The Beast of Gevaudan

 

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On this day in 1767, hunter Jean Chastel rid the world of history’s most well-documented werewolf, the Beast of Gevaudan.

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, until Chastel and his lucky shot.

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.

I think it’s important to point out here that things like so-called “mass hysteria” and the spreading of frightening rumors are perfectly natural human reactions to terrifying phenomena with no easy explanation. Yes, this was undoubtedly the work of normal wolves. But here we are hundreds of years later, still telling stories about it.

Today we are going to look at the main theories about the Beast of Gevaudan, and provide some writing prompts for anyone looking to keep the story going.

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

The Dire Wolf. (Best name for a cryptid ever.) The Dire Wolf, which was a real animal back in the Ice Age, is now a type of cryptid (unknown animal rumored to exist) known as a relic, which means an isolated example of an animal thought to be extinct. 

This is where you get the Yeti as a surviving Gigantopithecus or Nessie as a Plesiosaur. (Also, technically, the Dire Wolf was in North America, so for Gevaudan you’d be talking about some type of Pleistocene Wolf, but that doesn’t have as cool of a name. Or it could be some form of Mesonychid, which looked kinda like a wolf, but was actually related to giraffes.) Anyhow, if you’re going the relic route, you’re going to need an explanation for the survival of the relic and the fact that it’s gone undiscovered (that is: no bodies, no babies, no spoor, no impact on the food chain). And if you’re in the forest, you’re not going to be able to use “the ocean is really big, who knows what’s down there.” It’s the forest, we know what’s in there.

But this is fiction, so it can be done! One of the coolest theories I’ve heard for Bigfoot is that he’s from another dimension and only visits ours once in a while, leading to the sporadic sightings. Other relic explanations include time travel (humans go back in time or wolf comes into the future), as-yet-undiscovered vast cave networks or unknown islands that could sustain a relic population, cloning of extinct animals, or, since we’re talking Ice Age beasties, melting glaciers with frozen wolves that can be revived.

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