Werewolves started as a term meant to denigrate outlaws, and became something much worse. Whether
it’s killing children or dressing up a dead wolf in the mayor’s clothing, here is the
horrible truth about the people who were accused of being werewolves in Renaissance-era Europe.
People who can transform into animals have appeared in legends for almost as long as
we've had the ability to write those legends down, but the modern idea of a person who turns into a
violent, bloodthirsty beast is comparatively recent. The word "werewolf" didn't enter the
English language until around 1,000 years ago, when it appeared in King Cnut's Ecclesiastical
Ordinances. Werewolf literally means "man wolf," but the word was originally meant to
be a disparaging name for an outlaw. Sort of how you might say "that guy is a wet blanket"
even though you don't actually think that he's a saturated piece of fabric.
Fortunately, we modern people haven't ever gone from calling someone a wet blanket to
actually believing that some people can transform themselves into soggy bed coverings.
But at some point a few hundred years ago,
people did start to think that man-wolves could become literal man wolves. So the name stuck.
Medieval werewolf stories weren't like modern werewolf stories, or even like the stories that
led to the werewolf trials that happened in later years. Early European stories didn't
portray werewolves as violent, flesh-eating creatures. Instead, they were sympathetic,
tragic characters forced to live out their lives under a terrible curse, sort of like Beast in
Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Maybe angry at the world or eternally sad, but not generally evil.
Werewolves from those older stories didn't lose their humanity when they became wolves.
In fact, they were usually capable of rational thought and behaved pretty much exactly like
humans. One of them even rode a horse, which probably didn't go over so well with the horse.
But that tells you something about the faculties of the medieval werewolf. When medieval werewolves
did behave like wolves, they had human motivations. They desired things like wanting
revenge on whoever it was that cursed them. Even the way that werewolves transformed was
different. In modern stories, the wolf exists inside the person, and then the person kind of
turns inside out to reveal the wolf, with a lot of hair sprouting and stretching and
joints moving in the wrong direction. In ancient werewolf tales, the wolf was kind
of like a skin that covered the person, so even the transformation wasn't super violent.
Then the 1500s happened, which was around the same time that witch trials were becoming a thing
and shortly after Spanish Inquisition began. So people were already pretty used to the idea of
burning random people at the stake for supposedly being in league with the devil. Werewolfery kind
of just became one more facet of witchcraft, and in 1521 we have the first record of a human being
accused of turning into a wolf. From that point on, the concept of a werewolf changes forever.
"Whoever is bitten by a werewolf and lives becomes a werewolf himself."
Pierre Burgot was a French shepherd who told the court he'd been living as a man-wolf for 19 years.
Burgot and co-wolf Michel Verdun both claimed to have been slathered with some magical
transformative stuff that made them grow hair and fangs. After their transformation
they went on to hunt and kill humans, including two children and an adult woman.
It’s hard to say if these crimes really happened, because courts of that era were famous for making
stuff up and believing whatever weird stories the townspeople wanted to tell about people they
didn't like. The story does say that Verdun was captured "in wolf form" while in the actual act of
attacking a hapless traveler, which seems to imply that there were real wolf attacks happening at the
time. On the other hand, the fact that the two men confessed to the horrors does kind of suggest that
they were killers who wanted to have some excuse for their awful behavior, no matter how unlikely.
Clearly, when you have a werewolf problem, you need a werewolf judge.
Enter Henry Boguet, who presided over St. Claude's criminal justice system for
15 years during the late 1500s and early 1600s. In that time, Bouget busied himself with making
sure that werewolves were brought to justice. History has a tendency to exaggerate reality,
and there were some historians who claimed Bouget sent more than 600 people to their deaths.
But Bouget himself rather modestly claimed the number was more like 80. If you look at
the actual records, though, he probably sentenced just under 30 people to death, and he even let a
few people avoid the executioner. Who says the legal system in the 1600s wasn't fair?
However, Boguet wasn't especially discriminating when it came to who he chose to sentence to death.
In one of the most horrible stories from his time as a werewolf judge,
he had a child executed because she liked to run around on all fours pretending to be a wolf. The
story told in court was that she attacked a couple of kids, but her conviction probably had more to
do with the fact that she was dirty and poor than whether or not she was a danger to anyone.
In this next story, two men were out in the woods when they happened upon a pair of wolves eating
the corpse of a teenage boy. After being spotted, the wolves ran off and the two men gave chase.
They didn't find the creatures, but they did find Jacques Roulet, who had long
hair and a beard and was half-naked, hiding in bushes, and also had blood all over his hands.
Roulet was poor and was known around town as a beggar. He told the court
that he was able to turn himself into a wolf with the help of a magic salve
and that he'd killed more than just the one boy in the woods.
For some reason the court eventually decided that Roulet was more crazy than supernatural,
which is weird because he was clearly not a werewolf, but if he really did have blood on
his hands, well, he probably wasn't harmless, either. Nevertheless, his death sentence was
commuted to two years in a madhouse, which makes him a pretty lucky guy given the circumstances.
France was kind of the epicenter of werewolf hysteria, but other nations certainly weren't
immune. In 1595, the Netherlands tried and convicted 62-year-old Folkt Dirks
and his daughter, who was just 17. The Dirks' accusers were Folkt's own sons, ages 14 and 13,
who claimed that the whole family had made a pact with the devil. They claimed that the
devil had given them a magic belt that changed them into wolves. Included in the accusations
were two younger siblings, ages 8 and 11. No human beings were harmed by the alleged
werewolves, but the Dirk family confessed to killing livestock and also occasionally
transforming into cats and attending weird cat dances. Folkt and his daughter both,
of course, confessed under torture, and the girl named several other werewolves, werecats,
and devil worshipers. Folkt Dirk was burned at the stake. The Dirk boys were all spared,
but they were whipped and forced to watch while their sister also burned to death.
Being accused of werewolfery was usually a death sentence,
but not always. In the late 1600s, an old man named Thiess told a court that he was a werewolf,
but not to worry. He wasn’t the sort of werewolf we like to see
shirtless on a movie poster, but the sort of werewolf who works for the good guys.
"Hey, hey, hey. Don't swear." "Sorry, they started…"
"We're werewolves. What are we?" "Werewolves not swear-wolves."
Thiess called himself a "hound of God," and said he would occasionally turn into a wolf but
only so he could travel down to Hell to do battle with demons and witches and other unsavories.
By doing so, he was protecting the people up above and the flocks they depended on.
Perhaps the most shocking part of this story is that the judges actually bought it,
or were at the very least convinced that Thiess didn't deserve to be executed for his crimes.
Instead, they let him off with just 10 lashes. If only all the doomed
werewolves of the past had been clever enough to come up with the same defense.
In most cases, courts didn't need an actual body to convict someone of a capital crime.
They just needed to believe that the accused was under the influence of Satanic magic.
When an 18-year-old boy named Hans was brought before an Estonian court in 1651,
he told the judge that two years earlier he'd been bitten by a man dressed in black clothes,
and had been a werewolf ever since. As is so often the case in these stories, the judge
asked him if he physically became a wolf or if it was just a spiritual transformation. The boy said
it was a complete physical transformation, but he insisted he hadn't made any pact with the devil.
That didn't really seem to matter to the judge. The court was convinced that the man
who bit Hans must have been Satan, which meant that Hans was under the influence of Satanic
magic whether he'd been a willing participant or not. That was all the information the judge
needed to arrive at a sentence of death, even though Hans had no human victims.
You didn't need a human body to convict someone of werewolfery, and you didn't need an actual
living human werewolf, either. In this story, the perpetrator was a literal wolf, but the villagers
were still pretty sure it was a werewolf. The town of Ansbach in Bavaria once had a
mayor who was widely hated by pretty much everyone in town. Then he died, and the townspeople were
decidedly overjoyed at his demise. But not long after that, a wolf started terrorizing the town.
It wasn't just eating livestock. It was killing kids and full-grown women too.
And the deaths were pretty gruesome. The wolf left behind partially eaten corpses that had
been ripped apart. So the villagers arrived at a totally logical conclusion: The wolf was actually
the reanimated form of their dead mayor, come back to torment the town from beyond the grave.
The townspeople killed the wolf, so that was a relief. But then they dressed it up
in a suit and put a wig and beard on it so it looked like their deceased mayor.
Then they gave it to a museum, you know, as proof that werewolves existed
because obviously no normal wolf would ever dress itself up in a suit, a wig, and a fake beard.
Today we understand that some people just don't possess empathy. We even have a clinical name
for it: Psychopathy. While we're still shocked and horrified by the things these people do,
we also understand that psychopaths are still human. Hundreds of years ago,
though, people didn't have an explanation for serial killers, and it wasn't hard to get from
"behaves like an animal" to "actually is an animal." That's why people like Peter Stubbe
ended up dying for werewolfery in particular rather than for just being a despicable person.
The crimes of Peter Stubbe were almost certainly real. He terrorized Bedburg,
Germany and was responsible for the deaths of two pregnant women, at least 13 children,
and also a bunch of cows. He mutilated his victims and sometimes partially ate them.
After he was apprehended, he told inquisitors that he turned into a wolf with the help of a
magic belt. And you won't be surprised to hear that the belt was given to him by the devil,
because of course it was. Stubbe's confession was given while
he was bound to the rack, so that does cast some doubt on whether or not he was the actual killer.
Though it does seem likely that the crimes were the act of a deranged person and not an animal.
It's not hard to feel bad for so-called "werewolves" who were really just people guilty
of nothing except wanting to make the torture stop. But the case of Peter Subbe wasn't the only
time the townspeople probably got it right. There was a tailor in Chalons, France who
lured kids into his shop, tortured them, and then slew them. And to make matters worse,
he ate them and stuffed their bones into barrels. It's really not a huge leap to go from
there to werewolf, even if you're not a French townsperson living at the end of the 16th century.
The tailor was undone by his own greed. As more and more children went missing,
the townspeople started to suspect him. Then when the barrels of bones were discovered,
it was pretty clear who the perpetrator was. The tailor confessed and was burned
at the stake. Afterwards, the court destroyed all the records of the trial and expunged the
guy's name from history, which sort of begs the question of how we even know this story.
Still, this is one of the few cases of an accused werewolf probably getting what he deserved.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about supernatural creatures are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.