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In the autumn of 1589, a farmer named Peter Stumpp stood before judges in Bedburg, near Cologne, and confessed that the devil had given him a belt. Buckle it on, he said, and he became a wolf — huge, fire-eyed, strong enough to run down a grown man. The court wrote all of it down. Clerks recorded the belt, the transformations, the killings, as if they were entering stolen livestock into evidence. Then they sentenced him to one of the most brutal executions in German legal history.
That's the part of werewolf history most people never hear. Long before Hollywood, before the full moon and the silver bullet, the werewolf lived in court records. Between roughly 1520 and 1650, secular and church courts in French- and German-speaking Europe tried, convicted, and executed people — most historians put the number in the hundreds across the period — for the crime of lycanthropy. These weren't rumors traded around a fire. They were trials, with witnesses, confessions, and verdicts.
With Robert Eggers' werewolf film Werwulf arriving in late 2026, the old cases are drawing fresh attention. They deserve it, because the documents are stranger than any script.
Gilles Garnier: The Hermit of Dole, 1573
The trial of Gilles Garnier is one of the earliest with a solid paper trail. Garnier was a hermit living in a hovel outside Dole, in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, with a wife he could barely feed. Through 1572, children began disappearing from the vineyards and woods around the town — and some were found partially eaten.
The authorities in Dole took the wolf reports seriously enough to do something remarkable: they issued an edict encouraging locals to hunt the creature down. One evening, a group of workers came upon a figure crouched over a child's body. Some swore it was a wolf. Others recognized the face of the hermit.
Garnier confessed — under torture, as almost all of the accused did — that a spirit had given him an ointment that turned him into a wolf. He admitted to killing at least four children. Around fifty witnesses testified. The court, a secular one, convicted him of lycanthropy and witchcraft, and in January 1573 he was burned at the stake.
Strip away the wolf, and the record describes something courts still see today: a starving outcast who killed children, and a town that needed the horror to have a shape and a name.
Peter Stumpp: The Werewolf of Bedburg, 1589
The Stumpp case is the most infamous of them all, largely because a lurid English pamphlet from 1590 spread the story across Europe. Stumpp was no outcast — he was a relatively prosperous farmer near Bedburg. After a string of gruesome deaths, hunters claimed they had chased a wolf that, cornered, turned out to be him.
On the rack, or under the threat of it, Stumpp confessed to nearly everything the judges could ask. He said he had practiced sorcery since the age of twelve. He said the devil's belt let him transform, and that he had killed fourteen children and two pregnant women over twenty-five years. He confessed to eating his own son's brain.
The execution on 31 October 1589 was designed as a public lesson. Stumpp was strapped to a wheel, his flesh torn with heated pincers, his limbs broken, his head cut off, his body burned. His daughter and his mistress were executed alongside him. Officials mounted the wheel on a pole with a carved wolf figure — a warning to anyone who doubted what the court had found.
Modern historians read the case very differently. The region around Cologne was in the middle of a savage religious war, Stumpp was a Protestant convert in newly re-Catholicized territory, and every detail of his confession came through torture. Whether a murderer, a scapegoat, or both, the man on the wheel tells us more about 1589 than about wolves.
Why the Panic Happened Where It Did
Werewolf trials cluster tightly on the map — Franche-Comté, the Jura, Burgundy, the Rhineland, parts of Switzerland. The pattern isn't random. A few conditions kept repeating:
- Real wolves. These borderlands were heavily forested, and wolf attacks on children herding animals alone were an actual, recurring danger. Dead children with animal wounds demanded an explanation.
- The witch-hunt machinery. The werewolf trials rose and fell with the great European witch panics, and used the same legal tools: torture-extracted confessions, devil's pacts, accomplice naming.
- Demonology in print. Learned treatises debated whether Satan could truly change a man's body, or merely delude his senses. Either answer left the accused guilty.
- War and famine. Franche-Comté and the Rhineland were contested, hungry regions. Panics flourish where daily life is already frightening.
By the mid-1600s the trials faded, for an unheroic reason: courts grew skeptical of tortured confessions, and physicians increasingly framed lycanthropy as delusion — a medical condition, not a crime. Some later defendants were sent to asylums rather than the stake.
FAQ
Were werewolf trials real historical events?
Yes. Court records, execution accounts, and pamphlets document trials for lycanthropy in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, concentrated in France, Germany, and Switzerland. Garnier's 1573 conviction and Stumpp's 1589 execution are among the best-documented cases.
How many people were executed as werewolves?
No complete register survives, but historians estimate several hundred people were tried in the core regions during the peak decades, with the Franche-Comté and the Rhineland producing the most cases. Many trials overlapped with witchcraft prosecutions.
Did the accused actually believe they were wolves?
Some may have. Period physicians described “melancholic lycanthropy,” a delusion in which sufferers believed themselves transformed. But most surviving confessions were produced under torture, which makes them evidence of what judges wanted to hear rather than what the accused believed.
Is the 2026 film Werwulf based on these trials?
Not directly. Robert Eggers' Werwulf, due at Christmas 2026, is set in 13th-century England — earlier than the trial era. But its release has renewed public interest in the historical record behind Europe's werewolf beliefs.
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