Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Many Moons ago

The village in the French region of Gévaudan, located between the Loire River and the Marguerite Mountains during the rotten `Ancient regime` (the kingdom of the Bourbons) was recovering from a plague epidemic, the population began to increase again, the wounds were healing... when an infestation of robbers began, characters who stole from the rich but did not think of giving to the poor, on the contrary, they stole from them too, taxes again weighed heavily on the backs of the poor peasants and because their life was too `fun`, fate decided to send them a famine that lasted for several years. And just when the village thought that it could not be worse, a Werewolf appeared!

Maybe not the kind of movie one, who turns into beasts with screams on a full moon and who belong to fantasy - but a completely real danger that will take an unknown number of lives. The suffering of the people began in June 1764 when something resembling a wolf but much larger and with a tendency to stand on two legs attacked a girl who was guarding a herd of oxen (in the `good old days` young girls guarded oxen). Fortunately for the girl, the bloodthirsty creature only wounded her because unexpectedly several oxen launched a counterattack and chased the creature away, unlike the guard dogs who ran away, squealing...

The girl's statements about a huge wolf-like creature were ridiculed by the villagers who considered it an illusion resulting from fear and panic. It didn't take long for the bloody confirmation of the girl's words to be confirmed, the same creature attacked, strangled and partially ate the `colleague` of the girl who had survived the first attack - a few days later. In the next few months, a reign of fear and horror began, lone travelers on the foggy roads of Gévodane, travelers on forest paths, shepherds and other herders, children who played a little further away than usual and whose blood ran cold before the ominous howling of the creature that emerged from the morning mist with a demonic gleam in its eyes - only to pounce and strangle its victims - that was the sad `pattern` according to which in the next three years at least 113 and at most 310 people would go to the other world, estimates varied as the collection of information at the time varied...

The people gathered in churches to pray for deliverance from the torment and their prayer was often interrupted by the howling of the beast in the distance, a harbinger of new death, fear and unrest in the area. In addition to prayer, the people also grabbed a rifle, a pitchfork, an axe - whatever you can get your hands on, and groups were formed to find and kill the "perpetrator". Wolves were killed en masse, some of them quite large - but in vain, each killed wolf gave false hope that the danger had been eliminated, only to have someone's grave dug again the next day...

The following year, word of the events reached King Louis XV, who financed a special group of "specialists", more precisely experienced hunters gathered from all over France who were supposed to solve the problem. They also killed wolves en masse, but in vain. Only once did they come into contact with the alleged Werewolf, when they managed to inflict a wound on him, although several of the elite hunters also suffered serious injuries. The attacks continued until June 1767 when a local hunter named Jean Chastel, an accurate marksman, risking his life finally managed to shoot the creature with a silver bullet (!?). Finally, the torment ended, but not the mystery. The huge and bizarre corpse of something that resembled a hybrid between a huge wolf and a Mastiff was taken to Paris, the hunter was rewarded and money was charged to view the corpse. Proposals to taxidermy the miracle were late, summer time and high temperatures - the corpse decomposed and was buried, unfortunately.

No one was able to determine what it was. Wolf attacks on humans are rare, but the creature was not a wolf anyway. The speed and number of attacks were also impossible for a wolf and the territory that the beast `covered` in search of victims was incredible. The silver bullet used in the killing gave rise to theories that it was a Werewolf. Some claimed that he had "ordained" a specific type of maniac, a phenomenon that would later become known as the "serial killer" - camouflaged in fur, and the hybrid animal only served to distract attention and sow fear, in an unusual capacity as an apprentice-pet-killer.

The creature became known as the "Beast of Gevaudan" and continued to live in the legends and collective consciousness of the area for a long time. To this day, it is not known exactly what it was about, but if he was really a serial killer and stopped killing after the death of his "pet" then he would be one of the greatest maniacs ever, with at least 113 murders behind him - which makes Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac, the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, Jack the Stripper, Bible John and the New Orleans Axeman - total amateurs in the realm of sadism. Their common trait is that they have remained undiscovered and legendary figures in the world of evil...

(Roger Mortis, 069)

No comments:

Post a Comment