Werewolves: ancient legends, or real-life monsters? Whether you believe in these creatures or not, crimes committed by werewolves appear in the history books and on the Internet. A number of these supposed werewolf crimes originate from 16th century Europe, particularly France and Germany. This was the height of werewolf hysteria, when many men and women were burned at the stake or tortured after being accused of possessing dark powers. A few of these victims truly believed that they could turn into beasts.
The most comprehensive source on the case is a 16-page pamphlet published in London in 1590 called The Damnable Life and Death of Stubbe Peeter, the translation of a German print of which no copies have survived. The English pamphlet, of which two copies exist (one in the British Museum and one in the Lambeth Library), was rediscovered by occultist Montague Summers in 1920.
It describes Stumpp’s life, alleged crimes and the trial, and includes many statements from neighbors and witnesses on the crimes. Summers reprints the entire pamphlet, including a woodcut, on pages 253 to 259 of his work The Werewolf. The original documents seem to have been lost during the wars of the centuries that followed. Some additional information also came from an account by Edward Fairfax in 1621, who referenced the case when writing of his daughters being accused of witchcraft in his famous Daemonologia.
In the late 16th century, the town of Bedburg, Germany was terrorized by a diabolical creature that slaughtered its cattle and snatched away its women and children, killing them with unspeakable morbidity. The shocked and horrified townspeople feared that they were being victimized by a raving demon from Hell or, just as bad, a bloodthirsty werewolf who lived among them.
Peter Stumpp (c. 1535 – 1589), also spelled Peter Stube, Peeter Stubbe, Peter Stübbe or Peter Stumpf, and other aliases include such names as Abal Griswold, Abil Griswold, and Ubel Griswold. The name “Stump” or “Stumpf” may have been given him as a reference to the fact that his left hand had been cut off, leaving only a stump. In Germanic mythological systems, which underpinned laws and court rulings, it was held that if a werewolf’s left forepaw was cut off, the same injury appeared on the man. Peter was a German farmer and alleged serial killer, accused of werewolfery, witchcraft and cannibalism. He was known as ‘the Werewolf of Bedburg’.
Stumpp was born at the village of Epprath near the country-town of Bedburg in the Electorate of Cologne, a small city in Germany’s Rhineland, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. The area where Stumpp lived had most recently been devastated due to the Cologne War, also known as the Sewer War (the name is apparently derived from a battle in which Catholic forces stormed a castle through its primitive sewer system).His actual date of birth is not known, as the local church registers were destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
He was a wealthy farmer of his rural community. The community knew him as a pleasant enough widower and father of two adolescent children, whose wealth ensured him a measure of respect and influence. During the 1580s, he seems to have been a widower with two children; a girl called Beele (Sybil), who seems to have been older than 15 years old, and a son of an unknown age born out of an incestuous relationship with his daughter.
At the time, Catholicism and Protestantism were at war for the hearts and minds of the populace, which brought invading armies from both faiths to Bedburg. There were also outbreaks of the dreaded Black Plague. For many years, farmers around Bedburg were mystified by the strange deaths of some of their cows. Day after day for many weeks, they would find cattle dead in the pastures, ripped open as if by some savage animal. The farmers naturally suspected wolves, but this was actually the beginning of Peter’s unnatural compulsion to mutilate and kill which would escalate into attacks on neighboring villagers.
Children began to disappear from their farms and homes. Young women vanished from the paths they traveled daily. Some were found dead, horribly mutilated. Others were never found. The community was thrown into a panic. Hungry wolves were again suspected and the villagers armed themselves against the animals. Some even feared a more devious creature—a werewolf, who could walk among them unsuspected as a man, then transform into a wolf to satisfy its hunger. Although he did not literally transform into a wolf, Peter would cloak himself with the skin of a wolf when seeking his victims.
During 1589, Stumpp had one of the most lurid and famous werewolf trials in history. After being stretched on a rack, and before further torture commenced, he confessed to having practiced black magic since he was 12 years old. he made a pact with the Devil, with the Prince of Lies getting his soul in exchange for numerous worldly pleasures. But this wasn’t enough to satisfy Stumpp, who was “a wicked fiend pleased with the desire of wrong and destruction” and “inclined to blood and cruelty.” He claimed that the Devil had forged and given him a magical belt or girdle of wolf fur, which enabled him to metamorphose into “the likeness of a greedy, devouring wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like fire, a mouth great and wide, with most sharp and cruel teeth, a huge body, and mighty paws.” Removing the belt, he said, made him transform back to his human form. After the trial an extensive search was made at Peter’s farm for the magical werewolf-belt but nothing resembling it was ever recovered.
For 25 years, Stumpp had allegedly been an “insatiable bloodsucker” who gorged on the flesh of goats, lambs, and sheep, as well as men, women, and children. Lambs and calves were ripped apart and devoured raw. Small children were strangled, bludgeoned, and throats ripped open with his bare hands. Some were disemboweled and partially eaten. Being threatened with torture, he confessed to killing and eating 14 children, 2 pregnant women, whose fetuses he ripped from their wombs and “ate their hearts panting hot and raw,” which he later described as “dainty morsels.” One of the 14 children was his own son. Stumpp led the boy into the forest, killed him, and then ate his brains. The young women among his victims were sexually assaulted before he tore them apart.
In one instance of a triple murder, Stumpp saw two men and a woman taking a walk just outside the city walls of Bedburg and he crouched hidden out of sight behind some brush. He called out to one of the men by name with the pretense that he needed help with some lumber. When the young man joined him out of sight of the others, Stumpp bashed his head in. When the man didn’t return, the second young man went looking for him and was likewise killed. Fearing danger, the woman began to flee, but Stumpp managed to catch her. The men’s battered bodies were later found, but the woman never was, and it was thought that Stumpp, after raping and killing her, might have eaten her completely.
Not only was Stumpp accused of being a serial murderer and cannibal, but also of having an incestuous relationship with his daughter whom he had impregnated, and was sentenced to die with him, as well as his mistress. In addition to this, he confessed to having had intercourse with a succubus sent to him by the Devil.
When the limbs of several missing people were found in a field, the villagers were further convinced that a ravenous wolf was responsible, and so several hunters set out with their dogs to pursue the predator. The men hunted the creature for days until at last, they saw him. But according to the account, they saw and chased down a wolf, not a man. The dogs chased the animal until they had it cornered. The hunters were sure that they were chasing a wolf, but when they came to the spot where the dogs had it cornered, there cowered Peter Stumpp. According to an eye witness account, being trapped with no room for escape, Stumpp removed his magic belt and transformed from the wolf to his human form. He was also accused on account of his missing left hand, for the werewolf in question was missing a left forepaw. This supposedly came about when the werewolf had been caught in a trap earlier and had to chew its paw off to escape. Stumpp was missing the corresponding hand, which was lost in an accident years before. However, the timing of the injury was conveniently ignored in an effort to find evidence against Stumpp.
The hunters saw no magic belt, as Stumpp later claimed he had, but only an ordinary walking stick in his hand. At first they disbelieved their own eyes; after all, Stumpp was a respected, long-time resident. How could he be a werewolf? Perhaps this wasn’t really Peter Stumpp at all, they reasoned, but a devilish trick. So they escorted Stumpp to his house and determined that he was indeed the Peter Stumpp they knew. Peter Stumpp was arrested and tried for the crimes.
The arrest, trial, and prolonged execution of Peter Stumpp, the sorcerer and werewolf, near Cologne in 1589 were recounted in pamphlets in the Netherlands, London (1590), and Copenhagen (1591). Cologne had recently become Catholic and the accused was Protestant, so the accounts of Stumpp’s sodomy, incest, rape, and cannibalism may have had a political element involved. The 1590’s pamphlet provides trial notes and witness statements which can be found recorded in other publications, indicating that the story of Peter Stumpp’s execution is true. The private diaries of Hermann von Weinsberg, a Cologne alderman, also covered this case and it was detailed in several broadsheets printed in southern Germany, which all convey identical versions this weird and gory tale.
Thought now to be a werewolf, Stumpp was brought to trial, and it was only under pain of torture on the rack that his confession to all of the heinous crimes came out, including sorcery, his consort with the Devil and the story of the magic belt.
This fact has led some researchers to surmise that Stumpp was, in fact, innocent; that his wild confession was elicited by the torture. Perhaps Stumpp himself was a victim of the superstition and religious rivalry taking place at the time: the fear and conviction of a demon-inspired werewolf might lead people back to the “true Church.” Whether he was truly a serial killer or a political victim, Stumpp was found guilty on October 28, 1589.
The 16-page pamphlet and the German broadsheets all noted the attendance of “members of the aristocracy” at Stumpp’s execution “including the new Archbishop and Elector of Cologne”. This single fact suggests the presence of a hidden motive.
It might be relevant that the block of years in which Stumpp was said to have committed his crimes (1582-1589) were marked by internal spiritual and political warfare. The Electorate of Cologne was in upheaval upon the introduction of Protestantism by the former Archbishop Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg. Stumpp was an early convert to Protestantism and fought in a war which historians claim brought uncontrolled violence out of soldiers on both sides, resulting in an epidemic of the plague.
In 1587, the protestants were finally defeated and the new lord of Bedburg – Werner, Count of Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck made Bedburg Castle the headquarters of his Catholic mercenaries who were determined to re-establish the Roman faith. Stumpp’s werewolf trial may have been performed to, a tad more than gently, persuade the remaining Protestants to sign up to Catholicism. It was unlikely that any of Germany’s elite would have attended a regular werewolf or witch trial – and they were regular. It is most likely the case that having drawn up Stumpp’s alleged, and truly outrageous crimes,
the elite constructed a popular public spectacle, and with assured visibility to the public at large, the nobility mounted their rides and attended the disembodiment of a werewolf – a protestant scoundrel – an archetype of anti-Catholic spiritual darkness.
The execution of Stumpp, on 31 October 1589, alongside his daughter Sybil and mistress, Katherine Trompin, is one of the most brutal on record: his body was strapped spread-eagle on large wheel; with red-hot pincers, where his executioners pulled the flesh from his body in ten places, followed by his arms and legs. Then his limbs were broken with the blunt side of an axehead to prevent him from returning from the grave, before he was beheaded and his body burned on a pyre.
His daughter and mistress (both of whom were convicted of abetting his crimes) had already been flayed and strangled, and were burned at the stake along with Stumpp’s body. By directive of the magistrate, a warning to other potential devil-worshipers was put in place for all to see: the wheel on which Stumpp was tortured was set high upon a pole from which hung 16 yard-long strips of wood, representing his 16 known victims. Atop that was the framed likeness of a wolf, and above on the sharpened point of the pole was placed Peter Stumpp’s severed head.
This execution of a werewolf takes place in a historical context where, in various parts of Germany, alleged witches or devil’s minions were hunted down and then condemned after torture sessions that led to extravagant confessions such as those of Peter Stumpp. About 250 werewolf trials from the period between 1423 and 1720 are documented in the literature. The files on this witch trial have not been preserved. It is therefore impossible to determine whether Stumpp actually committed the crimes for which he was convicted. There may be no way of knowing for certain whether Peter Stumpp was a convenient scapegoat for the authorities (which means a wolf or wolves really were responsible for the deaths), or he was a maniacal serial killer.
In Stubbe’s case, it’s possible he was suffering from clinical lycanthropy. The diagnosis (recognized in the DSM-IV) is thought to be a cultural manifestation of schizophrenia, and associated with bouts of psychosis, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and “grossly disorganized behavior.” There was a documented case from the 1970s, in which a 49-year-old woman, after having sex with her husband “suffered a 2-hour episode, during which time she growled, scratched, and gnawed at the bed,”
according to Harvey Rostenstock, M.D. and Kenneth R. Vincent, Ed.D. in their article in The American Journal of Psychiatry. The woman later said the Devil came into her body and she became an animal. The article goes on to say that “there was no drug involvement or alcoholic intoxication.” This was just one of the instances in which the woman had a lycanthropic episode. The authors opined that people experience lycanthropy when their “internal fears exceed their coping mechanisms” and they externalize those fears “via projection” and can “constitute a serious threat to others.” While in many cases lycanthropy is associated with wolves, there have been cases where patients believed they were sharks, leopards, elephants or eagles, among other “feared” animals.
If you are interested in reading the full 16 page pamphlet of his trial and execution, click here. Definitely an fascinating read!
Sources: https://www.liveabout.com/the-werewolf-of-bedburg-2597445, wikipedia, https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/german-werewolf-009397, http://scihi.org/peter-stumpp-werewolf/, https://modernfarmer.com/2013/08/peter-stubbethe-werewolf-of-bedburg/, https://exemplore.com/paranormal/Peter-Stumpp-The-Werewolf-of-Bedburg#gid=ci026e2488e000245f&pid=peter-stumpp-the-werewolf-of-bedburg-MTc1MTE3NjA1MjY5NjExNjE1
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