Werewolf Stories, page 12
The composite that emerged was one in which a full set of wolf fangs protruded from the skeletal mouth of the Ayres man, giving him, even in death, an appearance that frayed the nerves.
The composite that emerged was one in which a full set of wolf fangs protruded from the skeletal mouth of the Ayres man, giving him, even in death, an appearance that frayed the nerves. How much more frightening the wolf man of Eagle Creek must have appeared on the moonless nights when he stalked the primeval forests of Kentucky.
The discovery set off a flurry of scientific speculation about the meaning of the wolf tooth artifact in the daily life of the ancient culture. Was there a special wolf cult among the Adena? What might their ceremonies have been to require the use of the raw, keen wolves’ teeth inserted into the mouths of their priests?
Anthropologists were certain that the body found buried in lonely splendor in the Ayres mound must have been that of a tribal leader or a man of some other great importance. Few Adena people were given the honor of single mound burial, a practice reserved for persons of high rank.
Some knowledgeable observers believed the Ayres man may have given his life in a sacred ceremony designed to propitiate a god, most likely the wolf. Several Indian cultures were known to place victims inside a leather bag, allowing the material to slowly contract and squeeze the life from the body. Often the skull was crushed when this method was employed.
The discovery of the werewolf cult of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley substantiates, in part, a number of tribal legends previously thought to be baseless, in which terrible stories of men who became wolves are told.
Sometimes when the moon is full, those legends say, strange forms stalk the deep woods of the Ohio Valley, and sharp, piercing howls reach toward the sky.
Sources:
Steiger, Brad. Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 2011.
Eisler, Robert (1904–1949)
Robert Eisler, author of Man into Wolf, had a distinguished and tragic life. Born in Vienna in 1904, he was educated there and in Leipzig and gained his degrees and his doctorates summa cum laude. He was a Fellow of the Austrian Historical Institute, traveled widely, and visited the excavations at Ephesus, Milletus, and Knossos.
From 1925 to 1931, Eisler worked with the League of Nations in Paris and lectured at the Sorbonne on the origins of Christianity. He returned to his native Austria and spent the next six years doing research. In 1938, he had just received a position teaching comparative religion at Oxford when he was arrested by the Gestapo.
After 15 months in Buchenwald and Dachau, he was released and permitted to travel to England to accept the position at Oxford. Although he lectured at the university for nearly two years, the terrible results of the treatment that he had endured in the concentration camps began to take their toll on his body. By now the war was in full fury, and he remained in England, continuing to research and write, until his death in 1949.
The author of many works in German, Eisler had his final achievement in Man into Wolf — An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy in which he sought to demonstrate that all violence, from individual rape and murder to collective organized war, stems from an ancestral memory of humankind’s prehistoric descent from timid vegetarian to savage, meat-and-blood eating lycanthrope. Eisler was convinced that humankind’s collective consciousness — and conscience — had expressed its guilt all over the world in its legends, myths, and psycho-religious rites.
Sources:
Eisler, Robert. Man into Wolf. London: Spring Books, 1948.
Elkhorn Monster
As Linda Godfrey (1951–2022) tells in her book The Beast of Bray Road (2003), late one winter’s night in 1993, Lorianne Endrizzi was driving down Bray Road in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, when she saw what she at first thought was a man crouching at the side of the road. Curious as to what he might be doing on the shoulder of the road, she slowed down to take a closer look. Within the next few moments, she was astonished to see that the being spotlighted in the beams of her headlights was covered with fur and had a long, wolflike snout, fangs, pointed ears, and eyes that had a yellowish glow. The thing’s arms were jointed like a human’s, and it had hands with humanlike fingers that were tipped with pointed claws.
Lorianne sped off, thinking that the creature was so humanlike that it had to be some kind of freak of nature. Later, when she visited the library, she found a book with an illustration of a werewolf. She said that she was startled to see how much the classic monster of legend resembled the beast that she had seen that night on Bray Road right there in Elkhorn, Wisconsin.
Doristine Gipson, another Elkhorn resident who sighted the creature on Bray Road, described it as having a large chest, like that of a weightlifter. She was certain that she had not seen a large dog but instead a humanlike creature that had a wide chest and was covered with long, brown hair.
A 12-year-old girl said that she had been with a group of friends walking near a snow-covered cornfield when they sighted what they believed to be a large dog. When they began to call it, it stared at them, then stood upright.
As the children screamed in their alarm, the beast dropped back down on all fours and began running toward them. Fortunately for them, the monster suddenly headed off in another direction and disappeared.
“What impressed me most about the first witnesses to the Beast of Bray Road,” Linda Godfrey said, “was their almost visible sense of deep fright that was still obvious as they recounted what they saw. They didn’t act like people making something up, and in fact, they could hardly bring themselves to tell their stories. I was also impressed by the fact that they all noticed a certain jeering cockiness from the creature as it made eye contact with them. This is a characteristic that has continued to be present in every sighting reported. Even when the witness is some distance away, he or she reports feeling almost more like the observed than the observer. And that is very unnerving to even the most macho, outdoorsy of the witnesses. I was also struck by the fact that the creature apparently was more interested in getting away than in harming anyone.
“Officially, I don’t eliminate any sightings that are reported in good faith, as long as the witness felt there was something very strange about it. In much Native American lore, ‘spirit’ animals are visually indistinguishable from ordinary creatures. So if witnesses think there is something different enough about what they see that they are compelled to report it, I just put it down exactly as they tell it. I feel the more information we have, the easier it will be to see patterns.
“It’s worth noting that people do see ordinary dogs, coyotes, bears, wolves, etc., all the time and the reaction is just, ‘hey, there’s a coyote’ — not, ‘heaven help me … it’s scaring me to death.’”
“It’s worth noting that people do see ordinary dogs, coyotes, bears, wolves, etc., all the time and the reaction is just, ‘hey, there’s a coyote’ — not, ‘heaven help me, there’s something so unusual it’s scaring me to death.’ So I tend to trust people’s instincts when they say there was something not right about what they’ve spotted, whether it was size, speed, posture, or even as some have reported, telepathic communication!
“Most people entertain the Hollywood notion of the slathering, tortured soul who transforms bodily under the full moon and must be killed with silver bullets,” Godfrey continued. “Others might consider the word to signify a shamanistic shape-shifter who is able to summon the very realistic illusion of another creature. Or perhaps you are talking about the medieval notion of a human who is able to project an astral entity that looks like a wolf (usually while the person is sound asleep) that is able to roam the countryside, kill and eat people and which, if wounded, will transfer the wound to the corresponding area of the human body.
“There are other versions, too. Statements by witnesses such as ‘I thought it was a demon from hell’ or ‘It was something not natural, not of this world,’ have indeed made me wonder if something other than a natural, flesh-and-blood animal is roaming the cornfields around here.
“A few witnesses that I detail in my second book, Beyond Bray Road, claim to have seen the creature either morphing or materializing. This points to the supernatural, but still doesn’t prove that an actual human has changed bodily structure, grown fur and fangs, and then sneaked out for a midnight possum dinner. However, I do consider the possibility. And while I know there are self-proclaimed lycanthropes who insist they do transmute, I haven’t yet found the evidence to prove it occurs.”
Sources:
Godfrey, Linda. The Beast of Bray Road. Madison, WI: Prairie Oak Press, 2003.
Steiger, Brad. Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beast from the Darkside. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 2011.
Endore, Guy (1900–1970)
When Guy Endore attended Columbia University in the early 1920s and his classmates first began to perceive his literary talents — together with his aureole of blond hair — they began to describe him as the present incarnation of the young Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although Endore preferred the sciences, he excelled in the humanities and was a member of a group of young intellectuals who included such future literary luminaries as Clifton Fadiman, Mortimer Adler, Edgar Johnson, and Henry Morton Robinson. It is unlikely, though, that any of his classmates in the Columbia class of 1924 knew that Endore’s childhood had known desperate poverty.
When he was just a small boy in Brooklyn, his mother died, and his father sent him, with his brother and three sisters, to a Methodist orphanage in Ohio. Later, family circumstances dramatically improved to the point where their father took them to Vienna. Here, however, rather than offering comfort and peace of mind, Endore’s father left his children with a French governess and then mysteriously disappeared.
For five years, the governess fulfilled her responsibility to her vanished employer and saw to it that the young Americans were trained in scholarly ways in the rigorous elementary schools and gymnasia of Vienna. And then the funds ran out. The governess appealed to the U.S. Consulate to intervene, and the Endore children were restored to their father, who had taken residence in Pittsburgh. Guy enrolled in Schenley High School and the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh before his acceptance at Columbia.
Soon after his graduation, he married his wife, Henrietta, and managed to support himself, his wife, and eventually a child by doing translations from French and German. His first book, published in 1929, was a biography of Casanova. His second was a study of Joan of Arc. In 1933, he published the famous horror tale Werewolf of Paris.
Endore, his wife, and their two daughters, Marcia and Gita, survived the Depression years by answering Hollywood’s call to come to Los Angeles and write scripts for motion pictures. He subsequently wrote scripts for all the major studios and worked on a number of horror films, including The Mark of the Vampire (1936). Although Endore’s werewolf novel is credited as the inspiration for The Werewolf of London (1935) and Curse of the Werewolf (1961), it actually bears very little resemblance to either one of the cinematic treatments. Endore’s wolf man is based on the actual case of François Bertrand, who was truly more ghoul than werewolf.
Endore wrote a number of novels after his stint at the studios, including Methinks the Lady (1946) and King of Paris (1956).
Sources:
Endore, Guy. The King of Paris. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
Melton, J. Gordon. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 2011.
Enkidu
Perhaps our earliest written record of a man-beast appears on a Babylonian fragment circa 2000 BCE that tells the story of King Gilgamesh and his werewolf-like friend, Enkidu. The Epic of Gilgamesh remains to date the oldest known literary work in the world. Although it comprises 12 cantos of about 300 verses each, ancient records indicate that the original epic was at least twice as long as its presently known length.
Pieced together from 30,000 fragments discovered in the library at Ninevah in 1853, the story tells of Gilgamesh, the legendary Sumerian king of Uruk, and his quest for immortality. At first perceiving that the physical aspect of his quest lies in perpetuating his seed, Gilgamesh becomes such a lustful monarch that no woman in his kingdom is safe from his advances. The goddess Aruru, assessing the situation, decides to take matters into her own hands, and she forms the beast-man Enkidu from clay and her spittle to create an opponent powerful enough to challenge Gilgamesh.
In some period art, like this Akkadian cylinder seal where Enkidu (right) battles a lion, Gilgamesh’s beastman companion is depicted with bull-like features.
Gilgamesh soon learns of this hairy wild man of the desert who protects the beasts from all those who would hunt in his desolate domain, and the king begins to have uncomfortable dreams of wrestling with a strong opponent whom he could not defeat. Gilgamesh sends a woman into the wilderness to seduce the wild beast-man and to tame him. She accomplishes her mission, teaching him such social graces as the wearing of clothing and other amenities of civilization as they wend their way to Uruk. When Enkidu eventually arrives in the city, the two giants engage in fierce hand-to-hand combat. The king manages to throw the beast-man, but he does not kill him. Instead, the two become fast friends, combining their strength to battle formidable giants and even the gods themselves. It is the jealous goddess Ishtar who causes the fatal illness that leads to Enkidu’s death.
Gilgamesh finally abandons his search for immortality when the goddess Siduri Sabitu, dispenser of the Wine of Immortality to the gods, confides in him that his quest will forever be in vain — the cruel gods have decreed that all mortals shall die. Each day should be treasured, she advises, and one should enjoy the good things of life — a wife, family, friends, eating, and drinking.
Sources:
Gordon, Stuart. The Encyclopedia of Myths and Legends. London: Headline Books, 1993.
The Reader’s Companion to World Literature. New York: New American Library, 1956.
Ethnology of the Werewolf
In the beginning of the thirteenth century, Gervase of Tillbury wrote in Latin in his Otia Imperialia: “In English they say werewolf, for in English were means man, and wolf wolf.” In Medieval Latin, werewolf was written guerulfus.
In Scandinavia, the Norwegian counterpart to werewolf is vargulf, which, literally translated, is “rogue wolf.” In Swedish, varulf; Danish, vaerulf. The Norse words Ulfhedhnar (“wolf-clothed”) and ber-werker (in German, barenhauter) refer to the skins worn by the dreaded Northern warriors when they went berserk, war-mad, running amok among their opponents.
This Belarusian silver commemorative coin depicts Vseslav of Polotsk — a famed Slavic prince, hero, and reputed sorcerer — with a running wolf to acknowledge the fact he was a werewolf.
In other regions of Europe, we have the Medieval Norman garwalf; in Norman-French, loup-garou. In Portugal, lobarraz; in Italy, lupo-manaro; in Calabria, lupu-minaru; and in Sicily, lupu minaru.
In the Slavonic languages, the werewolf is called vlukodlak, literally “wolf haired” or “wolf-skinned.” In Bulgaria, vulkolak; Poland, wilkolak; Russian, volkolka or volkulaku; Serbia, vulkodlak.
In modern Greek, the word brukolakas or bourkolakas can apply to vampires as well as werewolves, since it is adapted from a Slavic word for a creature that flies or attacks by night.
Sources:
Eisler, Robert. Man into Wolf. London: Spring Books, 1948.
Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Translated by Angela Hall. Rochester, NY: Boydell Brewer, 1993.
Spence, Lewis. An Encyclopedia of Occultism. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960.
Exorcism
During his Sunday, March 4, 1990, sermon at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, Cardinal John O’Connor stated that diabolically instigated violence is on the rise around the world, and he disclosed that two church-sanctioned exorcisms had been performed in the New York area within that past year.
Cardinal O’Connor went on to say that the novel The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty was a gruesomely authentic portrayal of demonic possession. Perhaps the only exposure that most people have to the concept of exorcism is derived from that popular novel and motion picture — and perhaps the majority of those who read the book or shuddered through the chilling cinematic version believe that such demonic manifestations and such rites of exorcism exist only in the lively imagination of authors of horror novels. Those people could not be further from the truth.
Lorraine Warren and her late husband, Ed Warren, of the New England Society for Psychic Research revealed that they had been present during the two violent exorcisms referred to by Cardinal O’Connor. The first exorcism involved a woman who howled like a wolf, vomited vile fluid from her mouth, and levitated about a foot off the floor while the priests and their assistants tried to hold her down. The second case was that of a woman who had been into drugs and who joined a satanic cult. She spoke in the deep, rough voice of a vulgar, profane man, and she struggled against her exorcists with such strength that seven people could not restrain her. She, too, snarled like some monstrous beast, levitated, and vomited vile fluids.
On December 30, 1998, the London Guardian reported that Christian clergy are increasingly being called upon to conduct exorcisms to rid people of evil spirits. The Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church declined the opportunity to make an official comment, but they did admit that every diocese has dedicated staff experienced in dealing with exorcism. While some clerics are embarrassed by critics who claim the entire subject hearkens back to the Middle Ages, priests throughout the Western world are coping with steadily growing demands for exorcism and requests to drive away evil spirits from the afflicted.
