Looking for a collection of short horror fiction from the 80’s or early 90’s - was couched as for children

Question

Excited to think someone may be able to help me here. I’m looking for an anthology of stories - I believe there were 10-13 short stories which I read multiple times in 1991/1992 or 1992/1993. The three stories I remember vividly are:

Story 1: about the wendigo - where a hunting party ends up trapped out in the forest in a cave and one of the members starts eating the others and turns into a wendigo. May even have been partially what ravenous was based off. It is not the original Algernon Blackwood story.

Story 2: an old ‘woman’ rolls around the old west like a tumble weed looking for victims to attach herself to as a parasite. Once she’s on their back their only escape is to kill themselves.

Story 3: a scientist/alchemist creates a giant frog kind of like Gollum I think? The frog then ends up eating all his dozens of cats - the end of the story is the scientist starting to create cats to fight back.

Creepy stuff and certainly not appropriate for 11 year olds but hey - that’s what we had access to. I know it’s not scary stories to tell in the dark because I have all those. Any help would be much appreciated as I haven’t been able to track this down on my own.

Answer 1

This is Monsters You Never Heard Of, a collection of fourteen short stories by Raymond Van Over.

The book can be borrowed from the Internet Archive.

From the story "The Windigo"

Light Wolf was shocked. “You don’t know yet? You don’t see it? You’re a Windigo! A flesh-eater. You even look different, you’ve become more beast than man. You’ll never be able to stop now. You will never die, but never again will you crave anything as much as human flesh.”

From the story "The Burr Woman"

“What the hell is a Burr Woman?” someone asked.

“She’s an old hag the Indians fear. There are legends that say once she gets on someone’s back nothing can get her off. No one knows where she comes from or anything about her. Except the Indians think she’s very powerful medicine.”

From the story "Nevillon's Toad"

“Oh, my Lord,” Nevillon groaned. “Oh, my Lord. What have I done?”

Now he knew. The missing cats had been food for the blue toad. Nevillon broke down and wept as the toad hopped over and looked up at him like a concerned puppy. It croaked once or twice in sympathy with its unhappy master. Then, getting no response, it went back to hunting the cats.