Historical Werewolf Cases in Europe: Lycanthropy, Werewolf Trials and Folklore

by vamzzz · Published 09/07/2019 · Updated 08/21/2026

Werewolves belong to the oldest and most persistent supernatural traditions of Europe. Long before the werewolf became a monster of horror movies—a human transformed into a wolf by a bite and condemned to change during the full moon—European folklore described a much wider and stranger range of wolf-transformations.

Dog-headed men from Livre des merveilles du monde, a 13th-century travelogue with stories told by Marco Polo

Table of Contents

People were believed to become wolves through witchcraft, magical ointments, enchanted belts or wolfskins, curses, divine punishment, demonic pacts, or simply because they had been born with the ability. Others did not physically transform at all: their souls or spiritual doubles supposedly left their sleeping bodies and assumed the form of wolves.

Most remarkable of all, these beliefs did not remain confined to mythology and folktales. Between the late Middle Ages and the seventeenth century, men and women were actually interrogated, prosecuted, tortured, and sometimes executed for allegedly becoming werewolves.

The surviving historical werewolf cases of Europe reveal a world in which lycanthropy stood at the crossroads of folklore, witchcraft, criminal justice, religious persecution, mental illness, animal attacks, and older beliefs about human beings assuming animal form.

What Is a Werewolf?

The English word werewolf literally means “man-wolf.” It derives from Old English wer, “man,” and wulf, “wolf.” Related terms occur throughout Germanic Europe.

The traditional werewolf, however, was not one clearly defined supernatural creature. Depending upon period and region, a werewolf might be a person who physically transformed into a wolf, a witch whose spirit travelled in animal form, someone wearing a magical wolfskin, a human possessed by a wolf-like demon, or simply a person believed to behave like a predatory animal.

The modern idea that werewolves invariably transform during the full moon is largely a later popular-cultural standardization of much more diverse traditions.

The learned term lycanthropy derives from Ancient Greek lykos, “wolf,” and anthropos, “human.” Originally, however, lycanthropy did not necessarily mean supernatural shape-shifting. In medical literature it could describe a condition in which a person believed himself to have become a wolf or behaved like one.

Reginald Scot made precisely this distinction in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), arguing:

“Lycanthropia is a disease, and not a transformation.”

The distinction is crucial when examining historical werewolf cases. A confession that someone “became a wolf” does not automatically tell us what actually happened. It tells us what the accused, witnesses, interrogators—or the author recording the story—believed or claimed had happened.

The Beast of Gévaudan, “a calf-sized men-eating wolf” that attacked about 210 people, resulting in 113 deaths (98 of them were partly eaten), between 1764 and 1767

Werewolf Trials and the European Witch Hunts

Werewolf prosecutions developed alongside the European witch trials. Accusations of lycanthropy were always much less common than accusations of witchcraft, but the two categories frequently overlapped.

The decisive period was the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. In some regions, particularly in French-speaking and German-speaking Europe and the Baltic lands, suspected werewolves were accused not merely of transformation but also of witchcraft, murder, cannibalism, attacking livestock, entering into pacts with the Devil, and using magical substances or objects to assume animal form.

The notorious case of Peter Stubbe or Stumpp, executed at Bedburg in 1589, became one of the best-known werewolf cases in European history. But he was far from the only person accused of becoming a wolf.

Werewolf prosecutions persisted especially long in parts of Bavaria, Austria, Livonia, and neighbouring regions. In the Baltic, the situation became particularly interesting because indigenous ideas about werewolves did not always correspond to the Christian demonological model imposed by judges and clergy.

To understand these trials, therefore, we have to distinguish at least three layers: traditional folklore, the testimony of accused people and witnesses, and the demonological interpretation imposed upon that testimony by authorities.

How Did People Supposedly Become Werewolves?

European folklore offered numerous methods of becoming a werewolf.

One of the most widespread involved putting on a wolfskin or a belt made from wolf hide. In later witch-trial traditions, the belt could become an enchanted object supposedly supplied by the Devil. Removing it restored the wearer to human form.

Another method involved rubbing the body with a magical ointment. Such stories closely parallel accounts of witches using flying ointments before travelling to the Sabbath.

Other traditions claimed that drinking rainwater from a wolf’s footprint could cause transformation, while particular enchanted springs or streams supposedly possessed the same power.

The sixteenth-century Swedish writer Olaus Magnus reported that Livonian werewolves underwent initiation involving specially prepared beer and a spoken formula. Russian folklore likewise preserved magical formulas connected with transformation.

In parts of Italy, France, and Germany, it was claimed that sleeping outdoors on particular nights while moonlight fell directly upon the face could transform a person into a wolf.

The now-famous full moon was therefore only one element in a much larger complex of magical ideas.

The Werewolf Belt and the Devil

By the early modern period, Christian demonology increasingly interpreted werewolf transformation as Satanic witchcraft.

Richard Verstegan described this belief in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1628). According to him, certain sorcerers anointed themselves with an ointment supplied through the Devil’s agency and wore enchanted girdles. While wearing them, they appeared to themselves and others as wolves and behaved accordingly, attacking and killing human beings.

Whether authorities believed that an actual physical transformation occurred was another matter. Theologians had long debated whether demons could truly transform human bodies or merely deceive the senses.

Werewolf belief therefore became entangled with one of the central problems of demonology: does magic physically alter reality, or does the Devil merely make people believe that it does?

Lycaon: The Werewolf of Ancient Greece

European werewolf traditions did not begin with the witch trials.

Ancient Greek and Roman literature already contained stories about human beings becoming wolves. Herodotus reported that the Neuri, a people living beyond Scythia, were said to transform into wolves for several days each year before returning to human form.

The most famous classical example is Lycaon, king of Arcadia.

Different versions of his story survive, but in the best-known accounts Lycaon commits a terrible act involving human sacrifice or cannibalism. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he attempts to test Zeus by serving him human flesh. As punishment, Lycaon is transformed into a wolf.

The story establishes several themes that would remain attached to werewolf folklore for centuries: murder, cannibalism, violation of sacred law, punishment, and the collapse of the boundary between human being and predatory animal.

Pliny the Elder also preserved Arcadian traditions in which a man crossed a lake, became a wolf, lived in that form for a number of years, and could eventually become human again.

These stories demonstrate that human-to-wolf transformation was part of European imagination long before medieval Christianity associated the werewolf with Satan.

Lycaon. etching by Vergilius Solis (1514-1562)

Petronius and One of the Oldest Werewolf Stories

One of the most vivid ancient werewolf stories occurs in Petronius’s Satyricon, written during the first century CE.

During a banquet, the character Niceros tells how he once travelled at night with a soldier. Under the bright moon, the soldier suddenly removed his clothes, placed them beside the road, urinated in a circle around them, and transformed into a wolf.

The wolf ran howling into the forest.

Niceros later arrived at a farm where he learned that a wolf had attacked the livestock but had been wounded in the neck with a spear. When he returned home, he discovered the soldier lying in bed while a doctor treated a wound in exactly the same place.

Niceros consequently realized that his companion was a versipellis—literally a “turnskin.”

This motif would recur throughout later werewolf folklore: a wound inflicted upon the animal appears in exactly the same place upon the human body.

Repercussion: When the Wounded Wolf Becomes a Wounded Human

This transfer of wounds is sometimes called repercussion.

Numerous European stories describe a hunter injuring a wolf only to discover later that a suspected witch or werewolf bears an identical wound. Sometimes a severed paw becomes a human hand.

One famous tale, set in Auvergne around 1588, describes a hunter attacked by a large wolf. He struck the animal with his hunting knife and severed one of its paws. After placing the paw in his bag, he returned to a nearby castle.

When the bag was opened, the wolf’s paw had supposedly become the hand of a woman wearing a gold ring.

The castle’s owner recognized the ring as belonging to his wife. When he confronted her, he discovered that she was missing a hand. According to the story, she confessed that she had attacked the hunter in wolf form and was subsequently executed.

Whether such stories represent historical events, folklore attached to actual prosecutions, or later literary elaborations must be assessed individually. Their recurrence, however, reveals how important the idea of repercussion was to European shape-shifting traditions.

18th Century etching of a Loup-garou (werewolf)

Éliphas Lévi: The Werewolf as an Astral Body

Nineteenth-century occultists offered a radically different explanation.

The French occultist Éliphas Lévi attempted to explain werewolf traditions through his concept of the sidereal or astral body. Instead of assuming that the physical human body literally transformed into an animal, Lévi proposed that a person’s subtle body could leave the sleeping physical organism and appear elsewhere in animal form.

According to this model, the wolf represented the savage instincts of the sleeper. Because the astral and physical bodies remained connected, an injury inflicted upon the projected wolf could manifest upon the sleeping human being.

Within nineteenth- and twentieth-century occultism, lycanthropy was consequently sometimes interpreted not as literal anatomical transformation but as an unusually dense form of astral projection or animal-shaped etheric double.

This interpretation belongs to occult theory rather than historical proof, but it is important because it shows how older werewolf traditions were reinterpreted after the decline of the European witch trials.

Slavic Werewolves: Vlkodlak, Vukodlak and Vovkulaka

The Slavic world possesses an especially rich vocabulary for werewolf traditions.

Related forms include Polish wilkołak, Czech vlkodlak, Slovak vlkolak, Serbian and Croatian vukodlak, Slovenian volkodlak, Bulgarian vrkolak, Belarusian vaukalak, and Ukrainian vovkulaka. These names belong to a broad linguistic complex associated with the wolf and animal skin or hair.

This terminology is particularly interesting because it also intersects with vampire and revenant traditions.

The South Slavic vukodlak and related terms could shift in meaning between werewolf and returning dead, while a related Slavic word entered Greek as vrykolakas, one of the best-known Greek names for the corporeal revenant or vampire.

This overlap reminds us that modern categories such as “werewolf,” “vampire,” “witch,” and “revenant” were not always sharply separated in traditional European folklore.

The later Russian literary term vurdalak is another development of this complex and became particularly well known through nineteenth-century vampire literature.

Vseslav of Polotsk: The Werewolf Prince

One of the most famous medieval Slavic figures associated with wolf transformation is Vseslav of Polotsk, who ruled Polotsk in the eleventh century.

Vseslav acquired a reputation as a sorcerer, and the medieval East Slavic Tale of Igor’s Campaign describes him in supernatural terms, including travelling by night in the form of a wolf.

Whether this was intended literally, poetically, or as part of an older heroic-magical tradition is difficult to determine. What matters historically is that the image of the ruler or warrior possessing wolf-like supernatural powers was already firmly established in medieval Slavic literature.

Werewolves Were Not Always Evil

Christian demonologists tended to interpret supernatural shape-shifting as demonic, but European folklore was never so simple.

A striking medieval example occurs in William of Palerne or William and the Werewolf. Here the werewolf is not a bloodthirsty monster but a protector.

The werewolf Alphonso, himself an enchanted prince, rescues the young William from assassins, carries him to safety, brings him food, and later continues to protect William and his beloved Melior.

The story preserves an entirely different conception of the werewolf: not the servant of Satan, but an enchanted human being whose animal form does not destroy his moral character.

An even more remarkable example would emerge from Livonia several centuries later.

Historical Werewolf Trials and Cases

Pierre Bourgot and Michel Verdun — 1521

The so-called Werewolves of Poligny were accused in France in 1521.

Michel Verdun was reportedly suspected after a wolf was wounded and Verdun was subsequently discovered injured. Under torture, he confessed to lycanthropy and implicated Pierre Bourgot and Philibert Montot.

Bourgot’s confession followed the increasingly familiar demonological pattern. He claimed that mysterious men dressed in black had offered protection for his sheep, but that the agreement eventually required him to renounce God and his baptism. Verdun supposedly later supplied him with an ointment that enabled him to become a wolf.

The accused were also charged with killing children.

As with many early modern witch and werewolf trials, confessions obtained under torture cannot simply be treated as factual descriptions of events. They are nevertheless important historical evidence for what interrogators expected a werewolf confession to contain.

Gilles Garnier: The Werewolf of Dole — 1573

One of the most notorious French cases concerned Gilles Garnier, a hermit living near Dole.

During 1572, several children disappeared or were found mutilated in the surrounding countryside. Garnier became suspected of the attacks and was eventually arrested.

Under interrogation and torture, he confessed to killing and eating children and claimed that he had assumed the form of a wolf.

Garnier was convicted and burned in January 1573.

The case demonstrates the difficulty inherent in interpreting historical werewolf trials. Behind the supernatural accusation there may have been actual murders, animal attacks, communal panic, coerced confession, mental disturbance—or some combination of these factors.

The historical fact is not that Garnier was a werewolf. The historical fact is that a European court could prosecute a human being as one.

Peter Stubbe: The Werewolf of Bedburg — 1589

Perhaps the most infamous historical werewolf case is that of Peter Stubbe, also known as Peter Stumpp, Stumpf, or Stube.

Our principal surviving account is a sensational English pamphlet published in 1590, apparently translated from a now-lost German original.

According to the pamphlet, Stubbe had practised evil from his youth and entered into an agreement with the Devil. He supposedly received a magical belt that transformed him into an enormous predatory wolf with fiery eyes, powerful paws, and terrible teeth.

Removing the belt restored his human appearance.

Stubbe was accused of an extraordinary catalogue of crimes, including murder, cannibalism, incest, and killing his own son. The pamphlet claims that he had murdered victims over a period of approximately twenty-five years.

His execution at Bedburg on 31 October 1589 was exceptionally brutal. His flesh was torn with heated pincers, his limbs were broken, he was decapitated, and his body was burned.

Afterwards, the authorities erected a macabre monument incorporating the image of a wolf and Stubbe’s severed head.

The case became enormously influential in shaping the early modern image of the Satanic werewolf.

The Auvergne Werewolf — c. 1588

Another widely repeated account, dated to approximately 1588, concerns the hunter who severed a wolf’s paw only to discover that it had become a woman’s hand.

The story is a classic example of repercussion, the belief that damage inflicted upon an animal form simultaneously affects the human shape-shifter.

Whether this particular account can be treated as a documented criminal case rather than a migrating folklore motif is uncertain. It should therefore be distinguished from trials for which contemporary judicial or printed records survive.

1554 Munster Lycanthrope Werewolf Demon. Woodblock in the text of lycanthrope alongside accounts of real animals and places. Sebastian Munster in his book, Cosmographia, also included much of what was simply believed to exist in late medieval times. Hence this lycanthropic devil or demon turns up printed on many pages.

Johan Martensen van Steenhuisen — 1595

The Netherlands also produced explicit werewolf prosecutions.

In Arnhem in 1595, Johan Martensen van Steenhuisen confessed that the Devil had made him a werewolf several years earlier. He claimed to have belonged to a pack of approximately eight to ten wolves commanded by Satan and accused himself of harming people and animals.

During his periods as a wolf, he reportedly remained conscious but could not speak.

He was executed on 7 August 1595 by strangulation and burning.

The case illustrates how completely lycanthropy could become absorbed into the standard European witchcraft model: transformation, Satan, harmful magic, confession, and execution.

Jacques Roulet: The Werewolf of Angers — 1598

In 1598, Jacques Roulet was arrested after the mutilated body of a boy was discovered in the woods.

Roulet was reportedly found nearby, wounded and partially naked. He confessed to murder and claimed that a magical salve enabled him to transform into a wolf. He also claimed to have killed and eaten other victims.

What makes Roulet’s case unusual is its outcome.

Although initially sentenced to death for murder, cannibalism, and lycanthropy, his sentence was reconsidered. He was eventually judged mentally deficient or disturbed and was confined for religious instruction rather than executed.

The case therefore stands at the boundary between the supernatural and medical interpretations of lycanthropy.

The Woodsman and the Wolf-Woman — 1615

French physician Jean de Nynauld included another werewolf account in his 1615 work De la lycanthropie, transformation et extase des sorciers.

A woodsman was supposedly attacked by a wolf and managed to cut off one of its legs. The wolf immediately became a woman.

According to the account, she was subsequently burned.

Again we encounter the same persistent theme: injury exposes the supposedly hidden human identity of the animal.

Hans the Werewolf — Estonia, 1651

In seventeenth-century Estonia, an eighteen-year-old man named Hans was prosecuted for lycanthropy and witchcraft.

Hans admitted that he had been a werewolf for approximately two years. Remarkably, he claimed that he had acquired the condition after being bitten by a man dressed in black who was himself a werewolf.

The court interpreted the mysterious man as the Devil and concluded that Hans must therefore have entered into a Satanic relationship, despite his denial of such a pact.

He was executed.

The case is particularly striking to modern readers because transformation through a werewolf bite has become one of the defining rules of modern werewolf fiction. Historically, however, the bite was only one among many possible explanations for becoming a werewolf.

The Wolf of Ansbach — 1685

Not every historical “werewolf” was accused of being a living human being.

In 1685, the German territory of Ansbach suffered a series of attacks by a real wolf that killed livestock and eventually attacked people.

Local inhabitants came to believe that the animal was actually their hated former mayor, returned from the dead in wolf form.

After hunters killed the wolf, its corpse was treated as though it were human. Its muzzle was altered, it was dressed in clothing, supplied with a human-looking mask, and publicly displayed.

The Wolf of Ansbach is therefore particularly interesting because it connects three traditions normally treated separately: the dangerous wolf, the werewolf, and the returning dead.

Thiess of Kaltenbrun: The Hound of God — 1692

One of the strangest werewolf trials in European history took place in Jürgensburg, Livonia, in 1692.

An elderly man named Thiess, approximately eighty years old, openly declared that he was a werewolf.

But Thiess did not confess to serving Satan.

He claimed exactly the opposite.

Thiess described werewolves as the Hounds of God. Several times each year, he said, they descended into hell to fight witches, sorcerers, and the servants of the Devil. Their purpose was to recover grain and agricultural fertility stolen from the community.

Without the werewolves, the harvest would fail.

The judges repeatedly attempted to make Thiess accept the conventional Christian interpretation that werewolves served Satan. He refused. He even claimed that the souls of werewolves went to heaven after death because they had fought on God’s side.

Thiess was not executed. He was sentenced to whipping for superstition and idolatry.

His testimony is extraordinarily important because it reveals that beneath the Christian demonological stereotype there survived a radically different conception of the werewolf—as a supernatural defender of the community.

Historian Carlo Ginzburg later compared the case with the Italian Benandanti, visionary fighters who likewise claimed to battle witches spiritually in defence of crops and fertility.

The Livonian Werewolf Trials

The Livonian and Estonian material deserves special attention because it demonstrates what could happen when indigenous folklore encountered the imported demonology of Christian authorities.

Many Baltic peasants retained pre-Christian or only partially Christianized beliefs well into the seventeenth century. Their ideas concerning magic and werewolves did not necessarily involve Satan at all.

A person might possess a wolfskin, travel in animal form, fight other supernatural beings, or cause harm through magical transformation without understanding these activities as participation in a Christian Satanic conspiracy.

The courts thought differently.

When peasants described magical transformation, judges could reinterpret their testimony according to the familiar European witchcraft model: the wolfskin became a gift from the Devil, supernatural travel became witchcraft, and the werewolf became a servant of Satan.

Between 1527 and 1725, numerous men and women were accused in Livonian werewolf proceedings.

Some testified that another person or supernatural being had given them wolfskins. Others claimed that transformation followed eating particular substances.

In 1636, for example, a woman from Kurna reportedly claimed that an older woman had taken her into the forest, given her berries to eat, and that the two subsequently hunted in the woods as wolves.

Nor was the wolf the only possible animal form. Testimony from 1633 described people supposedly becoming wolves while a female companion assumed the form of a bear.

As late as 1696, testimony referred to a pack of eleven werewolves hunting in the forests.

The Baltic trials consequently provide some of the strongest evidence that European werewolf belief cannot simply be reduced to Christian witchcraft. Older indigenous ideas were repeatedly being translated—sometimes forcibly—into the theological vocabulary of interrogators.

Werewolf, Witch, Shaman or Spirit Traveller?

This raises a larger question.

What did people actually mean when they claimed that someone became a wolf?

There was probably never a single answer.

Some accusations may have followed attacks by real wolves. Some were connected with murder or cannibalism. Others arose from mental illness, dreams, altered states, folklore, coercive interrogation, religious persecution, or confessions extracted under torture.

But another category deserves attention: traditions of spiritual transformation.

Across many cultures, shamans, witches, sorcerers, and other magical specialists are said to send out their souls, doubles, familiars, or animal forms while their physical bodies remain elsewhere.

European werewolf traditions occasionally display exactly this structure.

This does not prove that supernatural transformation objectively occurred. It does, however, suggest that treating every historical account merely as a primitive belief that a human skeleton physically changed into a wolf skeleton may misunderstand what some witnesses and practitioners themselves thought was happening.

The Werewolf and the Witch

Werewolf and witch traditions overlap repeatedly.

Both may use magical ointments. Both travel at night. Both may possess animal familiars or assume animal shapes. Both were accused of harming crops, livestock, children, and neighbours. Both could be incorporated into narratives of Satanic pacts.

The boundary between them was consequently porous.

In some traditions, a witch became the animal. In others, she projected an animal-shaped double. Elsewhere she commanded an actual animal or sent a familiar to perform her will.

These differences mattered less to early modern prosecutors than they do to modern folklorists. To the demonologist, all could be interpreted as manifestations of witchcraft.

Werewolves and Vampires

Werewolves also intersect surprisingly often with vampire traditions.

This is particularly evident in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, where terminology associated with the wolf-shifter could become attached to the returning dead. Greek vrykolakas, for example, ultimately belongs to the same linguistic family as South Slavic werewolf terms.

The reason is not difficult to understand.

Both creatures represent a violation of the normal boundary separating categories. The werewolf crosses the boundary between human and animal. The vampire crosses the boundary between living and dead.

In some traditions, these boundaries overlap. A person capable of becoming a wolf during life might be considered especially likely to become a dangerous revenant after death.

The clean distinction between werewolf and vampire is therefore partly the product of later literature and popular culture.

Cynocephaly Is Not Lycanthropy

Dog-headed humans, or cynocephali, are sometimes confused with werewolves but belong to a different tradition.

The word derives from Greek kynokephaloi, “dog-headed.” Ancient and medieval writers described distant peoples possessing human bodies and canine heads, and such creatures frequently appeared in manuscripts, maps, chronicles, and travel literature.

Cynocephali do not normally transform between human and animal form. Their canine appearance is permanent.

Lycanthropy, by contrast, is fundamentally about transformation or dual identity.

The distinction is worth maintaining, especially when interpreting medieval illustrations that modern viewers may automatically label as werewolves.

A cynocephalus – From the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)

From Werewolf Trials to Modern Werewolf Fiction

By the eighteenth century, prosecutions for supernatural lycanthropy gradually disappeared, just as the great European witch hunts declined.

The werewolf itself survived.

Folklore preserved stories of wolfskins, magical belts, curses, animal doubles, wounded shape-shifters, and nocturnal transformation. Romantic and Gothic writers subsequently rediscovered this material, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature transformed it again.

Modern cinema eventually standardized several features that had never been universal in older folklore: involuntary transformation during the full moon, transmission through a bite, vulnerability to silver, and the hybrid half-human, half-wolf body familiar from horror movies.

The historical werewolf was far less standardized.

He—or she—might be a witch, criminal, enchanted prince, cursed victim, cannibal, spirit traveller, servant of Satan, protector of the harvest, or simply a human being accused of crimes that a frightened community could only explain by imagining a wolf in human form.

That diversity is what makes the historical records so fascinating.

Behind the fictional monster lies a genuine chapter of European history in which courts investigated werewolves, witnesses testified about them, theologians debated them, folklorists recorded them—and some of the accused paid for the belief with their lives.