Mystery of the month:
Was ‘The Beast of Gevaudan’ a werewolf?
The men walked back to the village of Les Hubacs, France carrying the slender body of a dead girl. As they entered the village, her mother began screaming.
The girl’s throat had been ripped from her body.
It was 1764 and 14-year-old -HDQQH %RXOHW ZDV WKH ¿UVW victim of what came to be known as the ‘Beast of Gevaudan.’ She’d been tending her sheep when she’d been ambushed and killed by some unknown, deadly creature.
Ravening beast
Over the next few months, the Beast claimed many more victims in this thickly-forested corner of rural France. As many as 113 people are thought to have been killed by the Beast, with many more injured. Most of them were lone men, women or children attending to their DQLPDOV LQ WKH ¿HOGV ± DQG reports noted that the Beast invariably targeted their necks or heads, crunching easily through adult human skulls as though they were twigs.
Soon, ‘Beast fever’ gripped France. The attacks coincided with the advent of newspapers and the printing press, and the story of the monster quickly spread round France, striking terror into the hearts of all who heard it. The king himself, /RXLV ;9 R HUHG D reward to anyone who killed it, and hunters made their way to Gevaudan to do just that.
Wolf-dog hybrid
But what exactly was the Beast? Those who saw it described it as looking like a hybrid between a wolf and a dog, with russet-coloured fur streaked with black, and a dog-like head with a wide mouth and sharp canine teeth ± EXW PXFK ODUJHU WKDQ \RXU average wolf or dog. It was said to have supernatural abilities
± LW FRXOG UHSHO EXOOHWV DQG KDG risen from the grave more than RQFH 5XPRXUV ÀHZ DERXW WKDW the Beast was a werewolf. Today, the most popular theory is that the Beast was a wolf. In the 18th century, packs of wolves still roamed round Europe, and it wasn’t unheard of for them to attack humans ± EXW LW ZDV XQXVXDO 7KH\ normally went for smaller, weaker prey. Most victims of wolf attacks were children under the DJH RI ± EXW the Beast was taking on fullygrown men and women. Some of the attacks attributed to the Beast probably were ZROI DWWDFNV ± but were all of them?
In 2016, biologist Karl-hans Taake wrote an article for National Geographic positing the theory that the Beast was, in fact, a young male lion that had escaped from captivity somewhere.
He pointed out that most French peasants would only have seen lions on heraldic ÀDJV ± ZKLFK EHDU OLWWOH resemblance to the actual EHDVWV WKHPVHOYHV ± VR would not necessarily have recognised one if they’d seen one. This would explain how the creature had the strength WR FDUU\ R DGXOW KXPDQV VSOLW human skulls and jump as far as nine metres.
Although many hunters claimed to have killed the %HDVW R HULQJ XS WKH ERGLHV of large wolves as proof, the attacks continued until 1767, when poisoned baits were left out for it. To this day, nobody knows for sure what it really was. So who knows, maybe it really was a werewolf….
It split human skulls