Since the dawn of humanity wolves have been a problem. In 1849 one wolf attack
alone saw 300 civilians die and there are countless more attacks unrecorded by
history the point I'm making is wolves are bad people first of all they are
impolite but even worse they have a habit of using their teeth which tend
to be sharp so as you'd imagine wolves have always been feared and as if wolves
alone were not bad enough they also had to worry about men who became wolves for
much of history it was generally believed werewolves exist and the truth
is it might not have been entirely superstition there are many cases of
people accused of being real werewolves some of which still shrouded in mystery
now
as far as historical records are concerned Spain's first serial killer
was a man called Manuel Blanco Romasanta after more than 20 deaths of in mid
1800s he was finally caught but he denied any personal guilt, claiming to
suffer a medical condition that rendered him a bloodthirsty wolf at his trial he
admitted to 13 murders but claimed only to have killed them while already having
transformed into a wolf he said for the last 13 years a curse had left him
periodically unable to control his body becoming the wolf man he now is the
judge did not buy this excuse sentencing him to death but he people of Spain did
massive outcry demanded his medical condition be studied so that the nature
of werewolves could finally be understood so before his execution the
Queen of Spain personally intervened commuting his sentence to life in prison
still within months of arriving at prison he was dead the cause of death is
unknown but rumor tells he was shot dead by guards who believed he really was a werewolf
1685 was a strange year for the Principality of Ansbach a small German
state that no longer exists it began with a discovery of a dead sheep for months
following that initial discovery local livestock were frequently found dead as
if torn apart by large animals for the time this was nothing unusual but when
children also began to be found dead everyone knew they had a serious problem
so they organized a mass hunt to go after whatever was intruding on their land then
one day a foreign priest came to town claiming to be tracking down a werewolf
who fled to the area finally they understood what was going on according
to historical records they found the beasts soon after with gunfire and a
pack of dogs they chased it into a well where it became trapped and was
immediately killed as the Beast Lay Dying it partially morphed back into a
human leaving its corpse somewhere between wolf and man
thereafter it was hanged from a gibbet as a warning to other wolf men
in 1598 an entire family were accused of being werewolves and executed on mass
At the time France had long been in the grip of panic any claim no matter how true
could see angry mobs take to the street one day a 15 year old boy was attacked
by a large wolf luckily a nearby crowd heard the attack
and was able to scare the wolf off as the boys wounds were tended to he
claimed he wolf had large hands like those of a human immediately it was
decided they were dealing with a werewolf as the wolf had been injured
by the crowd they set about searching for someone with any kind of fresh wound
it was not long before they found that person
a local woman with a limp without trial they executed her but that wasn't the
end of it rumor spread that her entire family
were practitioners of black magic regularly transforming themselves into
monstrous wolves the accusation alone sealed their fate the entire Gandillon family were arrested and killed
in the same year the Gandillon family were
accused of being werewolves so was Jacques Roulet. According to a
historical account written more than two centuries later a group of soldiers once
happened upon the mutilated corpse of a young boy following a trail of blood
they saw two wolves run into a nearby forest chasing them down three wolves
escaped from view and were not seen again if they did however find a
strange-looking man exhausted and dressed in rags from his hands and
mouths blood dripped to the ground in the age of witch hunts there could be only
one response. The man was dragged into town and put on trial under
interrogation he admitted to all kinds of wrongdoing that he came from a rich
family but a household slave corrupted his mind from a young age teaching him to
practice black magic and worship the devil
one day the slave gave him an ointment that transformed him into a wolf
enabling him to kill people without consequence all this he confessed
without any use of torture but strangely he was not put to death
like most other French people he was sent to an insane asylum
Livonia is a historical region in the Baltics that for over a century was part
of his Swedish Empire it was during this period that one of the most mysterious
cases emerged - the werewolf of Livonia in the year 1691 the Church
of a small village was looted with no sign of a culprit an old man who lived
beside the church was summoned as a witness but instead of discussing the
church robbery he openly declared himself to be a werewolf authorities were
stunned for years rumor had told this old man was a practitioner of magic but
no one had expected him to volunteer such a confession according to his story
he had spent years transforming into a wolf at will he claimed a wolf man could
pass on this ability to anyone else simply by sharing a drink with them
interestingly he hated witches claiming to have killed many
he said werewolf serve God and that he was a true Christian unsure whether or
not to kill him he was instead banished from town
it might seem like almost every alleged werewolf from history was French and
from here on out it won't get any less French ich in 1521 two men were executed
on werewolf charges one of those men was Pierre Burgot, a shepherd from eastern
France one night 20 years before when he was tending to his flock of sheep three
heavily armed men approached the men threatened to kill his sheep unless he
would renounce religion and worship them in the place of God fearing the loss
of his fluffy sheep Burgot agreed and kissed each of their hand from that day
he was different endowed with the uncontrollable ability to become a wolf
every full moon he and another man suffering the same curse would meet in
the woods were ready to become wolves together they would terrorize nearby
towns tearing their inhabitants apart
there was once a notorious serial killer called Gilles Garnier. A longtime hermit he
was distrusted by the community he lived outside of with no source of income he
was in a near constant state of starvation then during one particularly
harsh winter he took to cannibalism murdering children and carving out
chunks of their flesh finding a string of mutilated corpses locals came to
believe a werewolf was responsible and first on their list of suspects was the
strange hermit village authorities offered a bounty to any one able to
bring him in at his trial he admitted to being a bloodthirsty Wolfman after months
of starvation as he laced slowly dying a ghost appeared before him offering an
instant solution that solution turned out to be the werewolf curse and a constant hunger for human flesh
In medieval Belarus there was once a
notorious ruler called Vseslav and notoriety was nothing unusual for a
medieval King but Vseslav was different as a semi legendary figure it's
difficult to discern fact from fiction it is said he was born from magic
his mother unable to have children she turned to a group of sorcerers who
promised her a son. The promise came true but Vseslav was born cursed and
would grow up to be a werewolf so while by day he fought to expand his
kingdom and lessen the struggle of his people he was by night much more cruel
and violent racing from town to town in the form of a wolf massacring their
inhabitants each full moon he would render entire settlements ghost towns
but as he was King nothing was ever done to stop it
in the late 1500s children began to disappear from the small town of Chalons
for while it was speculated they were simply running away but as the
disappearances went on some locals began claiming to witness a large beast in the
woods like a cross between wolf and man it was seen near a town each night a
child went missing hunting parties failed to find any sign of a beast and
it seemed the mystery would never be solved but when a new rumor changed
everything it told that terrified screaming had been heard from inside a
nearby tailor shop for the inhabitants looking for a scapegoat the Taylor was
their monster it is said entire barrels full of human bones were found in his
shop and every wall was covered in blood
there is a Native American folk tale that gives a unique view of werewolves
according to it a young boy was once abandoned by his family left to fend for
himself in the great American Plains he took to following a pack of wolves
eating what scraps of meat they left behind in time the Wolves accepted him
as one of them raising him as a wolf but as the boy struggled to keep up with the
pack he broke his arm. Still part of a pack his arm gradually healed but as it
did it reformed into something more resembling the leg of a wolf slowly over
a period of many years he became a wolf identical to any other