Peter Stubbe Research Paper

In 1589, Peter Stubbe made a deal with the Devil. In Bedburg, a small town near Cologne, Germany, animals began to be mutilated in the night. Soon after, children and grown men and women began to disappear, later found mauled beyond recognition. The townspeople suspected a rogue wolf and eventually a group of men corned the creature. But what they found was not a beast, but a man ––one of their own–– named Peter Stubbe, a well liked and well respected farmer. Stubbe claimed that Devil had given him a belt that when worn would transform him into a bloodthirsty wolf, allowing him to fulfill his deep desire to kill and devour. It was revealed that over the course of a couple of years he had been responsible for murders and partial consumption of victims that included two pregnant women, tearing the unborn children from their wombs,

Many of the European werewolves of antiquity transformed by choice, oftentimes through the use or consumption of a magical item. One of the oldest known werewolf legends originated in Arcadia, Greece where the cult of Wolf-Zeus was based. Every year the priests prepared a sacrificial feast for their god on Mount Lycaeus that included meat mixed with human flesh. Whoever ate it would became a wolf, the caveat being that until they abstained from human flesh for nine years they would stay transformed. The neighboring Romans had similar legends in which people known as versipellis, or “turnskin” would use magic herbs or spells to transform into wolves (“Lycanthropy.” Encyclopædia Britannica). There were also legends, particularly in northern Europe, of magical wolf pelts that, when donned at night, would transform the wearer into a beast (Rose 391). These wolfskins, or similar magical clothing, show up frequently in mythologies, like the Saga of the Volsungs, and urban legends like that of Peter