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Before Salem: The Real-Life Werewolf Trials That Plagued European Nations
Thousands of people confessed to turning into werewolves via bites, potions, salves, and magic belts. The Church dealt with them the only way they knew how: burning them at the stake.
On October 31, 1589, in the German town of Bedburg, Peeter Stubbe was strapped to a wooden wheel, the flesh torn from his limbs with burning pincers, his arms and legs ripped from his torso. Using the blunt side of an ax-head, his limbs were broken, his head cut off, and everything burned on a pyre. His daughter watched in horror as she herself was flayed, strangled, and burned alongside him.
“In the townes of Cperadt and Bedburg neer unto Collin in high Germany, there was continually brought up and nourished one Stubbe Peeter,” reads the translation of a 16th-century pamphlet titled, A true Discourse: Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter, a most wicked Sorcerer, who in the likenes of a Woolfe, committed many murders, continuing this divelish practise 25. yeeres, killing and devuouring Men, Woomen, and Children.
Facing his imminent death, Peeter Stubbe confessed to practicing dark magic from age 12 on. He said the Devil gave him a belt that allowed…
