The 1930s brought us Lon Chaney Jr. as the classic Wolf Man. Decades later, Rick Baker’s far more advanced special effects gave us An American Werewolf in London. And our Hollywood werewolves have only gotten more sophisticated and terrifying. But centuries earlier, there was Gilles Garnier, who in 1572 was accused of being a real-life werewolf. With real horror. And real victims.
According to the new book, Werewolf Stories: Shape-Shifters, Lycanthropes, and Man-Beasts (Visible Ink Press) by Nick Redfern and Brad Steiger, Garnier mutilated two young boys and two girls in the small French village of Dole. “One of the boys had one of his legs completely ripped from the torso, and all those villagers who dared to look could see the marks of teeth on the arms and legs of all the little victims,” the authors described.
As the tale is told, more than fifty witnesses identified Garnier as the culprit. They had seen him “tearing apart the bodies of the murdered children with his teeth, gulping down pieces of raw flesh.“ He was promptly arrested for being a werewolf and “freely confessed” to the crime. As Werewolf Stories recounts, “Garnier told how shortly after the Feast of St. Michael, he ‘being in the form of a wolf,’ seized a ten-year-old girl in a vineyard and ‘there he slew her with both hands, seemingly paws, and with his teeth carried some of her flesh home to his wife.’”
The alleged werewolf described other equally awful terrors that followed. Garnier was executed in 1573.
This is just one of many lycanthropic tales spanning the course of humanity presented in Werewolf Stories. Others include exorcisms that freed the possessed from evil werewolf spirits, serial killers who believed they were werewolves and modeled their crimes on them, the Ouija Wolf Girl who was cursed by a spirit, and even werecats.
The collection was culled from Redfern’s research and from the prolific cryptozoology files of Steiger, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 82. Werewolf Stories, featuring more than a hundred images, will be available on September 12, 2023. That gives you a couple of weeks to get a copy before the September 29th full moon.
