We usually think of werewolves as creatures of fiction. But for about a century and a half, from roughly 1520 to 1650, werewolves were a matter for the courts. In France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries, men and — less often — women were accused of turning into wolves, attacking livestock, and killing and eating children. Many confessed, usually under torture. Many were executed. The trials ran alongside the great European witch-hunts, and they reveal how fears of the Devil, of violent crime, and of real wolves combined into a deadly belief.
The Legal and Theological Background
Medieval theologians had generally denied that a human being could truly turn into an animal. Saint Augustine argued that such transformations were illusions created by demons. The Canon Episcopi, an influential church text from around 900, dismissed belief in such things as a pagan delusion.
By the sixteenth century, attitudes had hardened. Demonologists such as Jean Bodin (De la démonomanie des sorciers, 1580) argued that the Devil could really transform witches into wolves, or at least make them believe they had been transformed while he himself committed the crimes. Either way, the accused had made a pact with Satan and deserved death. Other writers, like the Dutch physician Johann Weyer, argued that so-called werewolves were mentally ill and needed treatment, not execution. Weyer’s view was a minority one.
The Werewolves of Poligny (1521)
One of the earliest recorded cases took place at Poligny in the Franche-Comté in 1521. Three men — Pierre Burgot, Michel Verdun, and Philibert Montot — were accused of being werewolves. Burgot confessed that nineteen years earlier, while searching for his lost sheep in a storm, he had met three horsemen in black, one of whom promised to protect his flock if he renounced God. Later, Verdun had taken him to a gathering where they stripped, rubbed themselves with an ointment, and became wolves. They confessed to killing and eating several children. All three were burned. Paintings of them were hung in the local church as a warning.
Gilles Garnier, the Hermit of Dole (1573)
In 1573, the parliament of Dole in the Franche-Comté, alarmed by children killed in the countryside, authorized local people to hunt werewolves. Soon after, a reclusive man named Gilles Garnier, who lived with his wife in a hut in the woods, was arrested. He confessed that a spectre had given him an ointment that turned him into a wolf, and that in that form he had killed several children, eating the flesh of their thighs and arms, and even taking some home to his wife. Witnesses claimed to have seen him, some in wolf form and some as a man. He was burned alive in January 1574.
Peter Stumpp of Bedburg (1589)
The most notorious werewolf trial took place at Bedburg, near Cologne in Germany, in 1589. Peter Stumpp (also Stubbe or Stübbe), a prosperous farmer, was accused of being a werewolf who had terrorized the region for twenty-five years. Under torture on the rack, he confessed that at the age of twelve he had made a pact with the Devil, who gave him a magic belt that turned him into “a greedy, devouring wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like brands of fire.” He confessed to killing and eating fourteen children, including his own son, and two pregnant women, as well as incest with his daughter.
His execution on 31 October 1589 was one of the most brutal recorded: his flesh was torn with red-hot pincers, his limbs broken on the wheel, and he was beheaded and burned. His daughter and mistress were burned with him. A pole was erected with the wheel on it, a wolf-shaped figure, and his head on top, as a warning. An English pamphlet, A True Discourse Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of One Stubbe Peeter (1590), spread the story across Europe, complete with woodcut illustrations.
Historians have noted that Bedburg was at the time a battleground between Catholic and Protestant forces, and that Stumpp was a Protestant convert. Some suggest the trial had political motives. The confessions, extracted by torture, cannot be trusted.
The Werewolf of Châlons and Jacques Roulet (1598)
The year 1598 saw several French cases. In Paris, a tailor from Châlons was reportedly executed for luring children into his shop and killing them in wolf form, though the records are lost. In the same year, Jacques Roulet, a vagrant beggar, was found near Angers half-naked in a thicket near the mutilated body of a boy, his hands and hair smeared with blood. He confessed to being a werewolf. He was condemned to death — but the Parlement of Paris, on appeal, ruled that he was insane, and sent him to a hospital for two years instead. The decision was a sign of changing attitudes among the educated elite.
The Gandillon Family (1598)
In the Jura mountains, Pernette Gandillon was killed by villagers after she allegedly attacked two children in wolf form. Her brother Pierre, his son Georges, and his sister Antoinette were arrested and accused of witchcraft and lycanthropy. The judge Henri Boguet, who wrote a detailed account in his Discours des sorciers (1602), described them in prison crawling on all fours and howling. They were burned.
Jean Grenier (1603)
In 1603, in the Landes region of south-west France, a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy named Jean Grenier boasted to local girls that he was a werewolf and had eaten children. A series of child killings had occurred in the area. He told the court that a “Lord of the Forest” had given him a wolf-skin and an ointment. The Parlement of Bordeaux concluded that he was a mentally deficient, abused child suffering from delusions, and sentenced him to life imprisonment in a monastery rather than death. He died there some years later. Visitors described him as running on all fours and eating raw meat.
Thiess of Livonia: The Hounds of God (1692)
The strangest werewolf trial came late, in 1692, at Jürgensburg in Livonia (modern Latvia). An old man named Thiess freely admitted to being a werewolf — but insisted that werewolves were the “hounds of God.” Three times a year, on the nights of St Lucia, Midsummer, and St John, he and the other werewolves travelled in wolf form to the underworld “at the end of the sea” to fight the witches, who had stolen the grain and the fruits of the earth. If the werewolves won, the harvest would be good. He had once had his nose broken in such a battle.
The judges were baffled. Thiess refused to accept that he served the Devil. He was sentenced to ten lashes. Historians such as Carlo Ginzburg have compared his story to the Italian benandanti, who also claimed to fight witches in spirit for the sake of the harvest, and seen in it traces of ancient agrarian and shamanic beliefs.
The End of the Trials
Werewolf trials declined in the seventeenth century as scepticism grew among lawyers and physicians, and as the witch-hunts themselves came to an end. The werewolf passed from the courtroom into folklore and, eventually, into fiction.
What Lay Behind the Trials?
Historians point to several factors:
- Real wolves. Wolf attacks on livestock and even children were a real danger in rural Europe, especially in hard winters and during wars.
- Real crimes. Some of the accused may have been genuine murderers, whose crimes were explained through the werewolf belief.
- Torture. Most confessions were extracted under torture and shaped by the questions of judges who already knew what a werewolf was supposed to confess.
- Mental illness. Some of the accused, like Roulet and Grenier, appear to have been deeply disturbed.
- Demonology. The theological belief in the Devil’s power to transform or deceive gave the accusations their legal force.
The werewolf trials are a sobering reminder that legends can kill, when fear and authority combine.
Last reviewed: September 2026.