Tuesday 27 October 2020

I Thought I Would Start The Week,

with a Halloween story,


in the Middle Ages in Europe and the UK, many lonely women were burnt at the stake for being witches, but in France they had The French Werewolf Epidemic, (1520-1630), it was France’s version of Europe’s witch trials and executions, but with werewolves. For 110 years, 30 thousand people were accused of being werewolves, tortured in exchange for their confessions, or lack of admission of guilt and died at the stake, 
 
of the many examples of accused werewolfery is of Jacques Rollet, dubbed the Werewolf of Chazes. Rollet lured a fifteen-year-old boy to the woods where he murdered and ate his body. When he was tried for his crime, he confessed to having done the same to other locals, specifically employees of the court system such as lawyers and attorneys. Rollet got the death sentence (like pretty much everyone else back then) but ended up in an insane asylum,

the country’s history with wolf-related mythology is long and rich with stories such as the La Bête du Gévaudan, or The Beast of Gévaudan, which for three years terrorized the area,

the first attack occurred in April of 1764, and the victim, a young woman tending her flock of sheep, described her assailant as looking “like a wolf, yet not a wolf.” She survived when her sheep went into action, defending the teenage girl from the Beast…. This would be the start of more than 100 documented fatal attacks in Gévaudan in which most of the victims were partially eaten, a 67-page academic paper on the history of killer lycanthropes or some sort of man-eating wolf exists, which lists the 100 fatal attacks in Gévaudan, thank goodness there are no more werewolves, or are there?


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