Peter Stumpp: The Werewolf Who Ate His Own Son’s Brain | He Was Brutally Executed On Halloween

A wealthy German farmer confessed to 25 years of murder, cannibalism, and transformation into a wolf — but was it a genuine case of serial killing, or an elaborate political execution disguised as supernatural justice?

THE WEREWOLF OF BEDBURG: THE TRIAL AND BRUTAL EXECUTION OF PETER STUMPP

A pamphlet published in London in 1590 opens with practical advice for werewolf hunters on how to properly dispose of a captured beast. The rest of the document details the crimes of a German farmer so depraved that the pamphlet’s anonymous author declared no other villain in history could compare to him. The farmer’s execution, carried out on October 31, 1589, remains one of the most violent public spectacles ever recorded in European judicial history. The story sat largely forgotten in archives for over three centuries until its rediscovery in the twentieth century brought the case back to public attention.

THE WEALTHY FARMER OF BEDBURG

Peter Stumpp was born sometime around 1530 to 1550 in the village of Epprath, near the country-town of Bedburg in the Electorate of Cologne. His exact birth date remains unknown because the local church registers were destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War decades later, which means we’re working with incomplete records from the start. The name variations in historical documents — Stube, Stub, Stubbe, Stübbe, and Stumpf — likely all refer to the same man, though some sources also list aliases including Abal Griswold, Abil Griswold, and Ubel Griswold. The sheer number of name variations tells us something about record-keeping in sixteenth-century Germany, where spelling was far from standardized and documents were copied by hand.

The name “Stumpp” or “Stumpf” may not have been his birth name at all, and this detail matters for the story. The word means “stump” in German, and multiple sources indicate that Stumpp had lost his left hand at some point, leaving only a stump. This physical characteristic would later prove central to his identification and conviction — the missing hand became the key piece of evidence that supposedly proved he was a werewolf.

By the 1580s, Stumpp had become a successful and wealthy farmer in the rural community of Bedburg. He was a widower raising two children — a daughter named Beele (sometimes called Sybil due to her beauty) who was older than fifteen, and a son of unknown age. The 1590 English pamphlet describes him as a man who would walk through the streets of Cologne, Bedburg, and Epprath dressed respectably, greeting the townspeople who knew him well. According to this account, he was regularly saluted by friends and neighbors — including, the pamphlet claims, the families of people he had allegedly murdered. The image is striking: a respected community member, waving hello to people whose children he had supposedly killed and eaten. Whether this detail is true or was added for dramatic effect is impossible to know.

THE KILLINGS BEGIN

Starting around 1564, farmers in the Bedburg region began finding their cattle dead in the pastures, their bodies ripped open and mutilated. The deaths were initially attributed to wolves, which would have been a reasonable assumption — wolves were a genuine threat to livestock in sixteenth-century Germany. Over the following years, the attacks escalated in ways that didn’t fit the pattern of ordinary predation. Women and children began disappearing from farms, homes, and the paths they traveled daily.

The terror spread through the community in ways that shaped daily life. People became afraid to venture outside alone, and travelers moved between towns only in large, heavily armed groups. Dismembered limbs and remains of victims were sometimes discovered scattered across fields — not the work of an animal dragging prey back to a den, but something that seemed almost deliberately displayed. Whenever a child went missing, parents assumed the worst. The creature responsible — whatever it was — eluded all attempts at capture for years, which must have made the fear even worse. An ordinary wolf could be hunted and killed; something that evaded every trap and hunting party for over two decades seemed like something else entirely.

The 1590 pamphlet describes the beast as strong and mighty, with great large eyes that sparkled in the night like brands of fire, a mouth wide with sharp cruel teeth, a huge body, and mighty paws. This description reads like folklore, and it probably is — but the townspeople were convinced they were dealing with no ordinary wolf, and that belief shaped everything that followed.

In one incident documented in the sources, several children were playing in a meadow among some cows when a wolf suddenly emerged from nearby woods. The animal seized a young girl by the collar of her coat, but the collar was apparently so stiff and well-made that the wolf could not bite through it. An outcry was raised, and the wolf released the girl and fled. Men from the village gave chase, and this time, they caught up with their quarry.

The hunting party, accompanied by large mastiffs and other dogs, cornered the creature. According to some accounts, when they moved in for the kill, the wolf had vanished — and Peter Stumpp stood in its place. Whether the men actually witnessed a transformation or simply found Stumpp at an incriminating moment remains unclear from the historical sources. The accounts are written as though the transformation was real, but that’s exactly what we’d expect from documents produced in an era that believed werewolves existed.

Another version of his capture offers a different explanation for how he was identified. This account states that during an earlier attack, villagers managed to cut off the wolf’s left forepaw with a sword. According to Germanic folk belief — and this was considered legitimate legal reasoning at the time — if a werewolf’s forepaw was severed, the same wound would appear on the man. When Peter Stumpp was found missing his left hand, this was considered proof enough. Never mind that he might have lost the hand years earlier in a farming accident; in the logic of the day, the matching injury sealed his fate. The townspeople apprehended him and brought him before the authorities.

CONFESSION UNDER TORTURE

In 1589, Peter Stumpp was arrested and formally accused of being what the pamphlet calls an insatiable bloodsucker who had gorged on the flesh of goats, lambs, sheep, men, women, and children for over twenty-five years. He was brought before the local magistrate and faced with the threat of torture — and in sixteenth-century Germany, that threat carried real weight. The authorities had tools designed specifically to extract confessions, and they weren’t hesitant to use them.

Under this threat — and before being stretched on the rack — Stumpp began to confess. The speed of his confession suggests he understood exactly what would happen if he refused.

He admitted to having practiced black magic since the age of twelve. He claimed the Devil himself had appeared to him and forged a magical belt or girdle that enabled transformation into the likeness of a wolf. When the belt was removed, he said, he would return to human form. After his capture, Stumpp told the magistrate he had left the girdle in a certain valley. Men were sent to retrieve it, but despite an extensive search of his farm and the surrounding area, no such belt was ever found. The authorities attributed this to demonic concealment; a modern reader might draw different conclusions.

The confessions grew more disturbing as the interrogation continued. Stumpp admitted to murdering and cannibalizing fourteen children and two pregnant women. He stated that he had ripped the fetuses from the pregnant women’s wombs and eaten their hearts while they were still panting hot and raw. The specific, visceral nature of these details is characteristic of torture-induced confessions from this era — the accused often provided exactly the kind of lurid particulars that interrogators expected to hear.

He confessed to killing his own son and devouring the boy’s brain.

He admitted to an ongoing incestuous relationship with his daughter Beele and claimed to have had regular intercourse with a succubus — a female demon sent to him by the Devil. The inclusion of the succubus is notable because it connects Stumpp’s case to broader demonological beliefs of the period; he wasn’t just confessing to being a werewolf, but to a whole pattern of satanic association.

He confessed to at least one triple murder in which he had lured a man away from his companions under the pretense of needing help with lumber, then bashed in his head. When the second man came looking for the first, Stumpp killed him as well. The woman who was with them tried to flee, but Stumpp caught her. The men’s bodies were later found, but the woman’s never was — leading to speculation that he had consumed her entirely.

The total victim count varies between sources, with some listing as many as sixteen murders, including thirteen children. The pamphlet presents Stumpp as a man who derived pleasure from walking among the families of his victims, knowing what he had done to their loved ones while they suspected nothing. This detail — the monster hiding in plain sight, greeting the bereaved with a friendly wave — appears repeatedly in the sources, as though the authors found it particularly horrifying.

THE BREAKING WHEEL

The instrument chosen for Stumpp’s execution was the breaking wheel, and understanding this device helps explain why his case became so famous. The breaking wheel was one of the most feared punishment devices in European history, reserved for criminals whose offenses were considered so severe that ordinary execution methods were insufficient.

The wheel had been used since antiquity but reached its peak application during the medieval period and early modern era, particularly in France and Germany. In the Holy Roman Empire, this punishment was reserved primarily for men convicted of aggravated murder — killing committed during another crime, or against a family member — and for heresy against the Catholic Church. Stumpp qualified on multiple counts.

The device itself was typically a large wooden wagon wheel with radial spokes extending from a central hub to the outer rim. Some regional variations featured iron rims to facilitate the crushing of bones, while others incorporated small blades on the exterior that would slice the victim as the wheel rolled. The fundamental design remained consistent across variations: a framework that allowed executioners to systematically destroy a human body while keeping the victim alive as long as possible. This wasn’t execution as we understand it today — quick and clinical. This was execution as prolonged public spectacle.

Executions using the wheel followed specific protocols determined by the severity of the crime, and these protocols were spelled out in court sentences with disturbing precision. Less severe offenders were executed “top down” — the executioner would deliver a lethal first blow to the neck, causing relatively quick death. This was considered the merciful version. More heinous criminals received the “bottom up” treatment, starting with the legs and working upward, a process that could take hours. The number and sequence of blows were specified in advance, turning torture into a kind of grim bureaucratic procedure.

Documented cases reveal how long victims could survive this punishment, and the numbers are difficult to process. A fourteenth-century murderer reportedly remained conscious for three days after being broken on the wheel. In 1348, during the Black Death, a Jewish man named Bona Dies underwent the punishment and remained conscious for four days and nights afterward. In 1581 — just eight years before Stumpp’s execution — the German serial killer Christman Genipperteinga was convicted of 544 murders. He was given forty-two strikes with the wheel, then quartered alive. He remained conscious for nine days before dying, having been deliberately kept alive with strong drink. The executioners wanted him to suffer as long as possible, and they had the medical knowledge to extend that suffering.

After the bones were broken, the victim’s shattered limbs were woven through the spokes of the wheel in a process called “braiding.” The wheel was then hoisted onto a tall pole, leaving the sometimes still-living victim suspended high above the ground for everyone to see. Bodies were left exposed to the elements and to carrion birds, which would begin feeding while victims were still alive. The display served as both punishment and warning — a visible monument to the consequences of transgression that might remain standing for months or years.

The breaking wheel remained in use in parts of Germany far longer than most people realize. Bavaria did not fully abolish it until 1813; Hesse-Kassel continued using it until 1836. The last recorded execution by breaking wheel in Prussia occurred on August 13, 1841 — well into the industrial age, when railroads were being built across Europe.

THE EXECUTION ON ALL HALLOWS’ EVE

Peter Stumpp was found guilty on October 28, 1589. His execution was scheduled for three days later — October 31st. The date wasn’t yet associated with Halloween as we know it, but the timing on All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day, would not have been lost on a sixteenth-century audience. This was a night already associated with the supernatural, and the authorities were executing a man who had allegedly made a pact with the Devil.

The sentence was designed to match the horror of the crimes and followed the “bottom up” protocol reserved for the most despised offenders. Stumpp was strapped spread-eagle to the large wooden wheel with his limbs extended along the spokes. Executioners used red-hot pincers to tear the flesh from his bones in ten separate places on his body — a preliminary torture before the main event, designed to maximize suffering before the bone-breaking even began. His arms and legs were then broken with the blunt side of an axehead, systematically shattering the bones in a sequence specified by the court. This measure was described in some sources as intended to prevent him from returning from the grave — a practical concern when dealing with someone believed to have supernatural powers. Finally, his head was cut off, ending what must have been hours of agony.

Stumpp’s daughter Beele and his mistress, Katherine Trompin, were also convicted and executed alongside him. Beele was charged with complicity in her father’s crimes, while Katherine was accused of being a she-wolf sent by the Devil — or at minimum, of knowingly harboring Stumpp’s existence. The evidence against them appears to have been their association with Stumpp rather than any independent proof of wrongdoing. Both women were flayed alive and strangled before their bodies were burned alongside Stumpp’s corpse on a pyre. The inclusion of family members in the punishment was part of the message: the corruption of the werewolf had spread to those closest to him, and all of it had to be purged.

As a final warning, local authorities erected the torture wheel on a tall pole where it would be visible for miles around. They attached sixteen yard-long strips of wood to represent the known victims — a visual tally of the dead. A carved figure of a wolf was mounted on the wheel, and at the very top, on the sharpened point of the pole, they placed Peter Stumpp’s severed head.

This grim monument was intended as a continual warning to all ensuing ages about the evils of sorcery, devil worship, and transformation. It stood overlooking the German countryside for years afterward. Travelers passing through Bedburg would have seen it from the road — the wheel, the wolf, and the human skull staring down at them.

THE BROADSHEETS: SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MASS MEDIA

News of Stumpp’s execution spread across German-speaking territories with remarkable speed, and the mechanism of that spread tells us something important about the case. The story was carried by illustrated broadsheets — single-sheet publications that combined woodcut illustrations with text. These broadsheets functioned as the mass media of their era, the sixteenth-century equivalent of newspapers or viral social media posts. They were designed to be accessible even to those who could not read; the images told the story on their own.

Lucas Mayer, a woodcutter based in Nuremberg behind the church of St. Catherine, produced one of the most widely circulated versions. His composite woodcut employed a technique called simultaneous narrative, presenting multiple scenes from the story in a single image arranged on a diagonal. Viewers’ eyes could flow across the entire composition without resting on a single focal point, absorbing the complete arc of events — from the attacks to the capture to the execution to the final monument. It was sophisticated visual storytelling, designed to convey maximum information in a single glance.

The Mayer woodcut depicts the story in sequential vignettes that modern viewers can still follow. In the upper left corner, a large wolf attacks a child. Above this scene, a man with a sword fights off the wolf and lops off its left forepaw — the moment that would allegedly prove Stumpp’s guilt when the same injury appeared on the man. The center left shows the first stage of punishment: Stumpp bound to the wheel while executioners tear his flesh with red-hot pincers. Other sections depict his interrogation, the execution of his daughter and mistress, and the final display of the wheel monument topped with his severed head. The entire narrative unfolds in a single image.

Franz Hogenberg, working in Cologne — much closer to where the events actually occurred — produced a separate engraving of the execution. His version reversed the name to “Stump Petter” and used different artistic techniques. Etching allowed for easier insertion of text labels identifying Stumpp in each scene, whereas Mayer’s woodcut required separate textual plates. The Cologne broadsheet did not include the motif of the missing hand, instead relying on name labels to help viewers follow the narrative across the changing scenes. The differences between the two versions show how the story was adapted for different audiences and printing technologies.

Additional versions were printed in Augsburg and other cities across the German-speaking world. The geographic spread of these broadsheets covered roughly 22,000 square kilometers of territory — an enormous distribution network for 1589, when every copy had to be printed by hand on a manual press and physically transported by horse or cart. Copies and variations circulated through the same trade routes that carried other goods across the Holy Roman Empire, spreading the story far beyond anyone who might have witnessed the execution firsthand.

This level of media coverage was highly unusual, and that fact deserves attention. Routine werewolf executions did not generate coordinated publicity campaigns across multiple printing centers in different cities. Something about the Stumpp case was different. The rapid production and wide distribution of these broadsheets suggests that someone — likely the Catholic authorities who had just secured victory in the Cologne War — wanted this particular story spread far and wide. The execution was not merely punishment; it was a message, and the broadsheets ensured that message reached audiences hundreds of miles from Bedburg.

The broadsheets also guaranteed that Stumpp’s story would survive for centuries. Without them, this would likely be a forgotten local execution, one of hundreds carried out across Europe during the era of witch and werewolf trials. Their distribution is why the story reached England, why the poet Samuel Rowlands could reference Stumpp in 1612, and why an occultist browsing the British Museum three centuries later would find a sixteen-page pamphlet worth reading. The people who created and distributed those broadsheets shaped what we know about Peter Stumpp — and what we’ll never know.

THE PAMPHLET AND ITS REDISCOVERY

The most comprehensive source documenting Peter Stumpp’s crimes and execution is a sixteen-page pamphlet titled “A True Discourse Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of One Stubbe Peeter, a Most Wicked Sorcerer.” It was published in London in 1590 by George Bores, printed at the sign of the Vine by Edward Venge. The pamphlet was translated from a German original that has not survived — no copies of the German version are known to exist, likely destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War that devastated the region a few decades later. This means our most detailed source is a translation, one step removed from whatever original documents existed.

Only two copies of the English pamphlet have been found. One is held in the British Museum; the other is in the Lambeth Library, also in London. The document includes trial notes, witness statements, and a version of the composite woodcut depicting multiple scenes from the story. For a case this famous, the documentary record is remarkably thin.

The pamphlet sat in archives largely unread for centuries. Then, in 1920, an English clergyman and author named Montague Summers discovered it in the British Museum.

Augustus Montague Summers was not an ordinary clergyman by any measure. Born in 1880 to a wealthy Bristol family — his father was a director of Lloyds Bank and chairman of Bristol United Breweries — Summers had converted from evangelical Anglicanism to ritualistic Anglo-Catholicism before eventually becoming a Roman Catholic. Whether he was ever actually ordained as a Catholic priest remains disputed to this day; he called himself “Reverend” but never joined a particular order or diocese. The question of his ordination has never been definitively resolved.

Summers cultivated an eccentric public persona that made him a recognizable figure in London intellectual circles, and descriptions of him read like something from a gothic novel. The Times described him as “in every way a ‘character’ and in some sort a throwback to the Middle Ages.” His biographer, Father Brocard Sewell, painted a vivid portrait of the man: during 1927, the striking and somber figure of Montague Summers in black soutane and cloak, with buckled shoes in the style of Louis XIV and a shovel hat, could often be seen entering or leaving the reading room of the British Museum. He carried a large black portfolio bearing on its side a white label showing, in blood-red capitals, the legend “VAMPIRES.” This was a man who understood the power of presentation.

Summers was an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, the infamous occultist who styled himself “the wickedest man in the world,” though their approaches to the supernatural differed dramatically. While Crowley adopted the persona of a modern-day sorcerer practicing dark arts, Summers played the part of a learned Catholic witch-hunter opposing those same forces. Both were convinced that the supernatural was real and dangerous. Summers genuinely believed in the reality of vampires, werewolves, and witches — not as metaphors or psychological phenomena, but as actual supernatural threats that the modern world had foolishly forgotten.

His 1926 book “The History of Witchcraft and Demonology” made him a popular figure in London society, appealing to readers who enjoyed the frisson of the occult from a safe distance. He followed it with “The Vampire: His Kith and Kin” in 1928 and “The Vampire in Europe” in 1929. In 1928, he also published the first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious fifteenth-century witch hunter’s manual that had provided theological justification for the torture and execution of thousands. In his introduction, Summers insisted that the reality of witchcraft was an essential part of Catholic doctrine and declared the Malleus an admirable and correct account — a position that other Catholic scholars of his era found deeply problematic, given that Catholic authorities had actually condemned the Malleus on ethical and legal grounds back in the fifteenth century.

In 1933, Summers published “The Werewolf,” reprinting the entire Stumpp pamphlet, including the woodcut, on pages 253 to 259. The book was one of the first comprehensive English-language studies of werewolf lore, and Summers approached it with characteristic conviction. He wrote that the werewolf tradition was “not merely a grim superstition” but “a terrible and dangerous truth.” He meant it literally.

Modern scholars have mixed assessments of Summers’s work, which creates an odd situation for anyone researching the Stumpp case. According to horror genre scholar John Edgar Browning, “it is because of Summers that the modern serious study of the vampire figure exists today” — high praise for a man who believed vampires were real. At the same time, Browning notes that Summers’s research exhibits “a curious absence of any real depth,” which may explain why “a stigma has been attached to Summers’s writings for almost as long as they have been in print.” His translation of the Malleus Maleficarum has been described by historian Jonathan Seitz as “atrocious.” So we owe our knowledge of Peter Stumpp to a scholar whose work was both foundational and deeply flawed.

Regardless of his scholarly limitations, Summers’s rediscovery of the Stumpp pamphlet brought the Werewolf of Bedburg back into public consciousness after centuries of obscurity. Without his eccentric interests and his willingness to spend hours in the British Museum searching through old documents about monsters, the case might still be forgotten.

Additional historical evidence does corroborate the basic facts of the case, which helps establish that the execution actually happened even if the supernatural elements are obviously fabricated. Hermann von Weinsberg, a city alderman in Cologne who kept detailed private diaries, mentioned the events in his entry for October 31, 1589. Several illustrated broadsheets printed in southern Germany conveyed identical versions of the story. The poet Samuel Rowlands referenced Stumpp in “The Knave of Harts,” a collection of satirical poems published in 1612, indicating that by that time the story was widely known throughout Europe. Edward Fairfax, an English writer, mentioned the pamphlet in his firsthand account of alleged witch persecution of his own daughters in 1621. The case was real, even if the werewolf wasn’t.

THE COLOGNE WAR AND ITS DEVASTATION

The years during which Stumpp allegedly committed his crimes — 1582 to 1589 — coincided almost exactly with one of the most destructive conflicts in the region’s history, and this timing may not be coincidental. The Cologne War, also called the Seneschal’s War or occasionally the Sewer War, tore through the Electorate of Cologne from 1583 to 1588. Understanding what Bedburg experienced during those years changes how the Stumpp case looks.

The conflict began in December 1582 when Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, the Prince-elector of Cologne, converted to Protestantism. Under Catholic doctrine and the Peace of Augsburg, an ecclesiastical prince who converted was required to resign his position — the deal was that secular princes could choose their territory’s religion, but church princes had to remain Catholic. Gebhard refused to play by those rules. Instead, he declared religious parity for his subjects — allowing both Catholics and Protestants to worship freely — and in February 1583, he married Agnes von Mansfeld-Eisleben, a Protestant canoness. He was trying to transform an ecclesiastical principality into a secular hereditary duchy, with himself and his heirs in charge.

This was not merely a religious dispute, though it was certainly that. Cologne was one of the seven electorates of the Holy Roman Empire, meaning its ruler cast one of the votes that determined who would become Emperor. The electoral college was carefully balanced between Catholic and Protestant electors; if Gebhard retained his position as a Protestant, it could tip that balance permanently toward Protestantism. Future emperors might be Protestants. The Catholic Church and the Habsburg dynasty could not allow this to happen, and they were willing to go to war to prevent it.

The Cathedral Chapter of Cologne, dominated by Catholics, elected a rival archbishop: Ernst of Bavaria. Two archbishops now claimed the same territory, and both had armies willing to fight for their claim. The result was war.

For the people of Bedburg, the war brought horrors that rivaled anything attributed to a werewolf — and unlike the werewolf, these horrors were definitely real. Catholic forces, backed by Spanish troops from the Army of Flanders and Bavarian mercenaries, clashed with Protestant supporters reinforced by soldiers from the Palatinate and mercenaries from the Netherlands, Scotland, and England. Armies from both sides swept through the region, and the distinction between soldier and marauder often blurred beyond recognition. Contemporary accounts describe uncontrolled violence committed by troops on both factions — rape, murder, theft, destruction of crops and homes. For civilians caught between the armies, it hardly mattered which side was winning at any given moment.

Adolf, Count of Neuenahr, was a Protestant supporter and the lord of Bedburg at the war’s outbreak. He had assisted Archbishop Gebhard’s cause and fought against the Catholic forces. Stumpp, as a wealthy farmer in Bedburg, was almost certainly a convert to Protestantism — the faith of his local lord. In a region where your religious affiliation could get you killed, Stumpp had chosen the losing side.

The war also brought plague. Armies moving through the countryside carried disease with them, and the disruption of normal life — destroyed crops, displaced populations, breakdown of sanitation, bodies left unburied — created ideal conditions for epidemic illness to spread. The exact death toll from plague in the Electorate of Cologne during this period is unknown, but contemporary sources describe it as devastating. Between the soldiers and the sickness, the population of the region was decimated.

By 1587, the Protestant cause had collapsed. Spanish forces under Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, threw the balance of power decisively toward the Catholics. Gebhard, suffering from joint pain so severe he could no longer ride a horse — a crippling disability for someone trying to lead an army — retreated to Strasbourg. The remaining Protestant strongholds fell one by one through 1588 and 1589.

Bedburg Castle changed hands as part of this collapse. Werner, Count of Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck, a staunch Catholic, became the new lord of Bedburg. He made the castle his headquarters and filled it with Catholic mercenaries — the same kind of soldiers who had been terrorizing the countryside, now stationed permanently in the community. His mission was clear: re-establish the Roman faith in a region that had flirted with Protestantism. The population that had converted, or that had simply lived under Protestant rule, now had to deal with new masters who saw their faith as heresy.

It was in this environment — a community that had endured six years of warfare, plague, occupation by hostile armies, and a complete reversal of political and religious authority — that Peter Stumpp was arrested, tried, and executed in 1589. The timing deserves consideration.

THE POLITICAL CONTEXT

Several details in the historical record suggest the Peter Stumpp case may have been more than a straightforward trial of a werewolf and serial killer, and these details are worth examining closely.

The pamphlet and the German broadsheets noted the attendance of aristocracy at Stumpp’s execution, including the new Archbishop and Elector of Cologne himself. This was highly unusual — in fact, it’s one of the strangest details in the entire case. Werewolf and witch trials were common during this period; France alone experienced several dozen werewolf prosecutions around the same time. But these were routine judicial proceedings, handled by local authorities. High-ranking officials did not typically make appearances at executions of accused sorcerers any more than a modern governor would attend a routine sentencing hearing. The presence of the Archbishop suggests this execution was different — that it mattered to the people at the very top of the new Catholic administration.

The timing is difficult to ignore. The last Protestant strongholds in the Electorate of Cologne fell to Catholic forces in 1589, the same year as Stumpp’s trial. The new Catholic authorities were actively working to re-establish the Roman faith among a population that had, in many cases, converted to Protestantism during the preceding years. They needed to consolidate their victory, and they needed to send a message to anyone who might be thinking about resistance.

Some historians argue that the Stumpp trial may have been a politically motivated public execution designed to intimidate the remaining Protestant population into conversion. The werewolf charges provided a convenient framework — what better way to demonstrate the spiritual corruption of Protestantism than to show that one of its adherents was literally in league with the Devil? A Protestant farmer accused of devil worship and supernatural crimes made an effective demonstration of what the Catholic authorities characterized as the inevitable end point of abandoning the true faith. Convert or become like Stumpp: that was the implicit message.

The elaborate nature of the execution supports this interpretation. This was not a quiet disposal of a criminal; it was a theatrical production designed for maximum audience impact. The prolonged torture, the execution of family members alongside the primary offender, the construction of a permanent monument topped with the condemned man’s head — all of this was designed to be seen and remembered. And the broadsheets that spread across German-speaking territories ensured that the message reached far beyond Bedburg itself, far beyond anyone who could have witnessed the execution in person.

Whether Stumpp actually committed the murders attributed to him, was a genuine serial killer whose crimes were embellished with supernatural elements, or was simply a scapegoat selected for religious and political reasons remains impossible to determine from the available evidence. The truth could be any of these, or some combination. No interrogation transcripts or original court records have survived. The pamphlet that preserves his story was written by an anonymous author with unknown motivations, translated by a man who may or may not have witnessed the events.

What can be said with certainty is that the authorities who orchestrated Stumpp’s execution wanted it to be remembered. They invested significant resources in the punishment itself, in the permanent monument, and in the distribution of broadsheets across the region. Whatever Peter Stumpp did or didn’t do, his execution was meant to serve purposes beyond simple justice. And in that goal, the authorities succeeded.

WEREWOLF TRIALS IN EUROPE

The trial and execution of Peter Stumpp occurred during the peak of Europe’s werewolf panic, and placing his case in that broader context helps explain both why the authorities took it so seriously and why modern readers find it so strange. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of people across the continent were tried and executed for lycanthropy — the supposed ability to transform into a wolf. This wasn’t a fringe belief; it was accepted legal and theological doctrine.

These prosecutions were concentrated in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries, often overlapping with broader witch trials. The werewolf was viewed not as a separate phenomenon but as a form of witchcraft — a demonic pact that granted the ability to shape-shift. Courts treated lycanthropy cases using the same procedures and producing the same confessions obtained through the same methods: torture. The confessions that resulted were remarkably consistent in their details, which believers took as proof that werewolves were real and skeptics might interpret differently.

The earliest recorded werewolf trial in France occurred in Poligny in 1521, decades before Stumpp’s case. A wolf attack led authorities to the home of Michel Verdun, who, after being tortured, confessed to being a werewolf. He implicated two other men: Pierre Burgot and Philibert Montot. Under torture, Burgot provided elaborate details that read like a template for later cases. He described meeting three men dressed in black who agreed to protect his sheep in exchange for his renunciation of God. They gave him an ointment that allowed transformation into wolf form. He confessed to hunting and eating children while transformed. All three men were burned at the stake.

Burgot’s confession included a detail that appears in many werewolf cases: a description of the physical experience of transformation. He reportedly told the court that he was horrified at first by his four wolf’s feet and the fur that covered him, but found he could now travel with the speed of the wind. The specificity of these descriptions is striking — accused werewolves didn’t just confess to being werewolves, they described what it felt like. Whether these descriptions reflect genuine delusions, coached responses, or simply what the accused believed their interrogators wanted to hear is impossible to determine.

In 1573, Gilles Garnier of Dole, France — known as the Werewolf of Dole — was arrested after townspeople searching for a wolf came across a little girl being mauled by what appeared to be a wolf-like creature. They chased it away and believed they recognized Garnier, a local beggar. Under interrogation, he confessed to killing and eating four children, sometimes in wolf form and sometimes in human form. He admitted to strangling one boy while in his human shape, which raises interesting questions about how literally the court understood his transformations. He also confessed to bringing body parts home to share with his family. Garnier was burned at the stake in January 1573.

The Stumpp case in 1589 marked what some historians consider a turning point in werewolf persecution — not because it was the first or the most severe, but because it was the most publicized. The broadsheets and pamphlets spread the story across Europe and may have contributed to increased accusations in the years that followed, particularly in French-speaking and German-speaking regions. The publicity made the case famous and may have made other communities more likely to interpret strange events through the lens of lycanthropy.

In the Spanish Netherlands, werewolf accusations were sometimes attached to witchcraft trials, though this was not common. Between 1589 and 1661, six men were executed for sorcery in the region, three of whom were explicitly convicted of being werewolves. In 1598, Jan van Calster was accused of biting two children in wolf form but was acquitted — a reminder that not every accusation led to conviction, even in this era. In 1605, Henry Gardinn was executed for werewolfery and witchcraft.

Werewolf trials took on a different character in Livonia, the region encompassing modern-day Latvia and Estonia, where the cultural context was quite different. There, the indigenous peasant population maintained pagan traditions that coexisted uneasily with Christianity. They believed in werewolves but did not associate them with Satan the way the Church did. This created conflicts when cases came to trial.

In 1651, an eighteen-year-old named Hans was brought before a court in Idavere, Estonia, accused of being a werewolf. He confessed readily, without torture, to having hunted as a werewolf for two years. He claimed a man in black had given him the body of a wolf. When judges asked whether his physical body participated in the hunt or only his soul — a theological question about the nature of the transformation — Hans confirmed that he had found dog bite marks on his own leg, wounds he received while in wolf form. The court took this as proof that he had undergone genuine physical transformation, which meant he had experienced demonic magic. Because the “man in black” was obviously Satan, Hans could be tried as a witch and sentenced to death. The court needed to fit his confession into their theological framework, even though Hans himself might not have understood his experience in those terms.

The most unusual Livonian case occurred in 1692, when an eighty-year-old man named Thiess was tried for werewolfery in Jürgensburg. Thiess confessed openly to being a werewolf — but his account differed dramatically from the standard narrative and seemed to genuinely confuse the court. He claimed that he and other werewolves were not servants of Satan but warriors against him. Three times a year, he said, the werewolves descended into hell to fight witches and wizards, battling to recover grain and livestock that demons had stolen from the people. The werewolves, in his telling, ensured good harvests. They were the good guys.

The court tried repeatedly to make Thiess confess that he had made a pact with the devil, that the werewolves served Satan. That was how the story was supposed to go. He refused. They could not break his conviction that he was doing God’s work. He argued with the judges, insisting that his version was correct.

Thiess was not executed. He was sentenced only to flogging and banishment — an extraordinarily light punishment compared to what earlier accused werewolves had endured. By 1692, the era of werewolf trials was drawing to a close, and perhaps the judges simply didn’t know what to do with a case that didn’t fit their expectations.

Several factors contributed to the decline of werewolf prosecutions. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years’ War and brought greater stability to Central Europe, reducing the social chaos that had fueled accusations. Improved agricultural conditions and better wolf population control reduced direct human-wolf conflicts, which meant fewer mysterious attacks that needed supernatural explanations. The Scientific Revolution promoted naturalistic explanations for phenomena previously attributed to the supernatural. Educated elites grew skeptical of literal lycanthropy claims, though popular beliefs persisted longer in isolated rural areas. In France and Germany, werewolf trials declined dramatically after 1650, earlier than witch trials in most regions.

Modern medical historians have proposed various explanations for the werewolf confessions, trying to understand what the accused actually experienced. Porphyria, a group of disorders that can cause sensitivity to light, reddish teeth, and psychosis, has been suggested. Hypertrichosis, a hereditary condition causing excessive hair growth, could have contributed to wolf-like appearances. Ergotism — poisoning from a fungus that grows on rye and produces effects similar to LSD — may have caused hallucinations in both the accused and witnesses, explaining why people might genuinely believe they had transformed or had witnessed transformations. Rabies, neurological dysfunction, and various forms of mental illness have also been proposed. The truth is probably that different cases had different explanations, and some may have had no medical explanation at all beyond the power of torture and social pressure to produce confessions.

The Little Ice Age, which brought severe cold spells and crop failures to Europe from approximately 1300 to 1850, created conditions of malnutrition and social stress that may have heightened paranoia and superstition. The worst periods aligned with surges in witchcraft and lycanthropy prosecutions. When livestock died and children disappeared, communities sought explanations — and the werewolf provided one that made sense within their worldview.

MODERN LEGACY

Peter Stumpp’s story has persisted in popular culture for over four centuries, which is remarkable for a case with such limited documentation. The combination of extreme violence, supernatural elements, and just enough historical mystery to allow for creative interpretation has made the Werewolf of Bedburg a recurring figure in horror media.

William Peter Blatty referenced him in “The Exorcist,” his 1971 novel about demonic possession, mentioning a German in the sixteenth century who thought he was a werewolf. Blatty spelled the name as William Stumpf, but the reference clearly draws from the historical case — evidence that Stumpp’s story had entered the broader cultural consciousness even before the internet made obscure historical cases easily researchable.

The American metal band Macabre recorded a song about Stumpp titled “The Werewolf of Bedburg” for their “Murder Metal” album. The German horror punk band The Other wrote a song about him called “Werewolf of Bedburg” on their “Casket Case” album. The German metal band Powerwolf released a single titled “1589” in May 2024 explicitly about the case, as part of their promotion for the album “Wake Up the Wicked.” The story seems particularly appealing to metal musicians, perhaps because of its combination of historical darkness and supernatural horror.

Novelist Jonathan Maberry used Stumpp as the supernatural villain in his Pine Deep Trilogy, employing the historical alias Ubel Griswold. Maberry deliberately concealed the connection until the third book, “Bad Moon Rising,” revealing that Griswold was the infamous werewolf Peter Stumpp — a twist that would only work for readers who recognized the historical reference. The 2023 thriller film “Torn” features a main character named Peter Stube who fights inner demons in a town haunted by werewolf folklore.

The animated film “Big Top Scooby-Doo!” used a portion of the Lukas Mayer woodcut, specifically the scene depicting a man cutting off a werewolf’s left paw. The filmmakers modified the image, restoring the werewolf’s paw and removing a child from the second werewolf’s jaws to make it appear as if the swordsman was simply fighting wolves. No mention of Stumpp is made in the movie, but the use of actual historical artwork in a children’s cartoon is a strange example of how the case has filtered into unexpected corners of popular culture.

The Doctor Who audio drama “Loups-Garoux” presents an alternate history in which Pieter Stubbe was actually a werewolf who escaped before his execution and lived for another five centuries. He was defeated by the Fifth Doctor in Brazil in 2080. The story implies that during his centuries of survival, Stubbe ate both the Grand Duchess Anastasia and Lord Lucan — connecting the werewolf to other famous historical mysteries.

The third episode of the podcast “Lore,” hosted by Aaron Mahnke, retold the story of Peter Stumpp and introduced the case to a new audience of true crime and horror enthusiasts. In 2017, this episode was adapted into the fifth episode of the television series based on the podcast, with Stumpp portrayed by actor Adam Goldberg.

Deborah Harkness referenced the case in “Shadow of Night,” the second novel in her All Souls trilogy. The protagonists encounter a pamphlet about the trial and execution, taking it as a sign that witches and vampires in her fictional world are under greater threat than expected. The use of the historical case as a plot point in a fantasy novel shows how Stumpp has become a kind of shorthand for the dangers of the supernatural persecution era.

THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN

The evidence surrounding Peter Stumpp allows for multiple interpretations, and four centuries later, we still can’t be certain which one is closest to the truth.

He may have been exactly what the pamphlet describes: a genuine serial killer whose crimes were so extreme that his community could only explain them through supernatural means. Serial murder was not unknown in the sixteenth century, even if the modern terminology did not exist. Christman Genipperteinga, executed just eight years earlier, was convicted of 544 murders — suggesting that prolific killers existed in this era and were sometimes caught. If Stumpp really did kill fourteen or more people over twenty-five years, his neighbors might have genuinely believed that only demonic power could explain such sustained evil.

He may have been a man suffering from severe mental illness — perhaps a delusional disorder that caused him to believe he could transform into a wolf. Some accused werewolves clearly experienced psychological conditions that led them to confess to impossible crimes even without torture. The medical literature of the era recognized lycanthropy as a form of melancholia, a kind of depression that included mania and delusions. Stumpp might have believed his own confession.

He may have been a political prisoner whose execution was designed to terrify Protestants into reconverting to Catholicism. The timing, the presence of aristocratic witnesses, the elaborate nature of the punishment, and the coordinated publicity campaign all support this interpretation. In this reading, it almost doesn’t matter whether Stumpp committed any crimes at all; he was useful as a symbol, and symbols don’t need to be guilty.

Or some combination of these factors may be true. A man caught up in forces larger than himself, transformed by propaganda into the werewolf his community needed to see destroyed. Perhaps he committed some crimes and was blamed for others. Perhaps he was mentally ill and also politically inconvenient. Perhaps the truth is messier than any single explanation.

The torture that produced his confession guaranteed that whatever truths Stumpp might have told were mixed inextricably with whatever his interrogators wanted to hear. People being tortured will say what they think will make the pain stop; that’s a universal human response. The original court records have not survived. The pamphlet that preserves his story was written by an anonymous author with unknown motivations, translated by a man who may or may not have witnessed the events, and rediscovered by an eccentric occultist who genuinely believed in the supernatural beings he studied. Every link in the chain of transmission introduces potential distortion.

What remains certain is that on October 31, 1589, a crowd gathered in Bedburg to watch executioners tear the flesh from a man’s body with red-hot pincers, break his bones on a wheel, and sever his head. His daughter and mistress died beside him, flayed and strangled. A wolf figure was erected on a pole, and a human skull was placed at its peak, staring out over the German countryside as a warning that stood for years.

The last Protestant strongholds in the Electorate of Cologne fell to Catholic forces that same year. The religious war that had devastated the region for six years finally came to an end. Whether the werewolf trial helped secure that victory, or simply reflected the violence of the age, the people of Bedburg never forgot what they saw that Halloween night.

The broadsheets made sure no one else would forget either.

REFERENCES

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.