The Complete Idiot's Guide to Werewolves (10 page)

Chapter 6

Werewolves on Trial

The idea of a person being placed on trial for being a werewolf may sound rather ludicrous. However, just a few centuries ago this was a real part of the human world. Between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries, a number of people were tried for, and found guilty of, lycanthropy. Most of them were executed, often in terribly gruesome ways. Many today believe that these werewolf trials of the past were nothing more than cases of murder or undiagnosed madness. Some believe that, in the minds of medieval people, branding a criminal a werewolf was simply a way of explaining how a human being could be capable of committing the most unspeakable of crimes such as rape, murder, infanticide, incest, and cannibalism. What follows is a basic collection of the most famous—or, rather, infamous—accounts of these werewolf trials.

Among the multitude of so-called “werewolf trials” that occurred between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps the most well known is the 1589 trial of a German farmer named Peter Stubbe. (His first name is sometimes seen spelled Peeter and his last name Stub, Stumpf, or Stump.) Much of what is currently known about this alleged incident of lycanthropy is based on a combination of hearsay and a lone secondary account published in a London pamphlet (likely based on information gleaned from the tattered remains of the official documents, most of which were lost when many German church registers were destroyed between 1618 and 1648 in the violence of the Thirty Years War). However, Stubbe is known to have spent the majority of his life as a farmer somewhere near the village of Bedburg, just outside Cologne, Germany.

Little can be confirmed regarding just
how
Stubbe found himself in the position in which he was apprehended. According to the record of the incident, a werewolf (or an unusually large wolf) was sighted wearing a belt (though some sources call it a girdle) around its waist. How it was discovered or why it was in the area is not explained in any detail. The available account makes it seem as if the wolf was just strolling through the town and then it was caught (which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense). Authorities gave chase, apparently knowing that this was actually a werewolf. Once they had the creature cornered, they removed the girdle, and it immediately transformed into the human form of Peter Stubbe. He was dragged before the church courts, where he soon confessed to a laundry list of extremely heinous crimes.

 

It is unclear whether Stubbe gave his confession as a result of torture, just confessed under the threat of torture, or first confessed and then was tortured. Regardless of how the confession came about, Stubbe eventually took the rap for the killing of 14 children, 2 pregnant women, and a good number of assorted livestock. In addition, he also confessed to having partially eaten the flesh of the children and livestock, as well as the fetuses of the pregnant women he’d slain. The court also got him to confess to having sex with his own teenage daughter (which added the charge of incest to the list), to having sexual intercourse with a
succubus,
and to committing adultery. (Stubbe kept a mistress, who was also the mother of his daughter.) Apparently, these crimes are alleged to have occurred over a span of about 25 years.

The truth regarding whether or not Stubbe really committed any of these crimes can no longer be verified with the surviving documentation (though it is probably safe to say that at least the one about him keeping a succubus as a sex slave can be dismissed). He may indeed have been a demented serial killer. Then again, there is a possibility that he was merely a scapegoat for unsolved crimes that were committed by more elusive criminals or animals.

 

Having confessed, Stubbe was convicted of murder, cannibalism, incest, rape, infanticide, adultery, killing livestock, keeping a demon
familiar,
and (of course) lycanthropy. His execution was scheduled for October 31, 1589, and it would be remembered as one of most brutal in history.

Stubbe was first stripped almost naked before being lashed to a large wooden wheel. A pair of large iron pincers was applied to a fire until red hot and then was used to rip the flesh from 10 places on his body. As if this were not bad enough, a heavy wooden axe (a few alternate accounts claim it was just the blunt side of an axe) was taken to each of Stubbe’s limbs, one by one, until every major bone had been broken. He was then beheaded and his mangled corpse burned to ashes. Sadly, his daughter and mistress were tried and convicted of being accessories to Stubbe’s long list of heinous crimes. Both of them were burned alive at the stake soon after his execution.

 

What about the belt that Stubbe was said to be wearing when he was apprehended? Well, in his confession, Stubbe claimed to have received the belt, which gave him magical powers in addition to lycanthropy, as part of a pact with the devil. According to the surviving account, all later attempts to locate the belt were unsuccessful. As for the official explanation for the missing belt, provided by the presiding German authorities? Well … they decided that the devil must have taken it back.

In the countries of Argentina, Portugal, and Brazil, there was once a firmly held belief that if one’s seventh child turned out to be male (especially if preceded by six female offspring), he would be cursed with lycanthropy and referred to as
El Lobizon
(spelled
lobis-homen
in Portuguese). In Argentina, this belief was so ingrained in the culture that these “seventh sons” were almost always abandoned (or, at best, given up for adoption or sold) by their parents soon after they were born.

Just giving birth to a Lobizon often caused a family to be stigmatized by the village community (causing social expulsion and financial hardships). In such cases, these newborn babies would be immediately abandoned, “discarded” into a river (meaning murdered by drowning), thrown off of a cliff, or suffocated before the truth of the child’s sex could be discovered by anyone outside the family. This grew into such a widespread practice that Argentinean orphanages were often overcrowded, and acts of infanticide were becoming frighteningly commonplace.