Man, Beast, and the Fear In Between

I think the werewolf got so scary in the 1500s because people were already scared and looking for answers. The stories had been around forever, from Lycaon turning into a wolf to the Viking sagas, so folks were ready to believe them. Then when awful things happened, like Pierre Burgot, Michel Verdun, and Giles Garnier killing children in France, it was easier to say "werewolf" than to accept that a regular person did it. Whether those men were mentally ill, hallucinating, or just killers, everyone believed the werewolf story, and the confessions only made it worse.

It also gave people someone to blame. A lot of the accused were beggars, hermits, or outsiders, and they confessed after being tortured. Peter Stumpp might have been a victim of politics more than anything. The numbers got blown up too. One historian traced the "thousands" claim back to a prosecutor who counted a whole region, and the real total was probably a few hundred.

Reading about this made me think about how we still blame monsters for things that are hard to explain. Calling someone a "beast" is a lot easier than asking why they did what they did, and that's probably true now as much as it was in the 1500s.

Comments

  1. williams.dan76October 6, 2026 at 6:19 AM

    Thanks for your werewolf comments. Witch hunts and werewolf hunts were closely related during a time of insecurity and instability.

    ReplyDelete

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