Peter Stubbe
Peter Stubbe, executed at Bedburg in 1590, is perhaps history’s most notorious werewolf. Unusually, his tale is told in a contemporary pamphlet which was translated from Dutch into English in the year of his execution. According to the pamphlet, Stubbe ‘from his youth was greatly inclined to euill’. He made a pact with the devil, but had no interest in worldly prosperity or power, but ‘only requested that at his pleasure he might woork his malice on men, women, and children, in the shape of some beast’. Satan gave him a girdle which transformed him into a wolf whenever desired.
Stubbe immediately got to work. Anyone who insulted or displeased him could be sure of their death at the jaws of a ravening wolf, for he would ‘neuer rest till he had plucked out their throates and teare their ioyntes a sunder’. Stubbe acquired a taste for blood, and progressed onto indiscriminate murder. Cruelly, he would walk the streets of Bedburg courteously saluting the parents and relatives of his victims. He would also identify victims in this way: he would await anyone who caught his eye in the fields and woods that surrounded Bedburg, and attack them in his wolf shape.
Stubbe’s case is also notable in that his criminal lycanthropy included not only murder but rape. He would sometimes keep his human form, rape young women, and then turn himself into a wolf to kill and partially devour them. He boasted that he could outrun any greyhound when in the shape of a wolf, so even the district’s swiftest athletes were at risk from him. Within a few years, Stubbe had killed 13 children and 2 pregnant women, ‘tearing the Children out of their wombs… and after eating their hearts panting hotte and rawe, which he accounted dainty morsells’.
As well as slaughtering and eating livestock – a sure sign that he had become more beast than man – Stubbe was also guilty of incest with both his sister and his daughter (to whom the pamphlet is sympathetic), producing a grandchild/ child by the latter. Stubbe even killed his own (non-incestuous) son, luring him to the fields and assuming wolf-form before eating the brains from his skull: ‘the most monstrous act that euer man heard off, for neuer was knowen a wretch from nature so far degenerate’. Despite many attempts to catch him, Stubbe’s werewolf career lasted 25 years.
Finally, and only because God desired it according to the pamphlet, Stubbe was caught in his wolf form and surrounded by men who unleashed their dogs upon him. Realizing he could not escape, Stubbe resumed his human form, but was witnessed transforming by the awestruck huntsmen who recognized the polite man about town they all knew. Stubbe was put on the torture rack in Bedburg and confessed to the above before being torture. Red-hot pincers tore off 10 pieces of Stubbe’s flesh on the wheel and his limbs were broken before he was beheaded and his remains burned to ashes.