Gilles Garnier

Suddenly, anyone possessing unusual herbs, strange medical salves, or even just acting suspiciously could be accused of harboring this demonic technology.

Which perfectly and tragically sets the stage for one of the most heavily documented and deeply unsettling French cases in the history of these panics, the case of Gilles Garnier from the town of Dole, France.

The hermit of Dole.

Yes.

This takes place a few decades later, and the social dynamics here are incredibly stark.

Garnier was a deeply impoverished hermit.

He lived out in the woods, entirely disconnected from the social fabric of the town.

He is the ultimate outsider.

The French seemed to be obsessed with werewolves, and one of their most famous cases was the Werewolf of Dole.

Gilles Garnier was a hermit who lived out on the outskirts of his town with his wife.

When children in the town started to go missing and turned up mutilated, the townspeople set off on a wolf hunt.

They eventually decided Garnier was to blame.

Both were convicted and burned at the stake, along with a third person who refused to confess.

In 1573, another Frenchman, Gilles Garnier, was burned at the stake after he was accused of torturing children, killing four children, and feeding their bodies to his family.

Despite his confession, there were doubts of his ability to commit the crimes as he lived nearly 40 miles away from these victims.

And without going into more and more gruesome detail, I think you get the picture here.

As the hovel was far from any road, and was only reached by a path over moorland and through forest, it was seldom visited, and the couple who lived in it were not such as would make many friends.

The man, Gilles Garnier, was a sombre, ill-looking fellow, who walked in a stooping attitude, and whose pale face, livid complexion, and deep-set eyes under a pair of coarse and bushy brows, which met across the forehead, were sufficient to repel anyone from seeking his acquaintance.

Gilles seldom spoke, and when he did it was in the broadest patois of his country.

His long gray beard and retiring habits procured for him the name of the Hermit of Saint Bonnet, though no one for a moment attributed to him any extraordinary amount of sanctity.

On the fourteenth a little boy of ten years old was missing, who had been last seen at a short distance from the gates of Dôle.

The Hermit of Saint Bonnet was now seized and brought to trial at Dôle, when the following evidence was extracted from him and his wife, and substantiated in many particulars by witnesses.

On the last day of Michaelmas, under the form of a wolf, at a mile from Dôle, in the farm of Gorge, a vineyard belonging to Chastenoy, near the wood of La Serre, Gilles Garnier had attacked a little maiden of ten or twelve years old, and had slain her with his teeth and claws.

He had then drawn her into the wood, stripped her, gnawed the flesh from her legs and arms, and had enjoyed his meal so much that, inspired with conjugal affection, he had brought some of the flesh home for his wife Apolline.