptual category' is concerned, the category 'witchcraft' is probably the observer's and not a native category." The tidy fourfold table that circulates online is his filing system, and he said so.
His section three is headed "Witchery Way and Were-Animals", and it is there that the famous gloss appears, in a footnote, hedged twice: literally, "one who trots along here and there on all fours with it", where the "with it" "may possibly refer to the Witch's power, or, more plausibly perhaps, to the Witch's hide and 'outfit' in general." Both readings are his; neither is settled.
The second half of the name is an everyday word. In the Navajo–English Dictionary compiled by Leon Wall and William Morgan for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Window Rock in 1958 — Morgan was a Navajo translator and linguist — yee is "with; by means of", naaldloosh is "it is trotting about", and naaldlooshii is glossed "quadrupeds; animals; beasts; livestock". It is the ordinary word for four-footed animals, livestock included. The dictionary's word for a witch is a different one altogether: 'adilgashii, "witch", beside 'adigąsh, "witchcraft; to perform magic; to bewitch". That same witch word is already in the Franciscan Fathers' Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language of 1910, as 'adilgashi.
Working principally in the autumn of 1941, Kluckhohn used ninety-three informants in formal interviews and re-questioned a "check group" of twenty-five. Witches, he wrote, "are active primarily at night, roaming about at great speed in skins of wolf, coyote and other animals (bear, owl, desert fox, crow)", and he added that "this is one bit of witchcraft lore with which even the youngest Navaho is familiar." On the animals there was open disagreement, and the numbers are specific: "All agreed on wolf (almost invariably mentioned first) and coyote. Nine of the check group denied bear and eleven, owl. Only three would admit desert fox, and only one, crow." On initiation: "Killing a near relative, normally a sibling, is a part of the initiation into Witchery Way." On origin: "First Man and First Woman were the originators of Witchery Way, the beginnings of which are thus placed in the pre-emergence period."
He was equally explicit about why the record is thin. "The principal reason that so little is known of Navaho witchcraft is the extreme reluctance of the Indians to discuss the matter", he wrote; anyone known to have discussed it "is by that very fact open to suspicion" of being a witch. In his account the suspicion fell on the informant who talked. Diné writers state the same reluctance today: Noah Nez wrote in 2012 that witchcraft "is regarded as a taboo subject because it deals with concepts and objects surrounding death", and that Navajo people "are strictly prohibited from even speaking of such things". In 2020 Louise Tsinijinnie, speaking for Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation, told Vice that skinwalkers were not something many Navajo will discuss.
And there is a consequence that popular retellings drop entirely. Accusation killed people. Kluckhohn judged Richard Van Valkenburgh "undoubtedly right in considering witchcraft as a crime for which the Navaho administered capital punishment"; he interviewed nineteen people "widely rumored to be witches" and three who had actually been tried; he noted the shooting of a woman accused of being a were-wolf at Navajo Mountain about twenty years before he wrote. The best-known episode is the killing of some forty accused people in 1878. A. Lynn Allison, who named it the Navajo Witch Purge, read it as "a cultural response to the effects of colonialism on the Navajo way of life" in the destitute years after the Long Walk and Bosque Redondo, adding that "the killing of 'witches' was historically as much accepted among the Navajo as among the Europeans."
The English word skinwalker is younger than all of this. It is not in the 1910 dictionary and not in Kluckhohn, who writes were-animal and were-wolf from the first page to the last. By 1970 it was in ethnography, in quotation marks: Mary Shepardson and Blodwen Hammond's The Navajo Mountain Community (University of California Press, 1970) writes "One type of witch is a werewolf, or 'skinwalker.'" Margaret K. Brady's "Some Kind of Power": Navajo Children's Skinwalker Narratives (University of Utah Press, 1984, with a foreword by Barre Toelken) is a study of the stories Navajo children tell one another — which is exactly the material Kluckhohn said every Navajo child knows. Two years later Tony Hillerman put the word on the cover of a bestseller, Skinwalkers (Harper & Row, 1986), and it left the reservation for good.
Timeline: the documented record of Yee naaldlooshii
- 1878 Some forty Navajos accused of witchcraft are killed in the destitute years after the Long Walk and Bosque Redondo. A. Lynn Allison, who named the episode the Navajo Witch Purge, reads it as "a cultural response to the effects of colonialism on the Navajo way of life", noting that "the killing of 'witches' was historically as much accepted among the Navajo as among the Europeans".
- 1910 The Franciscan Fathers publish An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language, the standard reference of its day. It records the witch ('adilgashi) and discusses witchcraft in dozens of passages, and contains no occurrence of "skinwalker" or "skin walker" anywhere in its 1.2 MB of scanned text.
- 1944 (fieldwork mainly autumn 1941) Clyde Kluckhohn publishes Navaho Witchcraft with the Peabody Museum, Harvard. Ninety-three informants in formal interviews, a re-questioned "check group" of twenty-five, the footnoted literal gloss "one who trots along here and there on all fours with it", and an explicit warning that the very category "witchcraft" is "probably the observer's and not a native category". The word skinwalker does not appear in the book; he writes were-animal and were-wolf.
- 1958 Leon Wall and William Morgan, the latter a Navajo translator and linguist, publish the Navajo–English Dictionary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Window Rock. It glosses yee as "with; by means of" and naaldlooshii as "quadrupeds; animals; beasts; livestock", and gives a separate word for a witch, 'adilgashii. The compound "yee naaldlooshii" is not a headword in it, although the alphabetical run of yee- entries around the slot is intact and legible.
- 1984 Margaret K. Brady publishes "Some Kind of Power": Navajo Children's Skinwalker Narratives with the University of Utah Press, with a foreword by Barre Toelken. The English word was already in print in 1970, in Shepardson and Hammond's The Navajo Mountain Community; Brady's book is a study of children's storytelling — not of a candidate animal.
- 1986 Tony Hillerman's novel Skinwalkers (Harper & Row) puts the word on the cover of a bestseller, ten years before the Utah ranch enters the story. It later won the Anthony and Spur awards, and drew criticism from some Navajos for bringing attention to the subject.
- 30 June 1996 Zack Van Eyck's "Frequent fliers?" in the Deseret News tells the Sherman family's story from their 480-acre ranch near Fort Duchesne, Uintah County. It does not contain the word skinwalker, and does not mention the Ute or the Navajo.
- 20 October 1996 The same reporter covers Robert Bigelow's purchase of the ranch for around $200,000 in September 1996 and the work of his National Institute for Discovery Science, founded the previous October. Again there is no skinwalker in the text, and no Ute or Navajo.
- 2005 Colm Kelleher and George Knapp publish Hunt for the Skinwalker (Paraview Pocket Books). The book fixes the name in print, calls a nearby landform one "now known as Skinwalker Ridge", rests the Ute connection on retired schoolteacher Junior Hicks ("They say the ranch is 'in the path of the skinwalker'"), and cites Kluckhohn only through the popular volume The Navaho (1962), p. 180.
- Spring 2012 Noah Nez, a Diné writer, devotes his Native Skeptic column in Skeptical Briefs 22.1 to the subject, tracing the literature back through Kluckhohn, Washington Matthews and the 1878 purge, and concluding that most circulating information "does not provide any sort of real account for how these stories and their details came into being".
- 8 March 2016 After the subject is used as background material in a piece of commercial fantasy writing, Adrienne Keene publishes "Magic in North America Part 1: Ugh" at Native Appropriations, refusing to explain the belief and stating the boundary instead: "these are not things that need or should be discussed by outsiders." In the same year Robert Bigelow sells the Utah ranch to Brandon Fugal.
- 30 January 2020 MJ Banias asks the Ute Indian Tribe. Betsy Chapoose, its Cultural Rights and Protection Director, says the story of a Navajo curse on the ranch was "the first time I have ever heard that story", and adds: "It's true that the Ute and the Navajo have had a strained relationship over land ownership, but I've never heard any stories about a curse."
- 31 March 2020 The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch premieres on the History Channel, with Brandon Fugal revealing himself as the owner. A Navajo word is now the brand of a television series filmed in Ute country.
- October 2020 The word goes viral on TikTok after a video by John Soto (@that1cowboy), a Navajo and Apache rancher. Celeste Kaufman reports in Dazed on 30 October that Soto and others see it as raising awareness, while another Native TikToker refused to be interviewed at all, saying it was not right to talk about skinwalkers and that he was upset they were being treated as a trend. The community is not of one mind, and neither position is ours to summarise away.
Is there a rational explanation for Yee naaldlooshii?
Two different things get filed under this name, and only one of them is a question about evidence.
The first is a filing error, and it is ours. The yee naaldlooshii has never been a cryptid. There is no candidate species, no proposed animal, no body and no photograph, because in the tradition there is nothing zoological to look for: what is under the skin is a human being, and the entire logic of the belief is that he can be identified, named and dealt with. Wikipedia does not treat it as one either. On 25 September 2026 its English article is filed under witches in folklore, shapeshifters and Navajo mythology, its Spanish article under legendary creatures of the Indigenous peoples of North America, and neither the English "List of cryptids" nor the Spanish "Anexo:Críptidos" contains it, while the English list contains the mapinguari and the Spanish one the chupacabras. This site's own catalogue is where the conversion happened: the record arrived as the first of a batch of fifty imported entries that also filed Krampus, Kuchisake-onna, the gashadokuro, the penanggalan and Black Annis as cryptids — a batch in which "cryptid" plainly meant "any frightening being".
The second is a homonym: a ranch in Utah that the investigators' book of 2005 calls Skinwalker Ranch, and that has given its name to a History Channel series since 2020. That ranch is in Uintah County, bordering the Uintah and Ouray Reservation — Ute country — about 340 km (210 miles) north of the nearest edge of the Navajo Nation and about 515 km (320 miles) from Window Rock, its capital. The two founding newspaper reports do not contain the word. Zack Van Eyck's "Frequent fliers?" in the Deseret News of 30 June 1996 describes Terry and Gwen Sherman's 480-acre property near Fort Duchesne, three types of craft, seven cattle lost and no skinwalkers, and mentions neither Ute nor Navajo; his follow-up of 20 October 1996, on Robert Bigelow's purchase for about $200,000 and his National Institute for Discovery Science, is the same. Ten years on, reviewing the 2005 book, the same paper still headlined the property as the "UFO ranch" (Deseret Morning News, 22 April 2006).
The name is fixed by that book. Colm Kelleher and George Knapp's Hunt for the Skinwalker (Paraview Pocket Books, 2005) calls the family the Gormans and uses "Skinwalker Ranch" twenty-three times; it also reports that a nearby landform is "now known as Skinwalker Ridge", which is an admission that the toponymy came with the investigators. The book's authority for the Ute connection is a single quoted local, retired schoolteacher Junior Hicks: "The Utes don't mess with it. They have stories about the place that go back fifteen generations. They say the ranch is 'in the path of the skinwalker.'" The book cites Kluckhohn once, through the popular survey volume he wrote with Dorothea Leighton, The Navaho (Anchor, 1962), p. 180; a full-text search of the book returns no mention of Navaho Witchcraft.
And the tribe on whose doorstep the ranch sits was asked, eventually. Betsy Chapoose, Cultural Rights and Protection Director of the Ute Indian Tribe, told MJ Banias of Vice on 30 January 2020 that the story of a Navajo curse on the property was "the first time I have ever heard that story", and added: "It's true that the Ute and the Navajo have had a strained relationship over land ownership, but I've never heard any stories about a curse." She also said, in Banias's paraphrase, that people living near the ranch may have their own stories and traditions about the skinwalker, and that those ought to be respected. Louise Tsinijinnie, a spokesperson for Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation, told him that skinwalkers were not something many Navajo will discuss, and that she could not confirm that any curse had been placed on the land. The brand that reached History Channel in 2020 was fixed in print by two investigators who belonged to neither nation.
On the tradition itself, the sceptics on record include a Diné writer and some of Kluckhohn's own informants. Noah Nez, a Diné writer of the Native Skeptic column, went through the literature in Skeptical Briefs 22.1 (Spring 2012) and aimed his criticism at the "many self-published books and websites" on Navajo witchcraft, of which he wrote that "much of the information is obscure and does not provide any sort of real account for how these stories and their details came into being". Kluckhohn had recorded the same range in Navaho Witchcraft (1944): "A few Navahos also — even unacculturated ones — appear to be genuine sceptics."
Can you visit Yee naaldlooshii?
There is nothing to visit. The yee naaldlooshii belongs to Diné religious belief, and nothing in the Navajo Nation marks or exhibits it.
Asking about it carries a documented cost for the person asked. Kluckhohn recorded in 1944 that anyone known to have discussed the subject "is by that very fact open to suspicion" of witchcraft. Noah Nez wrote in Skeptical Briefs in 2012 that "Navajo people are strictly prohibited from even speaking of such things". Adrienne Keene wrote at Native Appropriations on 8 March 2016 that "these are not things that need or should be discussed by outsiders".
The Utah property that carries the name in English has a separate file on this site, skinwalker-ranch. It is fenced private land closed to the public, in Uintah County, about 340 km (210 miles) from the nearest edge of the Navajo Nation.
The Navajo Nation is a sovereign nation of some 71,000 km² (27,000 square miles) in the Four Corners region. It has its own government and its own police force, and it publishes its own visitor rules. Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation states that all areas of the Nation are closed to non-Navajos without a valid camping, hiking or backcountry permit issued by that department, that the camping fee is $15 per person per night, and that the Backcountry Use Permit carries a separate per-person fee set at each tribal park. Alcohol and illegal drugs are prohibited across the whole Nation. Firearms are prohibited under Navajo Tribal Code Title 17, Section 1451. Commercial photography and filming require a permit, and ascending Navajo Mountain is forbidden; the scattering of cremated remains is "STRICTLY Prohibited on Navajo Tribal Park lands".
Sources consulted
- Clyde Kluckhohn, «Navaho Witchcraft» — Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, vol. XXII, no. 2 (reissued by Beacon Press, 1962), 1944 book
- Leon Wall and William Morgan, «Navajo–English Dictionary» — U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Branch of Education, Window Rock, Arizona, 1958 book
- Franciscan Fathers, St Michaels, Arizona, «An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language» — The Franciscan Fathers, 1910 book
- Margaret K. Brady (foreword by Barre Toelken), «"Some Kind of Power": Navajo Children's Skinwalker Narratives» — University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 1984 book
- Tony Hillerman, «Skinwalkers» — Harper & Row, New York, 1986 book
- Zack Van Eyck, «Frequent fliers?» — Deseret News, 1996 newspaper archive
- Zack Van Eyck, «Millionaire leads quest for UFO data» — Deseret News, 1996 newspaper archive
- Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp, «Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah» — Paraview Pocket Books / Simon & Schuster, New York, 2005 book
- Noah Nez, «Skinwalkers (Native Skeptic column)» — Skeptical Briefs, vol. 22, no. 1 (Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), 2012 newspaper archive
- Adrienne Keene, «Magic in North America Part 1: Ugh» — Native Appropriations, 2016 web
- MJ Banias, «Inside Skinwalker Ranch, a Paranormal Hotbed of UFO Research» — Vice, 2020 newspaper archive
- History Channel / A+E Networks, «The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch» — Television series, first broadcast 31 March 2020, 2020 web
- Celeste Kaufman, «Skinwalkers: the creepy creatures terrifying TikTok» — Dazed, 2020 newspaper archive
- A. Lynn Allison, «The Navajo Witch Purge of 1878» — PaloVerde 9(1), Arizona State University West (quoted at length by Noah Nez, Skeptical Briefs 22.1, 2012), 2001 academic
- Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation, «Rules & Regulations» — Official visitor information, Navajo Nation, 2026 web
- Mary Shepardson and Blodwen Hammond, «The Navajo Mountain Community: Social Organization and Kinship Terminology (uses “skinwalker” as a gloss for the were-animal witch)» — University of California Press, Berkeley, 1970 book
- Lezlee E. Whiting, «Mysteries of 'UFO ranch' in spotlight (on Hunt for the Skinwalker)» — Deseret Morning News, 2006 newspaper archive
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-14 · How we verify our content
📎 Source: Enigma Atlas
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