Peter Stumpp

In France, in 1573, a man named Gallus Garnier was sentenced to burn alive after a court found he had killed children in the shape of a wolf.

In Germany, 1589, a farmer named Peter Stump was tortured in public and beheaded and burned as a werewolf.

The crowd watched.

In Livonia in 1692, an old man, Theinus, told his judges calmly that he was a werewolf.

And this story is disturbing, even if you don't believe one word of the supernatural part.

So this story centers around a man named Peter Stump.

Now, his name is going to be spelled differently depending on the source, but essentially he was a farmer living in Bedburg, Germany.

Now, he would eventually become known as one of the most infamous alleged, wink, wink, for entertainment purposes only, alleged werewolves in European history.

It's the same as in Sugara Murdi, where foreign scholars turned Basque folk belief into a pact with the devil.

It's the same as in Beetburg, where a man named Peter Stubbe was turned into a werewolf because someone needed one.

The outsider is always made into the monster, not because he was one, but because the teller needed one.

And if you think that's an old story, think of Enfield, more than 300 years after Tadworth.

Which is a good name for a movie.

Um, I don't know if you remember this, but it was the trial of Peter Stumpp.

Yeah.

I do remember this one, which, to be fair, you know, he wasn't just from Wolfsberg.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't think he was a great guy.

So I'm not saying he deserved to be killed in a werewolf trial, but, um, you know, if anyone was a werewolf, it probably was Peter Stumpp.

Yeah.

And, as so often in this series, that face was given to a woman, the desirable woman who devours the man, the childless woman who kills out of envy, the woman who was too wild, too beautiful, too other.

People took their own fear and turned it into her, just as they made a werewolf out of Peter Stubbe and Moorish princesses of the dead of Portugal.

Always the same pattern, the incomprehensible is given a face, and most of the time it's the face of the one you already feared.

But the oldest version we have tells it the other way around.