What happened
Peter Stumpp (also Stubbe) was a wealthy farmer near Bedburg in the Rhineland. In 1589 he was accused of a series of murders that had for years been blamed on a wolf roaming the area. Stretched on the rack, Stumpp confessed that he had practised black magic since the age of twelve and that the Devil had given him a belt that turned him into a huge wolf with fiery eyes. He admitted that over 25 years he had killed and eaten fourteen children, including his own son, and two pregnant women. He was also accused of incest. The magic belt was never found. On 31 October 1589 Stumpp was executed with great cruelty, together with his daughter and his mistress. A pole bearing the wheel, the figure of a wolf and his head was erected at the execution site as a warning.
Witnesses
The judges and people of Bedburg; the case was described in German broadsheets, the diary of Cologne alderman Hermann von Weinsberg and an English pamphlet of 1590, rediscovered in 1920 by Montague Summers.
Explanations and hypotheses
Historians stress that almost everything we know comes from sensational pamphlets and confessions extracted under torture. Some see Stumpp as a real serial killer, others as the victim of a trial held amid religious tensions in the Rhineland (Stumpp was probably a Protestant) and a wave of witch trials. The wolf transformations belong to the demonology of the time, not to fact. The story still inspires writers and musicians today.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
Sources
- Montague Summers, The Werewolf (Kegan Paul, 1933)
- Nathan Baillie, Monstrous Lessons: Peter Stumpp, the Werewolf of Bedburg (University of Saskatchewan Undergraduate Research Journal, 2024)
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