Lore Episode 3: The Beast Within (Transcript) - 6th April 2015

tw: murder, rape, death of children, bodily mutilation, cannibalism, graphic descriptions of violence, ableist language, disease, werewolves

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

Ask anyone in the mental health profession about full moons and you’ll get a surprising answer. They’ll respond with something that sounds incredibly like folklore and myth. The full moon has the power to bring out the crazy in people. We’ve believed this for a long time. We refer to unstable people as “lunatics”, a word that is Latin. It’s built from the root word luna, which means “moon”. And for centuries, has operated under the conviction that changes in the luna cycle can cause people to lose touch with reality. Just ask the parents of a young child and they’ll tell you tales of wild behaviour and out-of-the-ordinary disobedience at certain times of the month. Science tells us that just as the moon’s pull on the ocean creates tides that rise and fall in severity, so too does our planet’s first satellite tug on the water inside our bodies, changing our behaviour. As modern people, when we talk about the full moon we tend to joke about this insane, extraordinary behaviour. But maybe we joke to avoid the deeper truth, an idea that we are both frightened and embarrassed that we even entertain. For most of us, you see, the full moon conjures up an image that is altogether unnatural and unbelievable. That large, glowing, perfect circle in the night sky makes us think of just one thing: werewolves. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

Science has tried many times over the years to explain our obsession with the werewolf. One theory is a disease known as hypertrichosis, sometimes known as “wolfitis”. It’s a condition of excessive, unusual body hair growth, oftentimes covering the person’s entire face. Think Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. Psychologists actually have an official diagnosis in the DSM IV handbook known as “clinical lycanthropy”. It’s defined as a delusional syndrome where the patient believes they can transform into an animal, but the changes only take place in their mind, of course. Delusions, though, have to start somewhere. Patients who believe that they are Napoleon Bonaparte have some previous knowledge of who he was. I think it’s fair to assume that those who suffer from clinical lycanthropy have heard of werewolves before. It’s actually pretty easy to bump into the myth, thanks to modern popular culture. Werewolves have been featured in, or at least appeared in, close to 100 films in Hollywood since 1913.

One of the earliest mentions of something even resembling the modern werewolf can actually be found in the 2000-year-old writings of the Roman poet Vergil. In his Eclogue 9, written about 40BCE, he described a man named Moeris, who could transform himself into a wolf using herbs and poisons. About 50 years later, Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical novel called, appropriately, Satyricon, which I think is basically the equivalent of Stephen King writing a horror novel called “Frighticon”. In it, he tells the tale of a man named Niceros. In the story, Niceros was travelling with a friend, and when that friend suddenly took off his clothes, urinated in a circle and transformed into a wolf right before his eyes, before running off toward a large field of sheep. The next day, Niceros was told by the sheep-owner that one of the shepherds stabbed a wolf in the neck with a pitch fork. Later that day, Niceros noticed that his friend, now returned to the house, had a similar wound on his neck.

In the Greek myth of the god Zeus and an Arcadian king named Lycaon, Zeus took on the form of a human traveller. At one point in his journey he visited Arcadia, and during his time in that country, he visited the royal court. The king of the land, Lycaon, somehow recognised Zeus for who he truly was and tried, in true Greek form, of course, to kill him by serving him a meal of human flesh. But Zeus was a smart guy, after all, and he caught Lycaon in the act, throwing the mythological equivalent of a temper tantrum. He destroyed the palace, killed all 50 of the king’s sons with lightning bolts, and then of course cursed King Lycaon himself. The punishment? Lycaon would be doomed to spend the rest of his life as a wolf, presumably because wolves were known for attacking and eating humans, and he tried to serve human flesh. Most scholars believe that this legend is what gives birth to the term lycanthropy: lukos being the Greek word for wolf, and anthropos, the word for man.

Werewolves aren’t just a Greco-Roman thing. In the 13th century, the Norse recorded their mythological origins in something called the Völsunga saga. Despite their culture being separated from the Greeks by thousands of miles and many centuries, there are in fact tales of werewolves present in their histories. One of the stories in the Völsunga saga involves a father and son pair: Sigmund and Sinfjotli. During their travels, the two men came across a hut in the woods where they found two enchanted wolf skins. These skins had the power to change the wearer into a wolf, giving them all the characteristics that the beast was known for: power, speed, and cunning. The catch, according to the saga, was that once put on, the wolf pelt could only be taken off every 10 days. Undeterred, the father son duo each put on one of the wolf skins, and transform into the beasts. They decided to split up and go hunting in their new forms, but they made an arrangement that if either of them encountered a party of men over the certain size of seven, then they were supposed to howl for the other to come join them in the hunt. Sigmund’s son, however, broke his promise, killing off a hunting party of 11 men. When Sigmund discovered this, he fatally injured his son. After the god Odin intervened and healed him, both men took off the pelts and burned them. You see, from the very beginning, werewolves were a supernatural thing, a curse, a change in the very nature of humanity. They were ruled by cycles of time and feared by those around them.

Things get interesting when we go to Germany. In 1582, the country of Germany was being pulled apart by a war between Catholics and Protestants, and one of the towns that played host to both sides was the small town of Bedburg. Keep in mind that there were also still outbreaks of the Black Death, so this was an age of conflict and violence. People understood loss – they had become numb to it, and it would take something incredibly extraordinary to surprise them. First, there were cattle mutilations: farmers from the area surrounding Bedburg would find dead cattle in their fields. It started of infrequent, but grew to become a daily occurrence, something that went on for weeks. Cows that had been sent out to pasture were found torn apart. It was as if a wild animal had attacked them. Naturally, the farmers assumed it was wolves, but it didn’t stop there. Children began to go missing. Young women vanished from the main roads around Bedburg. In some cases their bodies were never found, but those that were had been mauled by something horribly violent. Finding your cattle disembowelled is one thing, but when it’s your daughter or your wife, well, it can cause panic, and fear, and so the community spiralled into hysteria.

Now, we think of historical European paranoia and we often think of witchcraft. The 15th and 16th centuries were filled with witch hunts: burnings, hangings, and an overwhelming hysteria that even spread across the Atlantic to the British colonies, where it destroyed more lives. The Witch Trails of Salem, Massachusetts are the most famous of those examples, but at the same time, Europe was also on fire with fear of werewolves. Some historians think that in France alone, some 30,000 people were accused of being werewolves, and some (hundreds, they say) were even executed for it, either by hanging or being burnt at the stake. You see, the fear of werewolves was real, and for the town of Bedburg, it was very real.

One report from this event tells of two men and a woman, who were travelling just outside the city walls. They heard a voice call out to them for help from within the trees beside the road, and one of the men stepped into the trees to give assistance. When he didn’t return, the second man entered the woods to find him, and he also didn’t return. The woman caught on, attempted to run, but something exited the woods and attacked her. The bodies of the men were later found, mangled and torn apart, but the woman’s never was. Later, villagers found severed limbs in the fields near Bedburg, limbs from the people who were missing. It was clear that something horrible was hunting them.

Another report tells of a group of children playing in a field near the cattle. As they played, something ran into the field and grabbed a small girl by the neck before trying to tear her throat out. Thankfully the high collar on her dress actually saved her life, and she managed to scream. Now, cows don’t like screaming apparently, and they began to stampede. Frightened by the cattle, the attacker let go of the girl and ran for the forest, and this was the last straw for the people of Bedburg. They took the hunt to the beast.

According to a pamphlet from 1589, the men of the town hunted for the creature for days. Accompanied by dogs and armed for killing, these brave men ventured into the forest and, finally, found it. In the end, it was the dogs that cornered the beast. Dogs are fast and they beat the men to their prey. When the hunters finally did arrive, they found the creature cornered. According to the pamphlet, the wolf transformed into a man right before their eyes. While the wolf had been just another beast, the man was someone they recognised. It was a wealthy, well-respected farmer from town named Peter Stubbe, sometimes recorded as Stumpp. Stubbe confessed to it all, and his story seemed to confirm their darkest fears. He told them that he had made a pact with the devil at the age of 12. The deal? In exchange for his soul, the devil would give him a plethora of worldly pleasures, but like most stories, a greedy heart is difficult to satisfy. Stubbe admitted to being a, and I quote,  “wicked fiend, with the desire for wrong and destruction”, that he was “inclined to blood and cruelty”. Now, to sate that thirst, the devil had given him a magical belt of wolf skin. Putting it on, he claimed, would transform him into the monstrous shape of a wolf. Sound familiar?

He told the men that had captured him that he had taken off the belt in the forest, and some were sent back to retrieve it, but it was never found. Still, superstition and fear drove them to torture and interrogate the man, who confessed to decades of horrible, unspeakable crimes. Well-known around the town, Stubbe told his captors that he would often walk through Bedburg and wave to the families and friends of those he had killed. It delighted him, he said, that none of them suspected that he was the killer. Sometimes he would use these walks to pick out future victims, planning how he would get them outside the city walls, where he could, and I quote, “ravish and cruelly murder them”. Stubbe even admitted to going on killing sprees simply because he took pleasure in the bloodshed. He would kill lambs and goats and eat their raw flesh. He even claimed to have eaten unborn children, ripped straight from their mothers’ wombs.

The human mind is always solving problems, even when we’re asleep and unaware of it. The world is full of things that don’t always sit right with us, and in our attempt to deal with life we… rationalise. In more superstitious times it was easy to lean on old fears and legends. The Tuberculosis outbreaks of the 1800s led people to truly believe that the dead were sucking the life out of the living. The stories that gave birth to the vampire mythology also provided people with a way to process Tuberculosis and its horrible symptoms. Perhaps the story of the werewolf shows us that same phenomenon, but in reverse. Rather than creating stories to explain the mysteries of death, perhaps we created the story of the werewolf to help justify the horrors of life and human nature. The tale of Peter Stubbe sounds terrible, but when you hold it up to modern day serial killers, such as Jeffery Dahmer or Richard Trenton Chase, it’s par for the course. The difference between them and Stubbe is simply 400 years of modernisation. With the advent of electrical lights pushing away the darkness and global exploration exposing much of the world’s fears to be just myth, it’s become more and more difficult to blame our flaws on monsters. The beast, it turns out, has been inside us the whole time.

And Peter Stubbe? Well, the people of Bedburg executed him for his crimes. On October 31st, 1589, (Halloween, mind you) he was given what was thought to be a fair and just punishment. He was strapped, spread eagle and naked, to a large, wooden wheel, and then his skin was pealed off with red hot pinchers. They broke his arms and legs with the blunt end of an axe before finally turning the blade over, and chopping off his head. His body was burnt at the stake in front of the entire town, and then his torture wheel was mounted on a tall pole, topped with the statue of a wolf. On top of that, they placed his severed head. Justice, or just one more example of the cruelty of mankind? Perhaps in the end, we’re all really monsters, aren’t we?

Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke. You can find a transcript of the show, as well as links to source material, at lorepodcast.com. Lore is a bi-weekly podcast, so be sure to check back in for a new episode every two weeks. And if you enjoy scary stories, I happen to write them. You can find a full list of my supernatural thrillers, available in paperback and ebook format, at aaronmahnke.com/novels. Thanks for listening.