5 Famous Werewolves from History
Are werewolves real?
Kinda. Although it’s unlikely that there’s ever been a man truly suffering from lycanthropy, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been people through history who have been suspected, accused and even legally ruled a werewolf.
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Here are five guys who were thought to be wolfmen…
Peter Stumpp
The sad story of Peter Stumpp would have made for a great limited series called Making A Werewolf, if Netflix had been around at the time. He was a German farmer in the 1500s who happened to draw someone’s suspicion in the midst of a bunch of decidedly bestial murders. It’s not like they were taping interrogations back then, so browbeating was a pretty effective strategy if you needed a perpetrator.
The suspicion is that the methods used to try to get him to confess were less offering him a cup of coffee and more threatening or enacting torture. At which point, a probably extremely pliable Stumpp “admitted” that he had made a deal with the devil for a magic belt that allowed him to turn into a werewolf. For his crimes, he was executed, and I mean really executed. They flayed him, broke his bones, chopped off his head and burned the rest. “The rest” including his wife and kids.
Gilles Garnier
Gilles Garnier, depending on who you believe, is a similarly sympathetic story to Peter Stumpp. After a string of violent attacks on children in 1573, the finger ended up pointed at Garnier. He wasn’t in the best situation to defend himself, given that he was a reclusive hermit. He hadn’t been known for being anything but harmless previously, but let me tell you, when a string of violent attacks happen? Bad time to be the local hermit.
He confessed to lycanthropy and murder, though his confession, too, smacks of at least light torture. Centuries before anyone really cared about the circumstances of a confession, Garnier was burned alive.
Wolf of Ansbach
Most of these entries are likely a man accused of being a werewolf because of the brutality of crimes they may or may not have committed. In the case of the Wolf of Ansbach, it’s now thought that this was probably a regular old wolf, so crafty that they assumed it had the power of human reasoning. The principality of Ansbach in Bavaria in 1685 had a real problem with children and livestock getting wolfed down. Could this simply be one big, bad wolf? No, they theorized. It had to be the spirit of a recently deceased, deeply hated ruler by the name of Michael Leicht.
They eventually trapped and killed the wolf, and no, it didn’t shrink and de-hair itself into the body of the suspect — which didn’t stop them from carrying the body around with a mask that looked like Leicht yanked over its head, and then hanging it for everyone to see.
Jacques Roulet
Not all of these are a Salem-type situation, where innocent people were scapegoated out of a fear of the supernatural. A couple are truly and deeply nasty individuals, so violent that it’s nicer to think there’s a wolf in there making them do some of this stuff. For example, Jacques Roulet. No torture was needed here, Jacques was found half-naked near a mutilated teenager’s body and confessed to the crime.
He further explained that he had a magical ointment that allowed him to turn into a wolf, and that he’d cannibalized other people before being caught. He went to court, and was promptly convicted of murder, cannibalism and lycanthropy. Instead of executing him, however, they ruled him mentally ill and sent him to an asylum. Which seems a little confusing, right? You can’t convict someone of lycanthropy and then say they’re crazy.
King Lycaon
We’ll wrap up by paying dues to the original werewolf, the very man who gives lycanthropy its name: King Lycaon. His story requires suspension of disbelief that goes beyond just Halloween creatures, since his wolfening is attributed to a punishment handed down by Zeus himself.
As the tale goes, he attempted to trick Zeus, which is historically an incredibly poor target for pranks. He tried to flim-flam the head honcho into eating human flesh, but Zeus took zero bites and instead cursed Lycaon to live in the form of a wolf for having the audacity to try that nonsense in the first place.
