Tag Archives: werewolf

by jfwknifton | October 27, 2016 · 12:33 pm

A Werewolf in Yorkshire: Eeh bah gum (again) !

I told you in previous articles that there were more werewolves about than you might think. News came in recently, on Sunday May 15th, of werewolf sightings near Hull in East Yorkshire. The national newspaper, the Daily Express, took up the story. Here is a highly abridged version:

“Seven separate eye witnesses claim to have spotted the 8ft tall creature lurking in an abandoned industrial area outside the centre of Hull.

Residents and folklore experts believe the beast is Old Stinker who, according to legend, is a foul-breathed creature in the Yorkshire Wolds.
The lonely banks of Barmston Drain are where the creature was first reported before Christmas.
One woman claims to have seen it turn from man to beast as she stood on the bridge”:

She said: “It was stood upright one moment. The next it was down running like a dog. I was terrified.
It bounded along, then stopped and reared up on its back legs, before running down the embankment towards the water.
It vaulted thirty feet over to the other side and vanished into some allotments. It both ran on all two legs and on all fours, as if with the qualities of both human and wolf.”

A couple saw “something tall and hairy” eating a German Shepherd dog next to the Drain.
They saw it jump an 8ft high fence before vanishing into the night, its prey still in its jaws.

I have a link to that. Something tall and hairy, eating a German Shepherd dog?

A woman walking her dog spotted something “half-man, half-dog” in the distance.
She was terrified, and her pet began shaking and refused to go any further:

Well, this monster could well have become a minor source of tourist revenue, particularly with the right people in the right costumes. Unfortunately, though, the locals chose to shoot themselves in the foot.

Leave well alone?? Rake in the cash?? No. No. NO!

Let’s take the high risk strategy of going to look for “Old Stinker”, the moment the next full moon raises her beautiful head. Notice how the local councillor just can’t keep away, and his almost childlike faith in Hull Council:

“Now locals plan a werewolf hunt with cameras and recording equipment. Councillor Steve Wilson has offered to keep an incident log: “I am happy to keep a diary of sightings by people around here and report them to Hull Council.”

Just one step from the Stasi.

Local author Charles Christian said: “Old Stinker was actually said to be operating on the other side of the Yorkshire Wolds but it would be no distance at all for a large animal to get to Hull.”

What faith in the public transport system. Why, it’s probably run by Hull Council:

Mike Covell, an expert in the supernatural, said: “No one really knows what to do. You can hardly pop down the local council office or police station and say you’d like to report a werewolf.”

Well, Mike, have I got news for you. That is exactly what everybody has been doing. On a discussion forum, watertight evidence was provided of previous werewolves in Yorkshire by “wmysteries90″:

“I had one witness claim they saw a huge dog which stood up, jumped over a fence and then run off with a cattle animal.(sic) Then his friend came forward to his fried stating he had seen a huge dog in the same area. (sic) A woman claimed she heard a strange howl. While a former military guy with an undisclosed area on the moors stated that few years back with a routine team in the middle of the night they had the sense of being watched by something.

Also there have been claims made by people around the moors stating that they have either seen or heard strange howls, growls.”

Indeed, the Daily Mail were to concentrate more fully on placing the “Barmston Drain Dog Destroyer” in its proper context, once they had established that the Werewolf Councillor was from the Labour Party.

Old Stinker, therefore, was supposed to haunt the “Wold Newton Triangle” (the what??), an area known for mysterious activity (really?):

“For centuries, tales have circulated of zombies, ghosts, and Old Stinker – a great hairy beast with red eyes, who was so called because he had bad breath…people would glimpse the rear lights of a car in front, but it would reveal itself to be the red eyes of a wolf.”

How often that has happened to me. Although driving a 1994 Volvo I don’t catch up too many cars, or werewolves, for it to be a real problem. Well, it’s not as bad as ice or sudden banks of fog.

If you want to investigate further the question of “How gullible can people get?”, then this is a similar story, set in the same area, but harking back in the “Golden Age of Satanic Panic”.

My previous story about the “Barmston Drain Dog Destroyer” and the “Golden Age of Satanic Panic” was soon followed in the national press by the story of two people who saw what they thought was a puma type creature as they returned home along country lanes around Pershore in Worcestershire in the early hours of the morning:

They suddenly saw a “muscular black animal” in the middle of the road. It was around one metre long and they were forced into an emergency stop. The creature circled the car and appeared to be about as tall as the car window. Its eye reflection was green. Frightened, the couple drove off, but not before they had noticed what they took to be the eyes of the creature’s mate hiding in the darkness of the hedgerow:

There have apparently been other sightings of puma type animals elsewhere in the county, at Evesham, Malvern and in the Malvern Hills.

Indeed, there are continuing reports of pumas or ABCs as they are called (Alien Big Cats) all over the country. In Leicestershire, for example, experts have said that there are two territories which overlap around the East Midlands Airport at Castle Donington. Rutland Water is included in one of them:

Even I have seen one, while I was trying out my new “see in the dark” binoculars. I thought it was a fox at the time, but I now realise that foxes don’t have long curved tails, wide faces or big round ears. There are even videos of these killer cats. This one comes from AnimalInfoTV, who produce a great number of really interesting looking videos on a number of different subjects. I would commend them to you:

Going back to the “Puma of Pershore” though, what makes this news story quite extraordinary, however, is the fact that when the couple did a drawing of what they had seen, because a werewolf had been spotted near Hull around the same time, the consensus of opinion suddenly became that they had actually seen the “Worcestershire Werewolf” rather than the “Puma of Pershore”.

Well, here is their drawing. Make your own mind up. “Worcestershire Werewolf”?? or the “Puma of Pershore”??

I went to Pershore twitching once. It’s a really lovely place. It was to see a Black-throated Thrush, which was at the time, a mega-rarity:

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Filed under Cryptozoology, History, Humour, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Alien Big Cat, Castle Donington, East Midlands Airport, Pershore, puma, Rutland Water, Volvo, werewolf, Worcestershire

by jfwknifton | February 14, 2016 · 9:08 am

The Wolves of Paris

I have always thought that France was fairly unlucky as a country to have been ravaged over the centuries by various Beasts, the majority of which nobody has been able to identify with 100% certainty. They have all been dismissed as merely oversized wolves, perhaps with attitude problems, but, somehow, I just cannot agree with that. Too many people who saw wolves perhaps three or four times a week were completely puzzled when they saw the Beast of Gévaudan, for example:

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Or when they saw the Beast of Benais or the Beast of Sarlat or the Beast of Auxerrois/ Trucy or the others whose individual blogposts I have not yet launched out into “Le Monde du Blogging”. Creatures such as the Beast of Lyonnais or the Beast of Cévennes/Gard/Vivarais or the Beast of Caen and Chaigny or the Beast of Orléans or the Beast of Veyreau. The Beast of Cinglais or the Beast of Gâtinais. The blood splattered list goes on.
What I did not realise, though, is that there are completely documented and wholly accepted historical accounts which detail attacks on Paris by wolves. And not just one wolf or even one pack of wolves. These were a whole series of large scale attacks by animals which broke all of our present day rules of how to be a politically correct wolf. They gleefully attacked and ate people. French people. Parisians:

The first wolf invasion came during the winter of 1419-1420. Over Europe as a whole, the weather that winter was unbelievably cold. In the east, in what is now Turkey, the Bosphorus was completely frozen over and it was possible to walk over the ice from Üsküdar to Istanbul, which was then called Constantinople.

In Western Europe, virtually all of France had already been made wretched by the debilitating effects of the Hundred Years War which was to last, rather inaccurately, 116 years, from 1337–1453:

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The winter of 1419-1420 was equally severe over the whole country with very low temperatures and copious amounts of snow falling for prolonged periods. Paris was occupied by the English and the famine there was so great that unfortunate Parisians spent all of their daylight hours wandering around just searching for food. Numerous packs of wolves, as hungry as the people, advanced into the suburbs of the capital, which was now just a vast, frozen wasteland. The River Seine froze over and people could cross over from one side to the other without problem:

Two years later, in 1421-1422, there was another winter of almost unbelievable severity. Wolves again entered the city. Every night they roamed around the streets of Paris, dug up recently buried corpses in the local graveyards and ate them. Anybody who tried to intervene was ripped to pieces and eaten, presumably, as a second course. Any wolves which were killed were strung up in the streets by their back legs the following morning, as a perhaps, slightly over optimistic warning to the rest.

It was so cold during this winter that bottles of wine, grape juice and vinegar froze in the cellars of Parisian houses and in some cases icicles formed on the vaults of cellar roofs. The River Seine, which had previously been in spate, froze over in less than three days and the ice quickly became firm enough to walk on. On January 12th 1422, there began in the French capital what was considered at the time to be the most severe spell of cold ever experienced by man.
The River Seine froze completely throughout its entire length. Wells froze after four days. This harsh cold persisted for almost three weeks. To compound Parisian misery, a couple of days before the beginning of this extremely cold weather, there had been a heavy snowfall. Because of the severity of this snow and the subsequent extreme cold, people were completely unable to work. Instead, they resorted to jumping games, playing ball and other vigorous activities to keep warm. The freezing conditions were so intense that the ice in the streets and public squares persisted until March 25th. It was so cold that on the heads of cockerels and hens, their combs froze:

Equally surprisingly, there were no wolves reported in Paris during the extremely harsh winter of 1433-1434. The big freeze began on December 31st 1433 and then lasted for nine days short of three months. After this, another severely cold period followed, from March 31st 1434 until April 17th 1434. Just as a comparison, during this particular winter, the entire River Thames in England had frozen completely solid from December to February and remained completely impassable to shipping.
The wolves, though, were back with a vengeance in the second Parisian “Winter of the Wolf”, “L’Hiver du Loup”. This came in 1437–1438, when the weather was equally, if not more, glacial.
The River Seine again froze over completely and packs of wolves wandered into the French capital, roaming the streets in search of food. Here is an anachronistic photo of the River Seine, frozen over in 1437. How can you tell that, mon cher Sherlock?

In actual fact, there had been five unbelievably cold winters in succession over the whole of the European continent, and this was the last of the five. In England, the famine was so severe from 1437-39 that it was second only to the worst years ever in 1315-1317. These latter years were so wet that virtually all the nation’s crops failed and as many as 10% of the population may have eventually perished, in a decade characterised by crime, disease, mass death and cannibalism.

From 1437-1439, though, the winter cold was such that the English people in the countryside were driven to attempt to make bread from fern roots and ivy berries. An unbelievably prudent Mayor of London had avoided this situation in the capital by importing a good supply of rye from Prussia. This may have been Mayor William Estfeld (1437) or Mayor Robert Large (1439) but personally I would go for Stephen Broun the Grocer (1438).

The only record of wolves in Paris which I have been able to trace during these three years of 1437-1439 came as early as the last week of the month of September 1439, when a desperate pack entered the city in search of fresh meat. They ripped out the throats of around fourteen people and duly devoured them. This occurred in the area between Montmartre in the north of the city:

And the Porte Saint-Antoine in the east, right next to the Bastille prison:

From 1450-1850, and possibly beyond that, into the early years of the twentieth century, the so-called Little Ice Age held sway over Europe. In 1457-1458 in Germany, for example, extreme cold froze the Danube River to such a thickness that an army of 40,000 men was able to camp on the ice. Two years, later during the winter of 1459-1460, the entire Baltic Sea was frozen and people could cross between Denmark, Germany and Sweden both on foot and on horseback:

In France, the most severe weather came right at the beginning of the Little Ice Age during their very worst winter of 1449-1450. During this period the weather in France was very wet, extremely cold, and there were, consequently, huge quantities of snow. Indeed, the winter had begun as early as October 1449, when large numbers of olive trees began to die of the cold across the whole country.

It was during this exceptional winter that Paris became the victim of its most famous attack by man-eating wolves, “des loups anthropophages” (a very useful mouthful, should you ever need the phrase on holiday, or perhaps wish to prove your sobriety to a French police officer).

This pack, “The Wolves of Paris”, (Oh somebody, form a Heavy Metal Band…the name is crying out for it!), “Les Loups de Paris”, are thought to have killed and eaten large numbers of hapless human victims of all ages over the course of the winter. The animals initially entered Paris through the very large holes in its dilapidated city walls, which had been built some 250 years previously in the early 13th century. Of course, the original builder, King Philippe Auguste, had intended the walls to protect the city from human invaders rather than animal predators:

The leader of the pack was a wolf named “Courtaud” which means “Bobtail”, as he had a tail which had been “docked” or shortened in some unknown incident. The descriptions of “Courtaud” at the time said that he was reddish in colour, not really a pigment that you would expect in a pure 100% common, Eurasian or Middle Russian forest wolf as the subspecies canis lupus lupus is variously known across Europe. Suggestions have been made that its unusual colour was because it was an Iberian Wolf canis lupus signatus on its holidays from Spain, but there is a problem with that. As far as I can see, the Iberian Wolf is not particularly reddish. Here he is. Just look at that blood:

According to the Wikipedia entry in the link above, canis lupus signatus has a lighter build than the European Wolf, some white marks on the upper lips, dark marks on the tail and a pair of dark marks in its front legs. There is no mention of red.
Don’t get me started, but my explanation for all those various Beasts (bêtes féroces, bêtes dévorantes ou bêtes anthropophages) which ravaged France over the centuries now comes into its own. I believe that they were members of a more aggressive, larger and now extinct species of wolf. If any unusual colour is mentioned for La Bête du Gévaudan, La Bête de Cinglais, La Bête de Caen, La Bête du Lyonnais or La Bête du Vivarais, it is always, exclusively, red. And, as we have just seen, Courtaud too had fur of this colour.

That is why I just do not believe that ordinary wolves were responsible for these blood spattered killings. And anyway, aren’t ordinary wolves a friendly looking bunch of chaps? They would not dream of eating anybody:

At first, there were around twenty wolves in the Parisian pack and they killed dozens of people. Gradually, wolf numbers built up, and the list of victims grew longer and longer. In the first month, supposedly around forty people perished, with a total kill for the whole winter of several hundred. They included, for the most part, anybody the wolves found wandering around the city at night, or any individuals who were outside sleeping rough. Inevitably, the inhabitants of Paris in that winter of 1449-1450 were swept by a feeling of total panic. Attempts to kill the wolves in their dens were totally ineffective. The wolves became so self confident that they often enjoyed a sing-song on their way back from the pub:

Eventually, though, Parisians became increasingly enraged that it was no longer safe to walk the streets of their beautiful city. Furious at all the deaths, a brave group of volunteers found a couple of unwanted cows and killed them. Then they set off, dragging the mutilated corpses along behind them on ropes, so that they left a bloodied trail. Eventually, the wolves began to follow the scent, and slowly, slowly, Courtaud and his bloodthirsty colleagues were lured and prodded into the very heart of the city:

When the wolves reached the Ile de la Cité (middle of the map), they arrived at the large square in front of the cathedral of Notre Dame, which is called the Parvis Notre Dame. Here they were trapped, surrounded by pre-prepared wooden barricades. Here is Notre Dame cathedral. See if you can spot the hunchback:

And here is the large square in front of the cathedral, which is really quite extensive in size. I wouldn’t like to have chased a pack of wolves across here:

Finally, the angry Parisians stoned and speared the entire pack, until every single wolf was dead. Courtaud was paraded dead around the city in a cart, pulled by the triumphant crowd. Here is one of those bizarre modern art exhibitions which was held in Paris recently. I don’t suppose it’s Courtaud and his pals from 1449-1450, but I do hope that no real wolves died to make it:

I do not really believe that Paris’ historical scrapes with wolves have necessarily finished. Grey wolves were completely extirpated from France in the 1920s and 1930s, but ten years ago they started entering the country again from Italy. There are now around 300 wolves in France and the farmers allege that they have killed more than 6,000 sheep in the last twelve months. The woods around Paris are well stocked with deer and boar and they would make an ideal hunting ground for wolves. Indeed, this year, wolves have been sighted just 40 miles from the city:

Presumably preparing the Parisian populace for the latest lupine invasion, there are a number of different books available, all of which are all entitled “The Wolves of Paris”:

The first is by Michael Wallace:

“It’s the winter of 1450 and Paris is in a panic. A pack of ravenous wolves is loose in the city, feasting on human flesh. Lorenzo Boccaccio is summoned by a Dominican inquisitor who….”

The second is by Daniel P Mannix and a reviewer promises:

“an extraordinary story with verve and deft pacing. In the reading of what is a tale of high drama, building remorselessly to the climax…”

After that remorseless climax, where next, but the boxset by Lance Roddick, also available in separate sections:

One of the sections has a wonderful review:

“The book started off talking about the hard times France was going through.”

You don’t say!

If you can, always finish a blogpost with a song. And what else could it be except…

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as anthropophage, Auxerre, Auxerrois, Baltic, Benais, Bosphorus, Caen, Cévennes, Chaigny, Cinglais, Courtaud, Danube, Denmark, england, Europe, European Wolf, famine, France, Gard, Gatinais, Gay Werewolf, Gévaudan, Germany, Hundred Years War, Iberian Wolf, Little Ice Age, Lyonnais, Notre Dame, Orléans, Parisian, Parvis Notre Dame, Philippe Auguste, Sarlat, Seine, Spain, Sweden, Thames, the Shangri-Las, The Wolves of Paris, Trucy, Turkey, Veyreau, Vivarais, werewolf, winter, wolf, wolves

by jfwknifton | February 6, 2016 · 9:01 am

Werewolves in Yorkshire: Ee bah gum !

I have written a good deal, some would say too much, about the monsters which terrorized France between 1500 and the end of the nineteenth century. The most conservative zoologists say that the so-called monsters were just wolves behaving badly. Other more daring individuals say they were cave hyenas or dire wolves or waheelas or whatever:

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I personally think that they were some kind of Superwolf which was like generally pretty much like an ordinary wolf in appearance, but with enough differences in behaviour to stand out from the rest. Just enough for the French peasant of 1764-1767 to think to himself, “C’était comme un loup, mais ce n’était pas un loup.”
What I have never imagined as the solution to this blood spattered conundrum is the werewolf. In French, it is the Loup-garou:

The Americans in those areas of the USA which have a French heritage call it the Rougarou, rather as if somebody in 1700 had slightly misheard the word. Given that the Rougarou allegedly lives in the bayou and perhaps makes a “Wooo-hooo” call, I have always been somewhat surprised that no aspiring songwriter has ever taken up this subject.

Nobody, though, would expect there to be any claims of werewolves, Loup-garou or Rougaroux in England, but, of course, there have been. I visited a forum recently, and they mentioned not one, but several.

In two cases, back in the day, they were unknown creatures that attacked livestock and left a trail of blood and gore. That could have been anything, of course, perhaps even the first Alien Big Cats in the country but much more likely to have been just feral dogs, which regularly kill both people and livestock in far larger numbers than either wolves or werewolves:

There was mention of a genuine werewolf near Ripon, Yorkshire, in the 1920s and then another in Edale, Lancashire, in 1925. It was described by the forum contributor, Jerry_B as “some large animal…tearing sheep to bits”. Sounds like it’s back to those feral dogs to me.
A bloodsucking equivalent of these two werewolves, allegedly, was the monster “on the prowl in 1905, at Badminton (Gloucester)”.
All of these seem extremely far-fetched in my humble opinion, but there is one interesting English werewolf tale which features very widely on the Internet. For me though, it is a superb example of putting a couple of interesting facts together, and then using them to come to a fairly ridiculous conclusion. After that, everybody is more than happy to view this iffy conclusion as completely sensible and to consider it henceforth as hard fact. No need to bother about questioning the reasoning process. If you still don’t understand what I’m getting at, then treat yourself to the finest example I know of, namely any episode whatsoever in the “Ancient Aliens” TV series.

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First of all, though, for the sake of argument, I am willing to accept the supposition, for the moment, that wolves in England, centuries ago, were capable of behaviour that, nowadays, would be dismissed as being highly unlikely. That behaviour, of course, would be to treat human beings as a prey item and to attack them as a matter of ordinary routine:

Whatever you may think about that as a supposition, the author, John Harries, in his book “A Ghost Hunter’s Road Book”, states that things were so bad in Saxon times that, presumably at the behest of King Aethelstan:

“ about the year 940 AD a hostel was built in the village of Flixton to shelter wayfarers in wintertime from attacks by wolves. At that period packs of the animals were not uncommon in the north of the country, and they were regarded with particular loathing because in times of severe weather they scavenged in graveyards.”

That statement is by no means outrageous, although it would be nice to know where the story originally came from. After all, there cannot be too many sources available to be cited when it comes to events more than a thousand years ago in 940 AD.
What tips it over the edge, though, is the next piece of rather iffy logic:

“Their cunning in discovering unprotected cattle, their boldness in attacking travellers, and their habit of suddenly descending in large numbers on an area where they had previously been unknown, all helped to give rise to the belief that the animals were not ordinary wolves but human beings who adopted a travesty of wolf shape by night.”

Wolves capable of finding “unprotected cattle”? How unusual! How unprecedented! I’m sure that has never happened in the northern states of the USA.

“Descending in large numbers” to a source of easy food? How extraordinary for a pack predator to be any good at doing that!

The wolf is one of the most widespread and successful predators on the planet. So why do we need to explain his achievements as the work of werewolves? And not even ordinary werewolves at that…

“Their nocturnal exploits were supposed to be organised by a wizard whose innocent appearance enabled him to gather information about cattle, sheep and human wayfarers in taverns and market places.”

Look out! There’s a wizard about!! Careless talk costs lives!!

Flixton, by the way, is in Yorkshire, in the north of England, near Scarborough. Look for the orange arrow:

Here is a more detailed map:

Further details about the Flixton Werewolf were that he has glowing red eyes and a particularly bad body odour. (Don’t say it!) Reports supposedly began all over again in 1150, although by now he had grown a very long tail. In 1800 a stagecoach making its way to York was supposedly attacked by an apparent werewolf. In 1970, the Flixton Werewolf made an unsuccessful attempt at attacking a long distance lorry. Easy prey, of course:

All these additional details, and a succession of precise dates, all help to give the story of a werewolf in Yorkshire veracity and credence, of course.

I was able to find mention on the Internet of just a two other werewolves in England, both of them in Devon (in the Valley of the Rocks in Lynton and the Valley of the Doones on Exmoor). On the latter occasion, a Victorian lady walking home in the dark saw a grey man with a wolf’s head, apparently stalking a large rabbit. The grey man disappeared when he was disturbed by a stag emerging suddenly from some nearby woodland.
Funnily enough, this apparently bizarre tale of the grey man with a wolf’s head sounds a lot more probable to me. If you have read my articles about Shuck and then the Wolfmen in the USA, you may recall that the almost cute behaviour of this grey man with a wolf’s head is much more typical of these cryptocanids:

Much more interesting than the Flixton Werewolf though, was the article I found by Nick Redfern about Wolfmen in the Cannock Chase German Cemetery. Nick’s approach is much more studied and cautious, and it is remarkable how close his “2+2” comes to equalling the “4” of Linda S.Godfrey in her description of such entities as the Beast of Bray Road and the Michigan Dogman. Reports mentioned by Nick include:

“Nick Duffy, of the West Midlands Ghost Club, reported that “The first person to contact us was a postman, who told us he had seen what he thought was a werewolf. He saw what he believed was a large dog, but when he got closer, the creature got on his hind legs and ran away.”

The next report was:

“A local scout-leader reported that: “It just looked like a huge dog. But when I slammed the door of my car it reared up on its back legs and ran into the trees. It must have been about six to seven feet tall.”

Both of these pieces of behaviour come much, much closer to the Dogmen and Werewolves of the USA. If you read Linda S.Godfrey, you will see that the majority of these monsters prefer not to attack but to run away:

Let’s finish with two things. Firstly a question. Why do you always have to shoot a werewolf with a silver bullet to kill it?

It’s because back in the days of muskets and similar hit-and-miss weapons, accuracy was way below today’s standards, as was killing power. One, albeit expensive, way to improve both was to discard the third rate bullets of the day, and make your own, rock hard, bullets from…you’ve guessed it! Silver.
And secondly I was unaware that when they were filming that classic tale “An American Werewolf In London”, the opening scenes on the Yorkshire moors were all filmed in Wales because “Yorkshire didn’t look Yorkshire enough”:

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Filed under Cryptozoology, History, Humour, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as American Werewolf In London, Beast of Bray Road, Flixton, Flixton Werewolf, King Aethelstan, loup garou, Michigan Dogman, Rougarou, Shuck, werewolf, Yorkshire

by jfwknifton | January 18, 2016 · 11:11 am

The Beast of Veyreau….another cannibal killer!

One more man eating monster to terrorise the local peasants of France was the “Bête de Veyreau”. At a time and in a place both relatively close to the Beast of Gevaudan, his bloodsoaked career peaked from 1799 onwards as he laid waste to an area of France called the “Causse Noir” or “Black Causse”. This beautiful countryside is situated more or less in the south of the Massif Central. Here is the old province of Rouergue, whose capital was Rodez:

And this is a more detailed map, with a red square in the extreme east representing the village of Veyreau. The orange arrow refused to travel abroad:

The province directly to the east of the green area is Gévaudan. The “Causse Noir” or “Black Causse” is dry, rugged and rocky.

There are many mountainous areas and some notable gorges such as the “Gorges de la Jonte”:

Normally, the best approach for these French monsters is to take an average of the various French websites. In this case however, that is not really going to work, because, as far as I can see, more or less every account of this creature is virtually the same, and probably owes a great deal to Wikipedia:

“The Beast of Veyreau was a man eating animal which ravaged an area in the “Causse Noir” not too far from Gevaudan, from 1799 onwards. This was an area where livestock were raised and is nowadays part of the Département of Aveyron. These attacks filled the inhabitants with such immense fear, and the Beast had so many “dozens of victims”, that the locals thought the Beast of Gévaudan had come to their region.”

I have been able to find one person who could expand a little on that:

“around the year 1799, there appeared in the country a beast which filled all the inhabitants with great fear. Its build was slimmer and more willowy than a wolf. Its way of walking had such agility that it was seen first in one place, but then four or five minutes later in a different place perhaps several miles away. And woe betide any child that might meet the creature. The Beast would carry them off and eat them , first the liver and then the limbs. In the space of six months this beast killed three victims including a boy of six whose limbs they found hidden in the earth in the Malbouche Ravine, in the very same place which was, people used to say, the haunt of the ogre.”

Mention of “The Ogre” will lead me neatly to another blogpost in the future, when this long series of familiar crazed creatures, blood soaked beasts, maniacal monsters, feral dogs, wolf-dog hybrids, wolves with attitude or whatever nasty four legged beast you can imagine, becomes just for a few hundred words, a two legged cannibal killer, with the supercool name of Jean Grin.

To get back to the story, this is the tiny village of Veyreau:

The very best version of the story of the “Bête de Veyreau” comes from a website designed to “découvrir et aimer la Lozère”, in other words to “discover and love La Lozère”, which is one of the most beautiful and picturesque areas of the “Causse Noir”. The account of the Beast below is quoted directly from the parish records of the village of Veyreau, which were collected together in 1870 by the then parish priest, Père Casimir Fages. The road sign below shows that two languages were/are spoken in this southern part of France. “Veirau” is the village name in Occitan. Try the Wikipedia website to read about this ancient language. You will find a really interesting use of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has been translated into a number of widely spoken languages but then into a good number of others such as Occitan, Gascon, Provençal and half a dozen others. At the very least, it has a wonderful moving map which you can click to enlarge:

As was so often the case in old France, the parish priest was the only literate person in the immediate area, and it was for him to record the history of tiny villages such as Veyreau. Père Fages’ church is still there:

The hard work for this website has all been done by an extremely dedicated gentleman, Monsieur Bernard Soulier. Bernard is the President of the Association “In the country of the Beast of Gévaudan”, in French, “Au pays de la Bête du Gévaudan”. This organisation is based in Auvers, a small village in the Haute Loire district.

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Here is Père Fages’ story:

“Around the year 1799, there appeared in the country, especially around the village of Paliès, a beast that filled all the people immense fear; its size was slimmer than a wolf ; Its way of walking had such agility that it was seen in one place, and four or five minutes later it was seen in another place perhaps a league away. It had the head and muzzle of a large greyhound ; it used to come into villages in broad daylight, and woe betide any child that might meet the creature, the Beast would carry them off and eat them, first the liver and then the limbs. One summer’s day, the Beast appeared at Paliès. Children spied it from a long distance away and ran to take refuge in a tree close to a house on the northern side of the village; faster than lightning, the Beast seized one of the children, who was already two metres off the ground and carried him off into Madasse Wood. Men shearing the sheep of a local farmer, including the father of the unfortunate child, ran at top speed to the place where the Beast had gone. The noise that they made caused the Beast to abandon the little boy who was found shaking on the ground with his insides ripped out! Seeing his father looking for him, he did, however, have the strength, to shout “I’m here”, but he died a few moments later. This child aged six, was called Pierre-Jean Mauri; in the register Monsieur Arnal who carried out the baptism ceremonies in 1794 when the child was fifteen months old, has added to the margin of that register, “Devoured by the ferocious Beast”.
Fifteen days later, the Beast took a child from the farm of Graille at Rougerie. In company with his older brother, he was keeping watch over the cattle close to the natural spring of St. Martin; the elder brother tried hard to help his brother, but when the beast stood up on its hind legs, he was so frightened that he fled and went for help at Veyreau ; it was a Sunday, a large crowd came to help, and searching the Malbouche property, they found the remains of limbs that the Beast had hidden in the earth. This same beast also seized a little girl named Julien who lived in Bourjoie ; her father was busy knocking nuts down from the trees; the small children were close to the tree, and the Beast, in full view of the father, seized the little girl; the father set off after her, but he could not catch her up, and a few days later, she was found buried in the undergrowth; her liver had been eaten.
These different characteristics of the Beast filled the people of Veyreau and St André with justified fear; several people saw the Beast which accompanied them, gambolling along, jumping about, but not daring to attack adults; One day in bright sunshine, the Beast walked through the village of St André, and stopped outside the door of a weaver’s house; they took it for a dog, and at the very moment when they were going to stroke it, it disappeared in a flash. Monsieur Gaillard, the parish priest of St André, with whom I have discussed this extraordinary animal, assured me that he had heard it one evening in a small field below the duck pond, emitting howls like the braying of a donkey, something which was confirmed by several other people:

All the local poachers met to hunt the creature, but when they encountered the Beast, they said that sometimes, especially when it was being shot at, the creature rolled around on the ground but then disappeared with enormous speed. The people who were children during this era, agree how great was the terror that it produced throughout the whole region of the “Black Causse”. Never attacking men or animals, because we had seen it pass through the middle of herds of cattle and flocks of sheep without doing them any harm, the Beast targeted only children. In the course of this year, from June to December, two boys and a girl were the sad victims of its ferocity; nobody dared walk outside on their own at night, and by day everyone carried a halberd at the end of a stick to defend themselves, in case they met the creature:

What was this Beast? It could not be classified as one of the known animals in the area; Monsieur Caussignac claimed that it was a hyena; Monsieur Gaillard, the village priest of St. André, thought it was a lynx, and the common people gave it the name of “Werewolf”, in French “Loup garou”:

After some six months or a year, the creature disappeared without anybody knowing what had happened to it. About the same time, a similar beast was seen in the Sanvero woods near the village of Cornus in the Aveyron province; it almost managed eat a little girl that I was to know twenty-five years later; she was near her home in the village of Labadie, in the parish of St Rome Berlières ; her brother, older than her, rushed to her defence and grabbed her from the creature, he dragged her into the house ; through the cracks in the closed door they could see the Beast watching and waiting for some time for the prey which had escaped, only by the skin of her teeth. Indeed, a bite from the creature had taken a considerable piece of skin from her side; this scar was never to fade throughout the rest of her life:

Whatever this animal was, its appearance had an enormous impact throughout the whole area of the Black Causse. Uneducated people saw in the Beast something supernatural, especially after all the upheavals and ordeals of the recent Revolution.”

And there you have it. Yet another wolf that seems to be not quite a wolf. At the moment, I am favouring the idea that up until about two hundred years or so ago, there was a second, much fiercer and larger species of wolf living in the remote and most mountainous areas of France, some prehistoric survivor that had lingered on until the nineteenth century in ever diminishing numbers, until, after tens of thousands of years, it finally became extinct. I cannot believe that the locals were incapable of recognising an ordinary wolf when they saw one. I cannot believe either that wolves were hybridising with dogs across the whole of France to produce killer hybrids. Wolves don’t have steamy affairs with dogs. They eat them!

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Science, Uncategorized, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Aveyron, Casimir Fages, Causse Noir, Fages, Gévaudan, hyena, Jean Grin, loup garou, lynx, Occitan, ogre, Paliès, Rodez, Rouergue, werewolf, wolf

by jfwknifton | December 18, 2015 · 5:54 pm

The Beast of Lyonnais

The Beast of Lyonnais was yet another killer monster (or monsters) in the long, long series of various creatures, beasts, feral dogs, hybrid dogs, wolves with attitude, sexual psychopath or good old fashioned serial killers who have ravaged different regions of France from around 1550 until the present day, with particular reference to the period 1750-1820.

I will freely confess that I knew nothing whatsoever of this type of event until very recently, when I started reading about the Beast of Gévaudan. Then I realised that there had been a Beast of Benais, a Beast of Auxerrois/Trucy, a Beast of the Cévennes/Gard/Vivarais (it did like to travel about a bit) and then a Beast of Sarlat.
There seemed to be any number of them, and I deliberately selected the ones which seemed not to be the most obvious of wolves. This is also the case with the Beast of Lyonnais, which, as we will see, hardly any of the witnesses at the time thought was good, old canis lupus lupus, even if all the noblemen at the time told them that they were mistaken (despite the fact that none of them had ever seen it):

Once again, I will begin by looking at a number of websites written in French, offering you my own translations and you can then take your own average between them.

We start with a hoary old favourite:

“The Beast of Lyon was a man eating animal behind a series of attacks on humans. The first attack was mentioned as being in the summer of 1754. Until the end of 1756, one or more ferocious beasts then ravaged the countryside, initially between Vienne in Isère, Meyzieu and then around Savigny in the Rhône area. This or these, animals claimed about thirty victims, mostly children or teenagers. Here is Meyzieu:

In early August 1754 the Royal Notary of Vienne was summoned by the most important individuals in the parish of Luzinay to proceed with the identification of the body of a young boy who had been found devoured. We know that at least two other attacks occurred in this same area, around Villette-de-Vienne and Régnié-Durette, before the Marquis of Marcieu, the Governor of the province, ordered a large hunt to trap the beast.
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The Great Hunt took place on September 10th, 1754 and lasted two days. It mobilized around 2,000 hunters from 26 different villages, but had no effect other than increasing the extent of the predator’s territory. All trace of the Beast was lost in the last three months of 1754.

The beast resurfaced in February 1755 in the parish of Sarcey, where it killed a new victim. Until at least October, at least one death on average per month could be attributed to the creature, mainly around Savigny and L’Arbresle . There was then no more news of the creature during the winter of 1755-1756. Here is Savigny:

On Easter Tuesday, April 20th, 1756, a girl was found devoured in Saint-Julien-sur-Bibost. During this attack, for the first time, witnesses reported two beasts together.

In early 1757, the parish priest at Brietton in the parish of Sourcieux-les-Mines estimated that a total of some 25 people had been attacked in the local area since the Easter of 1755. According to the priest, the (two) creatures were wounding more people than they killed and these victims might equally well have been eaten if nobody had come to their rescue.

On November 24th 1756, the last victim was devoured and left half consumed at Montrottier. The local parish priest was the first to hypothesize that the beast might be a hyena. This hypothesis, which has been challenged by present day research, was also put forward at the time to explain the Beast of Gévaudan:

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Following this apparently final attack in November 1756, the parish registers have no further mention of people being devoured by wild beasts in the vicinity of Lyon.
The accounts of burials that we still have give comparatively little information about the animal or animals ravaging the Lyon area between 1754 and 1756. The priest of Saint-Julien-sur-Bibost is the only one to have left us any evidence:

“This April 20th 1756, I buried in the cemetery of St Julien sur Bibost Marguerite Pinet, aged about eleven, the daughter of Jean-François Pinet, a resident of this parish & Jeanne Subrin. The child was employed by Monsieur Subilon in the hamlet of Bernay in the parish of Besenay to watch over his animals in the fields”

“There were two ferocious animals, one as big as a small horse, reddish in colour, resembling a wolf, except that it had a short tail. The second animal was as big as a good sized mastiff, but it had white on the belly and a great long tail ; they seized Marguerite by the throat and neck causing enough damage to kill the child; she was buried in the presence of Mathieu Crois and Jean Guainon , witnesses required by the parish, who said they were illiterate and could not sign this form. These animals have devoured a good number of shepherds in the area. This has gone on for two years. Berbier, Priest.”

Here is a shepherdess, the meal of choice for the majority of monsters and beasts during this era. The sheep were usually ignored:

The descriptions of the time mentioned a wolf, but with shorter legs. The fur was more coarse and the skin was mottled with several different colours. The evidence of the priest at Montrottier was that rumours of a hyena had currently gained momentum.

The theory of a werewolf was equally popular at that time and was mentioned by the Marquis of Marcieu in his instructions for Great Hunt held on September 10th, 1754:
“The Officers of both the Fusiliers and the Trackers must make every effort to destroy the ordinary people’s fanatical belief in werewolves:

We must prove to them that these are just ordinary wolves which unfortunately are accustomed to eating human flesh.
Even if the woods are full of lynxes, bears and tigers, we must prove to them that these are just animals which a bullet from a rifle will kill, and which it is necessary to destroy.”

The French word “loup-cervier” appears on a number of occasions connected with these mystery monsters. I have found it impossible to trace the word in the Online dictionary which I normally use,
but Google Images for France provides any number of photographs of lynxes, mostly Canadian lynxes but also European ones. I eventually discovered that “loup-cervier” originally meant a lynx which hunts stags, and is used nowadays as a favourite metaphor for predatory financiers. “Cervier” seems to have no real existence except when attached to the word “loup” or very occasionally “chat”.

In any case, a Lynx, whether European or Canadian, is more or less out of the question as regards the Beast of Lyonnais. Lynxes are unbelievably shy and retiring creatures and it is inconceivable that they would attack human beings. In Europe their favourite prey item is Roe Deer. This is a European Lynx:

In North America, they hunt mainly Snowshoe Hares. This is a Canadian Lynx, the so-called “loup-curvier”:

To me, they are more kute than killer:

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Wikipedia carried a list of the victims of the Beast(s) of Lyonnais:

Pierre Morel (5 years old), Claudine Tardif (45), François Beloud (8), Madeleine Joubert (?),Christophe Cambria (7), Anne Tricaud (14), Pierre Guillon (10), Marie Berchoud (13), Mathieu Gervais (9), Hélène Berquet (6), Marie Berger(6), Claudine L’Hospital (8), Catherine Cusset (10), an unknown toddler(2), Jean-Marie Duboy (13), Pierre Vaché (8), Benoite Daverdi (9), Marguerite Pinet (11), Benoît Thiver (10), Pierrette Devilard (7), Étienne Manu (6), Pierre Delorme (13), Jean-Baptiste Chazaud (7), Claudine Allioud (8), Anne Tiron (10), Elisabeth Blanc (11), Benoît Mortan (12), Jean Malaval (9), Marie Lombard (10), Benoit Barroh (sic) (1), Claudine Guillot (4), Pierre Paleron (6), Jean-Baptiste Bazin (14) and Anne Sarrazin(9).

This seems to be twice the usually quoted figure of seventeen. The first victim was killed on June 5th 1754 and the last on November 24th 1756. Very roughly, the deaths occurred perhaps once or twice a month, although in some months there were no killings at all. The original list gave dates without any further details but as far as I can ascertain, there were no occasions when two victims might have been killed together. On several occasions, one victim may have been quickly followed by another at the same location, but they were always killed on different days. In some cases, the animal or animals might have returned repeatedly to kill its prey, such as at the village of Savigny (6 slayings), Saint-Pierre-de-Chandieu (3) and Saint-Romain-de-Popey (2). This is Savigny nowadays. It looks a lot quieter:

I just do not know if ordinary wolves would return to the scene of the crime like this, although all predators, both animals and birds, tend to be very much creatures of habit, following the same paths and game trails every single day.
Another familiar website tells a fairly similar tale, but comes to a very different conclusion:

In all, seventeen young men and children were bitten, ripped to pieces or even devoured. Those who saw the animal, or believed they saw it, said that it was approaching the size of a wolf, with shorter legs, a coarser coat and skin mottled with various colours-an exact portrait of a hyena.
From these accounts, people were all agreed that it was a real, genuine hyena. But who is unaware that fear may magnify things, or change them completely. The descriptions that people have given of this carnivorous animal have probably been inspired by their heated imaginations. Fleeing at top speed, how could exact measurements be taken by eye? And running along, the creature must have seemed a lot lower than he really was. The frantic motion of his entire body made his hair stand on end and lastly we know that glare changes shades of colour. Take away these circumstances from your sighting, and instead of a hyena, much more likely it was a question of a big wolf driven by famine in that harsh winter of 1754.
The excessive winter weather of 1754 forced the animals of this latter species to seek in the villages what the countryside could no longer supply to them. Moreover, the hyena is an animal entirely foreign to our climate:

How would he have got to France? Can we suppose with any degree of probability whatsoever that he has crossed the immense expanses which separate us from his native home without leaving behind any traces whatsoever of his journey?

We are forced to conclude that too often we consider something miraculous when it is nothing out of the ordinary. “

Another description was of:

“two ferocious animals, one as big as small horse, verging on red in colour, like a wolf except it had a short tail. The other was the size of a large mastiff, but it had white on its belly and a big long tail”

When I wrote about the Beast of Gévaudan and examined in some detail the solutions to the mystery, I thought that the centuries old puzzle was solved. The Chastel family was the guilty party, and in particular, long and greasy haired Antoine. But then I read about the Beast of Cévennes/Gard/Vivarais whose behaviour was nothing like that of a wolf. And then came the puzzle of the Beast of Benais who the local people actually thought at the time was the “Beast of Gévaudan on Tour”. After that, it was the Beast of Sarlat which was supposedly a rabid wolf, although none of the locals thought so, preferring a werewolf as the likely explanation:

Next came the Beast of Auxerrois/Trucy which was not a wolf, the locals said, but a tiger, a demon or a werewolf.
Throughout my articles, I had deliberately ignored obvious wolves as culprits and deliberately selected only the creatures which seemed to me not to be obvious wolves.

The enduring problem was that there just seemed to be any number of these strange creatures and so many of the “wolf but not a wolf” category. You can’t stretch the Chastel theory to explain away all of them.

Soooooo……..
I have returned to C.R. Rookwood who, in one of his blog posts, suggested that the Beast of Gévaudan, was a prehistoric mammal, a mesonychid, which were very large ancient predators with huge heads, long tails, and hooves instead of feet.

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I do not have enough scientific knowledge to be quite so precise, but I would certainly go for some kind of relict creature, a fierce animal left over from a bygone age, its ever diminishing population dwindling on in the trackless forests and mountains of south-central Europe. Perhaps it was some kind of hyena such as the Cave Hyena. These photographs give an idea of their size:

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I said that I did not think these monsters could be wolves, but the “Dire Wolf” is not a wolf. Or at the very least, it is a wolf, Jim, but not as we know it:

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Who knows? And indeed, who ever will?

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Science

Tagged as bears, Beast of Benais, Beast of Gévaudan, Chastel, hyena, Isère, loup-cervier, lynxes, mastiff, mesonychid, Meyzieu the Beast of Sarlat, Rhône, Savigny, the Beast of Auxerrois, the Beast of Cévennes/Gard/Vivarais, tigers, werewolf, wolf

by jfwknifton | October 16, 2015 · 5:47 pm

The Beast of Primarette

The Beast of Primarette is not really a top drawer Premier League monster, so the first port of call will have to be the French version of Wikipedia. Here is my own translation:

“The “Beast of Primarette” was a man eating animal responsible for a series of attacks on humans in the vicinity of the village of Primarette in the south east of France. The first attack took place in the spring of 1747. Between then and the end of the winter in 1752, seven victims were identified in the parish registers.”

Primarette is a tiny village in south eastern France. On this map, it is represented by a red dot. The orange arrow is on holiday, but not in France:

In 1747, François Malarin, the village priest of Primarette, reported the very violent death of a little boy in his parish :

“In the year 1747 and on the 23rd of May, the Tuesday of Whitsuntide, during the service of Vespers, a carnivorous wolf (loup carnassier) seized the child of François Malarin from the door of their house in the presence of his mother. She was unable to snatch the child back from the animal’s teeth. Several people returning from Vespers heard the story of this misfortune and ran into the woods, following the trail of blood left behind by the child. They found some of his limbs scattered on the ground including the head, the arms, an upper leg and a foot. These body parts were all buried in the presence of Michel and Gabriel Perrochat, father and son, Antoine Jeury, Jean Bassat, Claude Berthier and several other people who had rushed to see this sad sight. The child, aged around seven years and one month old, was the legitimate son of François Malarin from Espagnoux and Fleurice Petit. Whereof I have signed, not the witnesses, who do not know how to write.

Favre the Priest.

An “x” is appended by Michel Malarin as a supplementary act.”

A sketch is in existence:

This beast, most un-wolf-like in its behaviour, was later to claim several more victims, and the priest reported later that year the level of emotion aroused by these incidents. In the Parish Register of 1747 he wrote therefore:

“There have been this year a large crop of acorns, and carnivorous wolves have eaten three children in Primarette. It is believed that they were most probably lynxes and the common people believe that they are werewolves. Until the priests give the peasants permission to carry out hunts armed with pairs of spectacles, nothing will be able to cure their stupid credulity.”

Below is the original parish register entry, in French, of the paragraph translated above. See if you can pick out any words, such as “loups”, “carnassiers”, “loups garous” or any other words. I can’t imagine any reader would be expecting to manage to read French written by long dead Favre the Priest in 1747. Nor indeed, would he be expecting anybody to still be reading his words in 2015:

Here is a werewolf, a “loup garou” filmed by a trailcam in Wisconsin:

The last victim within the bounds of the parish of Primarette was found in 1752, but nobody was ever able to identify the animal responsible for all these attacks.

Here is a very large wolf. It will calm you down after the werewolf. This animal was filmed by a trailcam in northern Scotland:

Here is a list of the poor victims:

May 23rd 1747                       Michel Malarin, 7 years of age
June 1st 1747                          Joseph Fournier, 13 years of age
October 24th 1747                 Mathieu Roux, 5 years of age
October 11th 1748                 Benoite Pichon, 2 years of age
January 23rd 1749                Marie Peiron, 6 years of age
May 14th 1751                        Jeanne Fervonat, years of age
February 19th 1752               Marianne Boindrieux, 3 years of age

Another French website suggests that mention of the huge number of acorns, and the presence of man eating wolves may be connected in the minds of the locals at Primarette. Perhaps they had some kind of superstition about this.
It is unfortunate that no description of the beast seems to have survived, although I would continue to argue that if the locals in this area thought that all the deaths in the area were caused by lynxes or werewolves, then that in itself lends credence to the idea that it was no ordinary wolf, an animal with which they would have been only too familiar. Favre the Priest tried hard to give people in the distant future some idea, adding little sketches to the side of his manuscript:

Here is a pair of wolf’s heads:

I have enlarged some of the sketches. Again, you may be able to read some of Favre the Priest’s words:

Here is a second head, with the name “Marianne Boindrieux”:

See if you can see the signature of Favre the Priest (“curé”):

This cryptid did not behave like an ordinary wolf. A wolf does not attack people at their front door. I’m not sure either, that a wolf would run off, dismembering its victim, and scattering body parts around, almost in sheer glee. And why did the same individual wolf remain in this area from May 23rd 1747 to February 19th 1752? Or was it a number of individuals from a local population, all with the same deviant behaviour? Members of a different species, in fact? “Like a wolf, but not a wolf.”

In so many cases like this, the original French text calls the animals “loups carnassiers”. “Carnassiers” means “carnivorous” or “predatory”. Why do they keep appending this epithet to the word “loup”?

And how on earth can this continuing series of creatures continue to be explained away either by the nefarious activities of Jean Chastel and his sons, or the accidental interbreeding of wolf and dog? It has become a truism nowadays to say that “wolves don’t interbreed with dogs. They eat them.”

And what happened to the Beast of Primarette after 1752? Did it take early retirement?

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Beast, lynx, Primarette, werewolf, wolf

by jfwknifton | July 1, 2015 · 1:09 pm

A Werewolf in Cambridgeshire. Run away!!

In three previous blog posts, I discussed “Shuck”, the huge phantom black dog, who for centuries has roamed, for the most part, the fields, fens and even beaches of East Anglia. I showed, though, that the cryptic canid has also walked on occasion in Nottinghamshire, visiting churchyards and graveyards. He frequents ancient tracks and pathways and, in particular, a lonely footpath down by the River Trent in Beckingham. He has been seen in isolated Crow Lane in South Muskham and, in recent times, on a pitch black Blyth Road, near Hodsock Priory:

In my third blogpost, I tried to establish a link with the American Wolfmen such as the “Beast of Bray Road”:

These are hairy bipeds with canid features who, like Black Shuck, seem to occur “near freshwater; on hills; at boundary areas such as roads; and on or near burial grounds, and military zones, and all types of sacred areas around the world”:

These are the words of Linda S Godfrey in her wonderful book, “Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America”:

After receiving this book as a Christmas present in 2013, I received an equally interesting publication in 2014. It was “Haunted Skies Volume One” by John Hanson and Dawn Holloway:

As they say on the cover, the book is part of a whole series telling the entire story of British UFOs. In total, there are ten different volumes and they are, quite simply, an absolute tour de force, a labour of love which runs from 1940 to the present day. So far, I have bought a number of other volumes although I am still a little bit short of the full set (as they say).

What has this got to do with Shuck you may ask? Does this mean that the Beast of Bray Road has moved kennel to England?

Well, in a way, it does. This is Volume 5:

This volume runs from 1972-1974. It contains a tale told about RAF Alconbury, a USAAF airbase in Cambridgeshire, which has a number of claims to fame as being haunted by a variety of different spectres. Here is a large scale map of the area. Look for the orange arrow which indicates the airbase:

And here is a close up. The orange arrow is in the same place on both maps:

The amazing tale told to John Hanson and Dawn Holloway, the authors of the book, by an eyewitness, is that a mechanic was:

“carrying out some routine work to an F-5 Aircraft, parked on the runway, a job that should have been completed in an hour. When he failed to make the telephone call, requesting a lift back from the Hangar, a search went out to find him. They found him sitting in the aircraft, as white as a sheet, with the canopy closed. Although I asked him, many times, what it was that he had seen, he declined, saying that it had frightened him so much that he refused to go anywhere near that location again. We discovered, from another source, that the man had seen a terrifying hairy humanoid, which had walked past the aircraft.”

This is a Northrop F-5 aircraft:

This is a second eyewitness account which they quote:

“I also heard about an incident involving two mechanics, working on an aircraft parked on the north side of the base, one of whom was so frightened by the appearance of a strange hairy creature that he jumped into the cockpit of the aircraft and refused to get out for some time.”

It is entirely impressive that the two co-authors should then discover a third corroborative tale about two USAAF personnel:

“Sergeants Randi Lee and Jackson…. one night, while on patrol with their two dogs, they saw some movement near the towers and called the Main Gate to check if any workmen were still on-site…. As they approached the tower, they came face-to-face with a hairy figure. The dogs stopped in their tracks, absolutely terrified, frantically trying to get away…..The truck arrived just in time to see the creature, whatever it was, climbing over the security fence, where it was last seen entering North Woods.”

It is difficult to imagine how much more thorough these two authors could have been at this point. They manage to find yet another witness to this bizarre tale:

“One foggy night my father received a radio call; there was an intruder within the perimeter…. He tore out in his truck and sped towards the scene…. Seeing a figure in the fog, he pulled over, thinking it was one of his guards. He rolled down his window and was screamed at, full in the face, by what can only be described as a man-like, bipedal creature. My father nearly wet himself in fear. In an instant the thing ran off at incredible speed and my father drove after it. Within moments it had sped past another of the guards….my father and these men witnessed this creature make fantastic, running bounds across the grounds before leaping over two tall, well-spaced barbed wire fences in a single bound. It disappeared into the surrounding woods.”

Many similar and confirmatory accounts can be found on the Internet of this interesting, yet frightening creature. Just as I have quoted John Hanson and Dawn Holloway, some of the websites are clearly redolent of Nick Redfern’s blog post of 2007, “Do Werewolves Roam The Woods Of England?”
One of the contributors, a gentleman who calls himself “wes” recounts his own version of the Alconbury creature:

“I encountered a werewolf (lack of better description) in England in 1970, I was 20 years old when I was stationed at RAF Alconbury. I was in a secure weapons storage area when i encountered it. It seemed shocked and surprized to been caught off guard and I froze in total fright. I was armed with a .38 and never once considered using it. There was no aggression on its part. I could not comprehend what I was seeing. It is not human. It has a flat snout and large eyes. Its height is approx 5 ft and weight approx.200 lbs. It is very muscular and thin. It wore no clothing and was only moderately hairy. It ran away on its hind legs and scurried over a chain link fence and ran deep into the dense wooded area adjacent to the base. I was extremely frightened but the fear developed into a total commitment of trying to contact it again. I was obsessed with it. I was able to see it again a few weeks later at a distance in the wooded area. I watched it for about 30 seconds slowly moving through the woods”

At the website “Winter Spirits” a person called “earth_spirit” recounts how he too was in the RAF:

“In 1978 I was stationed with the US Air Force in West Germany and was sent to RAF Alconbury in England for a 30 day TDY (temporary duty.) When I mentioned to a co-worker I was going to RAF Alconbury, he told me that he had been there in 1972 when one of the aircraft mechanics in his squadron had been found late one night in the back seat of an RF-4C Phantom jet, supposedly after he had died of “fright.” The story was that a subsequent investigation revealed unexplained scratches on the glass of the canopy of the jet, and this started a rumor circulating that the unfortunate crew chief had been the victim of what came to be known as the infamous “hard stand monster.”

You could be forgiven for misinterpreting the “hard stand monster” but clearly, there is something behind these stories.

In a fascinating blog, well worth a look, written by Sarah Hapgood and entitled “sjhstrangetales”, the testimony of yet another witness is quoted:

“Dennis Prisbrey, stationed here between 1973/5, told of colleagues seeing a “creature” near the north side of the airfield. One sighting of it scared a colleague so much that he jumped into the cockpit of an aircraft and refused to get out. The creature was also seen climbing over the security fence, and entering the North Woods. Wesley Uptergrove also saw it, and said he tried to pursue it in a truck. He described it as 5ft 9″ tall, with human-like eyes, a flat nose, and large ears.”

With so many websites discussing the unusual, the ghostly and the frightening, it is again just a matter of establishing some kind of average between the many repeated tellings of what is obviously the same incident. One intriguing explanation is offered by Nick Redfern with the full backing of Linda S.Godrey. Clearly based on the fact that these werewolves are often seen near military bases, it is well worth five minutes of your time. This individual is my favourite. He looks as if he waiting for his library book to be stamped:

Whatever happens though, you could do lot worse than to take a look at the many volumes of “Haunted Skies” by John Hanson and Dawn Holloway. They are an unbelievable set of books, although “unbelievable” is perhaps not the best choice of words when discussing UFOs.

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Filed under Aviation, Cryptozoology, History, Science

Tagged as Alconbury, Beast of Bray Road, Beckingham, British UFOs, Cambridgeshire, East Anglia, Hodsock Priory, Shuck, South Muskham, werewolf, werewolves, West Germany

by jfwknifton | December 31, 2014 · 7:56 am

The Beast of Sarlat

The « Bête féroce de Sarlat » was famous in Périgord in central France from 1766 onwards. Its peculiarity was not to attack women but exclusively to kill men.

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According to that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia….

“The « Bête de Sarlat » was a man-eating animal behind a series of attacks against human beings in the Périgord province of France. During the spring of 1766, a dozen or so fatal attacks were been recorded in the villages around Sarlat. The inhabitants of the region were filled with genuine panic, beginning to talk of a gigantic beast thirsting for human blood or even a werewolf. The creature managed around fifteen victims more, before in August 1766 the peasants and noblemen organised a beat together with more than a hundred rifles. During the course of this, the animal was flushed and killed. It was a wolf infected with rabies but the people did not readily accept this explanation and continued to talk of a werewolf.”

One website devoted primarily to the « Bête du Gévaudan » has a little to say about the « Bête de Sarlat » :

After all, the two areas are not a million miles apart in distance, although the two time periods clash, with the more famous Gévaudan monster killing its victims between the early summer of 1764 and June 19th, 1767 when a local man named Jean Chastel supposedly killed it during a hunt organized by a local nobleman.

“The Bête de Sarlat terrorised the Périgord province of France in the XVIIIth century. Its first appearance came in March 1766, when it carried out around ten killings in the surrounding area. The fear that the Beast caused can be imagined. It was from this time onwards that the myth of an enormous monster thirsting for human blood arose.
But in the month of August 1766, it was finally identified as a wolf suffering from rabies. The people did not really believe this explanation and it must be said that in the intervening time at least another eighteen more people were killed. The monster was seen absolutely everywhere, even in the dark backstreets of Sarlat. When the people’s fear and exasperation was at its height, the legend of the beast grew to such a point that the good people of the area no longer dared go out as soon as it got dark.

From this time onwards, both peasants and nobility came together with more than a hundred rifles and began a beat. The creature was found, pursued and shot. This death was confirmed by an assembly of a large number of happy eye-witnesses and seems to have taken away once and for all the justified fears of the local people. We know very well that the wolf with rabies and the man with rabies seem equally overcome with madness: frothing at the mouth, slavering and biting. They are terrifying to see and dangerous to approach. But this killing only stopped the spread of the rumour. Nothing really changed either in Sarlat or in the surrounding region, where they still spoke of the beast as a werewolf.”

A further account tells broadly the same tale….

“The first time that this creature came to people’s attention was in the spring of 1766 when it had already committed a dozen murders in the villages around Sarlat. From then on, absolute terror reigned in the province of Périgord. They spoke of a gigantic beast, thirsting for human blood, and soon the legend grew to such a point that the people no longer dared to go out as night was falling, because it was claimed that the monster had even been seen in the very streets of Sarlat itself. The creature killed another good fifteen or so people before both the peasants and the aristocrats, driven to it by fear, organised a beat with more than a hundred rifles. The animal was flushed and killed, and it was stated to be a rabid wolf. Even if this particular animal was killed, its legend remained alive and well throughout the whole region, where they spoke for a good many more years of a bloodthirsty werewolf.”

On his own website, Mikerynos writes…

“The Beast of Sarlat terrorised Périgord in the XVIIIth century. Its first appearance dates back to March 1766 when it had already committed around a dozen murders in the neighbouring areas. It is easy to imagine the terror that it provoked. It was from this time that there began the myth of an enormous monster thirsting for human blood. In the month of August 1766, however, the animal was finally identified as a wolf carrying rabies. The ordinary people found it difficult to accept this explanation, and it must be said that in the meantime it had killed at least eighteen more people.
People would see the creature absolutely everywhere, even in the dark alleyways of Sarlat. With fear and anger both reaching their peak, the tales told about the beast grew to such a level that the good people of the region no longer dared to go out as night fell. From that moment both peasants and aristocrats came together with more than a hundred rifles and organised a beat. The animal was found, tracked and shot. This death was witnessed by so many ecstatic eyes and seemed to have rid the local people for ever of the object of their well justified fears.
We know very well that a wolf or a man with rabies both seem equally overcome with madness, slavering at the mouth, frothing and biting. They are terrifying to see and dangerous to approach. But this only stopped the rumours from spreading, nothing had changed and both in Sarlat and the surrounding area, they still talk of the beast even now as a werewolf.”

At the time in 1766, a broadsheet about the beast was published locally in the province.

Here is the bottom half with the text. Hopefully, the words are a little clearer…. Here is a translation of the words you can see, but unfortunately, this is, literally, only half the story. And it seems supremely ironic that on the scan of the front page, you can see some of the print from the back page in reverse, but I cannot find it anywhere on the Internet…

“The curious, remarkable and true tale of the deaths and disorder caused by the ferocious beast, in the area around Sarlat in the Périgord region (of France).
Recently there has been seen in the area around Sarlat in the Périgord region, a ferocious beast, that was considered to be a rabid wolf, but one of an extraordinary size. This ferocious beast roamed, at an incredible speed, over the parishes of Saint-Julien and Grossejac. In vain did a number of the inhabitants of one or the other parish try to put a stop to the depredations of this cruel animal. Between eighteen and twenty people were the sad victims of its fury.
This animal was in complete contrast to the Beast of Gévaudan of which so much has been said; for it seems that the former hated only men whereas the Beast of Gévaudan preferred to attack women. When ready to seize its prey, it put up its hackles, and its eyes became flaming red. It raised itself up on its back legs and tried to seize the victim, sometimes by the face, sometimes by other parts of the head. To stop the ravages of this formidable enemy, whose terrible deeds were already beginning to weigh only too heavily on people, the nobleman Descamps and the gentleman Saint Julien……

Raising itself up on its hind legs, of course, is not normal behaviour for a wolf, animals which nowadays seem to stick firmly to a four legged approach. Flaming red eyes, of course, are not a feature of any known wild animal.

The on-line edition of the newspaper « Sud-Ouest » reports…

“In the XVIIIth century a monster terrorised the south eastern part of the province of Périgord for several weeks. The creature appeared in March 1766 and around a dozen people were killed in the villages around Sarlat. Then was born the myth of an enormous beast thirsting for human blood, like some kind of werewolf.
In the month of August in the same year certain people identified it as a very large wolf infected with rabies. But the population were not reassured by this, especially as in the meantime eighteen other people had been killed. People glimpsed the beast everywhere, even in the dark little lanes of Sarlat. The “population of the village shut themselves away in their houses. Around a hundred people armed with rifles, both peasants and nobles then organised a beat. A rabid wolf was killed. The attacks stopped but the legend lived on, that of a werewolf.”

Its report continues with a device that is known, probably, to newspapers the whole world over. Indeed « Sud-Ouest » could not consider itself a real newspaper if it did not have that desire to thrill, to terrify and then to sell more newspapers…

« Un loup a-t-il été aperçu en Dordogne ? »
“Has a Wolf been seen in the Dordogne?

«This animal was photographed at Saint-Amand-de-Coly. Other people in the immediate area have been seeing it for the last two weeks. According to government sources, the theory of a wolf, however, is not particularly credible and some doubt may be expressed. Quentin Sarlat, aged 20, was coming back from Montignac last Friday and came across this animal in a field at Saint-Amand-de-Coly.

He took a photograph of it, unlike one of his friends who had already seen it two weeks previously. «At first, the animal was much more distant and then it began to run across the field in my direction only to stop about ten metres away from me. He looked at me for at least thirty seconds, and I did not dare get out of my car. Then the animal went off round the back of the car, without ever taking his eyes off me »

As for Aurélien Viau, the regional head of the Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage (The Ministry of Hunting and Wildlife) said that there was little chance that this was a wolf.

«Looking at this photograph, I would say that it’s a dog because the animal is too fat, it’s wearing an orange collar and it does not fear man. But nevertheless we will be going over there to have a look round. »

The collar that the animal is wearing could well be an identification collar, as some method of tagging wolves. On the other hand, it is certainly a wolf which seems to have eaten all the pies.

After this, of course, widescale panic seems to break out and the questions below are suddenly all asked in the newspaper. Nobody seems to notice it is that old strategy….”thrill, terrify, sell”……

Et si le loup revenait dans les forêts de Dordogne ?
“What if wolves came back to the forests of Dordogne?”
Le loup peut très bien recoloniser entièrement le territoire
“The wolf might very well recolonise the entire area”
Environnement : les sentinelles guettent toujours le loup
“Environmental news: a network of guards await the wolf”

And then, AH NON !!!!….

Dordogne : le loup était un husky

“Report from the Dordogne: the wolf was just a husky.”

Most significant of all perhaps is the verdict of the historian Jean-Marc Moriceau who in a newspaper article entirely worthy of our Daily Mail will:

“retrace the blood soaked career of the wolf in France. 8000 dead people in 250 years, and perhaps it isn’t all over yet….”

Perhaps the writer who argued in one of my previous blogposts that the entire French nation was too often guilty of collective hysteria in the face of these much maligned and gentle animals was correct. This website makes « Sud-Ouest » appear almost conservative in its ideas….

LE DIABLE A-T-IL CRÉÉ LE LOUP ?

DID THE DEVIL CREATE THE WOLF ????

Bonne nuit et dormez bien!

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Humour, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Beaqst of Gévaudan, Beast, Daily Mail, Devil, Dordogne, France, husky, Jean Chastel, Mikerynos, Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage, Périgord, Sarlat, Sud-Ouest, werewolf, wolf

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