What happened
Manuel Blanco Romasanta was a small, mild-looking travelling pedlar from Galicia who also guided travellers across the mountains to Castile and Asturias. In the 1840s women and children who had hired him as a guide began to disappear. Their families received letters from him saying their relatives had arrived safely, but people noticed he was selling the victims' clothes. A rumour also spread that he was selling soap made from human fat. Arrested in September 1852 in Nombela, he was tried in Allariz. He confessed to thirteen killings but claimed he was cursed: in the mountains of Couso he had turned into a wolf and, together with two other wolves, killed and eaten people. When the prosecutor asked him to demonstrate the transformation, he replied that the curse had lasted thirteen years and had just expired.
Witnesses
Victims' families, Galician villagers, prosecutor Luciano Bastida and the Allariz doctors who examined the accused; the trial record runs to more than two thousand pages.
Explanations and hypotheses
The Allariz doctors found Romasanta fully sane and concluded that he had invented his “lycanthropy.” The court acquitted him of four killings because the evidence pointed to real wolf attacks and, on 6 April 1853, sentenced him to death for the other nine. After a French hypnotist who wanted to study “clinical lycanthropy” intervened, Queen Isabella II commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Today Romasanta is regarded as Spain's first documented serial killer; according to newspaper reports found by researchers, he died in 1863 in the prison at Ceuta.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
Sources
- La Voz de Galicia – La leyenda del «hombre lobo» Romasanta resucita en Allariz (2011)
- La Rioja – El fiscal que encerró al hombre lobo (2012)
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