The Beast of Gevaudan

 

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Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.

Today: The Beast of Gevaudan: 18th Century Werewolf

Welcome on this Weird Wednesday! Today we’re taking a (rather ill-advised) stroll in the French woods of 1764, looking for history’s most well-documented werewolf.

With a body count of up to 113, the Beast of Gevaudan terrorized France for three years. Occasionally hunters, many sent by the king, would slay the wolf and display its body as proof— and then more people would be killed. It’s thought the creature was finally dispatched by a hunter named Jean Chastel in 1767.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t actually unusual at the time for people working in fields and tending cattle to be killed by wolves. But the Gevaudan attacks were especially frequent, and thus sparked some supernatural rumors. The wolf was said to be as big as a horse, strangely colored, and sometimes walked on two legs. It could be seen in two places at once and it appeared to defy multiple attempts to kill it.

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some beastly writing prompts, such as:

• The Big Badass Wolf. Everybody’s here for werewolf prompts. We’re going to start with paranormal romance. Werewolf romances have a lot of the same tropes as those with vampires: you’ve got a cursed hero (gender neutral), a human lover, a specific way to die (blessed and/or silver bullets for werewolves) and an unnatural thirst for blood/tendency to choose violence when dealing with minor inconveniences. You can even throw in a bit of immortal-falling-for-a-mortal if you like. Specific to Gevaudan, you could write a love triangle (or thruple) with the werewolf, a local villager, and one of the soldiers sent to hunt the wolf. Or a werewolf might accidentally turn their lover into a wolf as well and must deal with the guilt.

If romance is not the main driver of your plot (because you are no fun), you could focus on a town where there’s a lot of local love for lycanthropy. Who’s to say a village didn’t create or even just hire a werewolf to go after its enemies? And how rude of the king to send hunters to interfere! What if one of the king’s soldiers is also a werewolf but he’s never had werewolf friends to explain to him how it works or that he doesn’t need to slaughter people if he doesn’t want to? (Or maybe he wants to.) What if all the villagers are werewolves? Maybe they’re travelers from another dimension or werewolf planet and they’re stranded in the French woods trying to pretend that they are Very Normal, thank you.

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