It also had a long snout that was by turns either calf-, pig-, or wolf-like; big claws, or hooves, or big paws with hooves for claws; and laser eyes. The animal was apparently as big as a calf, which would make it two or three times as large as any known wolf species. The Beast of Gévaudan. In 18th-century France, the Chevalier de Fronsac and his Native American friend Mani are sent to the Gevaudan province at the king's behest to investigate the killings of hundreds by a mysterious beast. Others have suggested, as mentioned earlier, that it wasn’t a wolf at all, but rather an extant Asian hyena. I like this theory, and so does National Geographic. And one of the oldest monsters in our collective lore, is the werewolf. For a long time, the Beast of Gévaudan was widely believed to be a real-life werewolf, even by scholars. 1, p. 128). The following weeks were disappointing, and more royal hunters and agents were dispatched to help in the fight. Mankind loves its monsters. Whenever a bunch of people turn up dead, “other human” does need to be placed near the top of the list of suspects. According to Dr. Valack, the Beast was originally a human in the late 1700s, the time of the original Gevaudan attacks.Gerard retells the story of Sebastien Valet, a French soldier in the 1760s. But for me, we’re getting into the weeds with this one. The creature weighed a whopping 60 kilograms (130 lbs), and was 80 cm tall at the shoulder. It focuses on the pain of being a free-thinking and acting human being laden with responsibilities. When France went on a wolf-killing rampage, … It stands to reason that the locals knew what wolves looked like, so if it actually was a wolf, would we really have so many questions about its appearance or behavior? It’s possible that there was more than one Beast of Gévaudan, given the timeline and locations of the attacks, as well as varying descriptions of appearance, but they don’t appear to have worked together. While this murderous spree only lasted a few years, the mystery as to what—or who—killed the villagers of Gévaudan remains to this day, prompting educated speculation by modern scholars and 2001 French action films alike. More than 100 people had been savagely killed over a three-year period but finally—mercifully—the attacks ended. Mysterious Universe is a property of 8th Kind Pty Ltd, Bigfoot Apology, Creepy SexBots, Paranormal ‘Friends’ and More Mysterious News Briefly — April 21, 2021, Astronomers Find Five Binary Star Systems With Possible Habitable Tattooines, The Bizarre Mütter Museum and its Mysterious Giant Skeleton, Paranormal Creatures That Have Terrifying Holds Over Us, The Grim Story of the Werewolf of Châlons, Werewolf Named Old Stinker Terrorizes English Town, Monsters Whose Weak-Spots Were Their Eyes. Beast: Werewolves, Serial Killers, and Man-Eaters: The Mystery of the Monsters of the Gévaudan: Amazon.in: Schwalb, S. R., Romero, Gustavo Sánchez: Books Between 1764 and 1767, an unknown but terrifying beast stalked the residents of the region of Gevaudan, attacking and killing over a hundred people, and injuring more. It seems that the Beast was no more. Some sources claim that … Check out this great listen on Audible.com. In his official report to the King, Antoine claimed that they “…never saw a big wolf that could be compared to this one.”. An engraving of the Beast courtesy la Bibliothèque nationale de France. While French nobility in the 18th century normally would have concerned themselves more with extracting unpaid labor from peasants than with their general welfare, word of a beast stomping through the quaint French countryside and making meals of the heads of innocent women and children was macabre enough to instill a certain sense of noblesse oblige (or at least a bit of idee fixe) in the landed upper classes. Dubbed the "Beast of Bowen", a 42 kg (~93 lbs) wolf-dog stalked the island for months, killing deer, pets, and local wildlife. Between 1764 and 1767, something killed a lot of people in and around the forests of Gévaudan in Southern France. All right, there has of course been a lot of conjecture over the years. Share this article... your friends will love it too! In September 1765, Louis XV’s own bodyguard/gunman François Antoine shot and killed the first of these canids. Gévaudan, Beast of. With Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos, Jérémie Renier, Vincent Cassel. Add to My Queue Download MP3 Share episode. It was said to have huge jaws with 42 razor sharp teeth (an important point to refute the claim that it was a hyena), and a red coat with black markings on its back. Sources vary on the details, but over 100 people were maimed or killed by some devil, a roving rural nightmare with a consistent modus operandi: it preferred to attack women and children, often ripping their throats out, and then eating their heads off. In the 1760s, in the former County of Gévaudan, located in southern France, and in adjacent areas, about one hundred children, youths, and women were killed by an alien “beast”; numerous other humans survived the attacks, many of them seriously injured. The obvious claim that it wasn’t any kind of cryptid type animal, but was actually just a pack of regular European wolves notwithstanding, these explanations seem to satisfy logic, even though they greatly disappoint imagination. The Kingdom of France had some rough ideas of what they might be looking for. Sources describe the animal as a massive wolf, or dog-wolf hybrid. All told, a veritable army of civilians, huntsmen, bloodhounds, and also the actual army were tapped to put an end to this Beast. And then there’s Marie-Jeanne Vallet, who was attacked on August 11, 1765, and managed to defend herself and wound the beast, earning herself the title “Maiden of Gévaudan.”. The whole thing played out like a horror movie in a way, with kooky island locals, the mysterious beast, and so on. Likes Comments Share. The stories of the killings spread via faits divers reporting—18th-century true crime stories—and nobles, for all their other failings, could at least read. But a human killer would have needed some kind of functional monster suit, as well as the commitment to eat their victims; or maybe they owned the Beast, as implied by Michel Louis’ outfitted mastiff hybrid theory. T he first victim of la Bête was a fourteen-year-old girl named Jeanne Boulet, killed in the summer of 1764 while she tended livestock near her village. Still, the wolf hypothesis holds water for some sources. Depending on the source, the beast had red fur with stripes on its back, or jet black that made it melt into the night. Cool imagination, Michel. Not every victim had their head gnawed off. In the early 1990s, Brigitte Bardot gifted it with 80 wolves in a bid to help revive the fallen reputation of a demonised species. Things start to make more sense if you consider that this may have been an exotic animal—something rural peasants wouldn’t be able to name—that had been brought in captivity to the region by a wealthy collector. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast. There is some rough evidence that one or two large, rogue wolves may have been responsible for at least some of the attacks in Gévaudan. Take, for example, the European hyena, or mesonychids. Of course, every legend needs a hero, and in this case that hero is a local hunter named Jean Castel. In France, where the loup-garou (“werewolf”) lived among the superstitious, one such creature wreaked horror on residents of the western Gévaudan district during 1764 and 1765, and on to 1767. Witnesses examined it and agreed that yes, indeed, the Beast had met its end. Get the MegaPack collection now for this great price. It became part of the new Department of Lozère after the French Revolution of 1789. Nowadays, it is thought that the Beast of Gévaudan wasn't a single wolf at all, but many individual wolves. By Karl-Hans Taake From 1764 to 1767, in the historical region of Gévaudan, located in southern France, and in adjacent areas, about one hundred children, youths, and women were killed by a so-called “Beast”. Copyright © Mysterious Universe. Oh, wait. The Beast of Gevaudan was embalmed and taken from town to town so people could have a look at it, for a small fee of course. Engraving reproduced in François Fabre, La Bête du Gévaudan, Paris, Librairie Floury, 1930.” It would have been quite common for people of the time to manufacture their own shot, especially professional hunters, and the notion that silver has an effect on magical creatures was well known in that period. A silver bullet he personally made for the job of ending their nightmare. He threw a shitload of money and men at the problem, no questions asked. You’ll no doubt recognise that bit of lore from modern werewolf stories, and there are those who suggest it’s actually an embellishment by previous researchers in an effort to make the stories fit with the legend. Artist’s renderings did little to narrow the list of suspects, then and now. Another attack occurred on December 2, 1769, followed by a dozen more deaths. It happened in the former province Gévaudan (now the French department Lozère) in southern France over a period of six years, from the summer of 1764 until the final attacks over Christmas of 1769/1770 – though that’s a muddy bit of the story. Unfortunately for Antoine, the beast he had not killed. Maybe this was just a public craze. Approximately a hundred people were killed, while many others were injured to varying degrees. Fact or … In the years between 1764 and 1767, a real-life monster had brutally savaged the residents of the former province of Gévaudan in the highlan Some would argue that Gévaudan’s man-eating wolf is not a werewolf story, but if you’ll indulge, you may be rewarded. So it is possible that he did shoot the animal with a silver bullet. The Beast’s physiology, odd fur configuration, hunting methods, attack patterns, and preference for open country all point toward something like a subadult male lion. Peasants back then knew that sheep and cattle sometimes drew hungry wolves and other predators, says historian Jay M. Smith. Loads of deaths were blamed on wolf attacks, and for all we know, sure, that’s what happened here. Something about a primordial fear of the wild that has plagued mankind since it first adopted the social contract in a bid to separate itself from the daily murder-hustle of a Hobbesian life. Embellishments and inconsistencies in the description aside, it’s clear that a beast of mythic proportions was loose in the area of Gévaudan, and it had a taste for human blood. The fact remains that to this day we still don’t know what it was that killed up to 100 people in Gévaudan in the 18th century. But the real mystery is how the Beast of the Gévaudan was transformed from history into myth. After two months passed, the killings resumed, with another 30 or so dead over the course of a year and a half— and this time, without aid from the king, who assumed the problem had been solved. Alternatively, the Beast could have also been one or more humans behind a murderous hoax. But if you cherry pick the anecdotal evidence—and who doesn’t like doing that?—and view the illustrations with a big grain of salt, consider context, and examine the more reality-based behaviors exhibited by the Beast, we can draw some of the more likely conclusions. While existential dread would, 150 years later, tap a human fear of living, the Beast of Gévaudan made flesh the universal animal fear of being eaten to death by predators, at a time when many people lived very close to nature. Sketches of the Beast apparently predate accurate depictions of faunae, or human ability to draw a dog, so most of the images show what appears to be a bear-size squirrel with a bald tail, drawn by someone who had only read about quadrupeds in books, and who also maybe couldn’t read so good. And, in all fairness to this theory, no predator naturally hunts humans, so any culprit is going to be an outlier. France is a country famous for food, wine, chauvinism, and existential dread — a sort of banal but cloying internal crisis popularized by philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century. Combining all of the aforementioned characteristics yields some sort of chimera hybrid monstrosity lacking any kind of basis in zoology, rather than something real, like a rogue felid or feral jackalope. The werewolf, or lycanthrope (which is Greek in origin) has an ancient beginning. As a member of a hunting party organised by a local nobleman, Castel is credited with killing the creature that had terrorised his village for so long. Another attack occurred on December 2, 1769, followed by a dozen more deaths. 0:00. Wherever it began, there’s no denying the obsession we have with these stories and characters, and while pretty much every such story you might hear today is without a doubt fiction, there are some cases in the not-so-distant past that aren’t so easy to dismiss. Some, like little Jacques Portefaix or Marie-Jeanne Vallet, managed to fend off the Beast and became folk heroes as their stories spread. King Louis XV must have been a true crime fan, or at least a fan of distracting his subjects from a recent string of military defeats to the British and Prussians, as well as a generally merde French economy, because he decided to make a kingly big deal out of hunting the Beast down. Just like the beast killed by Antoine de Beauterne this creature looked relatively like a wolf but was much bigger than any local wolves. Some sources claim that Castel took down the beast with a single shot…a blessed silver bullet. There, between May 1764 and June 1767, a huge wolf-like creature killed between 80 and 113 people and injured many more. by Susan Hardy. But before your average French folk had the leisure time, espresso, and cigarettes to do much deep thinking on unhappiness, there was another kind of crisis in France: the kind where hinterland-dwelling hellbeasts eviscerated women and children by the hundreds. If there was a real animal behind these sightings and reports, it is obscured by a great deal of folklore. In the end disgruntled peasants had had enough of these outsiders eating their bread, trampling their fields and invading their houses. It was feared that it might attack a child or person, and the island people were pretty shaken up. 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