Based on True Events: The True Story of Werewolves

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]There are old stories that never die.

[00:00:03]They outlive the people who first whispered them. They outlive the villages that first feared them.

[00:00:09]Throughout time, there have been stories and eyewitness accounts of a beast that prowls the edges of the woods. A beast that walks on two legs when it wants to and howls at a moon it seems to recognize. [music] I'm Stephanie Harlow and this is based on true events.

[00:00:29]Tonight's story isn't one story, it's hundreds of them stitched together >> [music] >> because for as long as human beings have had a word for wolf, they've had a word for something that is almost wolf and almost man. The French called it the Loup-Garou. The Cajuns called it the Rougarou. In the upper Midwest, they call it the Dogman. The earliest written account of a man turning into a wolf is nearly 4,000 years old. It appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, older than the Bible. The Greeks gave us a word for it, lycanthropy. From the myth of King Lycaon, a ruler so cruel he was cursed by Zeus to spend the rest of his life in fur. From there, the sightings never stopped. Medieval court records, colonial diaries, Civil War letters sent home and they still haven't stopped.

[00:01:20]Every single year, sheriff's departments and state wildlife offices across the country still take calls from people who swear, stone sober and still shaking, that they saw something upright at the edge of the tree line. Something watching. Something wrong. And at a dark, [music] quiet campsite, a man whose head was as heavy as his heart would join their ranks. Today's video is sponsored by Helix Sleep and honestly, thank god because with the amount of dark, disturbing information I willingly put into my brain on a daily basis, sleep is not optional. It is a survival tool. It is emotional damage control.

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[00:05:44]Not much further now, His name is Jim. The woman in the photograph taped to his dashboard was his whole life, and Wheeler, the loyal dog beside him, is all that he has left of her.

[00:06:07]The campsite he picked was advertised as remote, off-the-grid, peaceful, and that was exactly what Jim was seeking, peace.

[00:06:15]Jim had been married to Susan for 18 years, and [music] for the last two of them, he had sat powerless and watched her fight a losing battle [music] with cancer.

[00:06:25]For the first time in their lives together, Jim had been unable to help or protect Susan, >> [music] >> and the guilt and grief of that reality had become overwhelming.

[00:06:44]Well, buddy, what do you think?

[00:06:49]Hm.

[00:06:51]I don't see any other campers.

[00:06:53]Well, more fun for us, right?

[00:07:02]We better get started.

[00:07:04]Woof.

[00:07:05]Yeah. Jim had wanted to escape [music] somewhere quiet and remote. He had wanted to be off-the-grid, and some places, [music] that is a feature. In others, it's a warning.

[00:07:23]Susan would have loved this.

[00:07:31]Did you get enough to eat, boy?

[00:07:38]It's probably just a squirrel or something.

[00:07:41]>> [sighs] >> Oh, jeez.

[00:07:44]Learn to love them.

[00:07:46]Hold on.

[00:07:47]Be right back.

[00:07:55]It's rarely one big decision that dooms a man. It is the small, ordinary ones, like walking alone into the dark woods, away from the one thing in the world that loves him.

[00:08:13]Somewhere past the last flicker of firelight, the forest forgot how to make a sound. The crickets went first, [music] then the wind. In the woods, silence is never the absence of something.

[00:08:25]>> [music] >> It's the presence of something, usually something unnatural.

[00:08:30]Jim had hunted with his father in the Colorado high country since he was 9 years old, and he'd grown up being able to identify all sorts of paw prints. In 50-some [music] years, he had never seen a track like this one.

[00:08:49]Our instincts are old, ancient even.

[00:08:51]Jim's body knew before his mind [music] did.

[00:08:59]Hello?

[00:09:04]Hello?

[00:09:31]What's up, boy?

[00:09:40]>> Hello.

[00:10:21]Every witness who has ever lived to tell the story says the same thing. It stood like an animal remembering he used to be a man.

[00:10:32]Really?

[00:10:36]Oh, really?

[00:11:00]>> [screaming] [snorts] >> Jim had trusted that shotgun for over 30 years, but that night it felt like a toy in his hand, and he was transported to the bedside of [music] his wife, Susan, shaking, powerless, at the mercy of something stronger than he was.

[00:11:33]If there is one thing in this world we can depend on, it is that the sun will rise. Wars are waged, bills go unpaid, hearts are broken and never quite mended. People are born and people are [music] buried and still morning comes, slow, steady, indifferent. [music] It has no idea what happened in the dark and it never will.

[00:11:56]Jim made it home. He never spoke of that [music] night, not to his daughter, not to his pastor, not to the men he drank with on Sunday afternoons.

[00:12:05]>> [music] >> Because there is a rule about stories like this one.

[00:12:09]If you tell [music] it, if you say it out loud by name, it knows [music] how to find you.

[00:12:18]The oldest werewolf story in the Western record is not a folk tale, it's a punishment. His name was Lycaon. He was a king of Arcadia, a region of mountains and shepherds in central Greece. And according to the Roman poet Ovid, writing in the 1st century AD, Lycaon made a single catastrophic mistake. He invited Zeus to dinner and then, to test whether his guest was truly a [music] god, he served him a plate of human flesh. Zeus, being Zeus, was not amused.

[00:12:49]He destroyed Lycaon's palace with lightning and as the king fled into the wilderness, his clothes turned to fur, his hands to paws and his voice to a howl. He became the first of his kind, lycanthrope, wolf man. It's from his name that we get the word lycanthropy.

[00:13:08]What's worth [music] noticing, even at the very beginning of this story, is what it's about. Lycaon does not become a wolf because of a curse from an enemy or a bite from a stranger. He becomes a wolf because of something he did, something monstrous. The transformation is not the horror, the transformation is the reveal. Zeus did not randomly choose a wolf curse. It was a form of poetic justice. Because Lycaon acted like a beast, Zeus made his outward form reflect the brutality that already [music] existed within him. That, more than anything else, is the idea that will haunt the next 2,000 years of European history. In the Norse sagas, written down in Iceland in the 13th century, but far older in the telling, there are warriors called Ulfhednar, wolf coats. They wore wolf [music] pelts into battle. They were said to enter a trance, to become impossible to kill, to fight with the strength of the animal whose skin they wore. The skin was not just armor, it was a sacred totem. By wearing it, the warrior symbolically shed their human identity and merged with the spirit [music] of the apex predator. The Norse had a stranger, deeper word for this kind of person.

[00:14:21]They called him einhamr, not of one skin. It was not [music] an accusation, it was a description used in the way we might say someone is left-handed. The Norse believed the self was layered, that beneath the physical body there was the hammer, a shape self, an essence, [music] that for most people stayed exactly where it was supposed to. But for some, it didn't. For some, the hammer could come loose. It could leave the body during sleep or in trance and travel as a man or as an eagle or as a wolf, while the human body lay breathing in a bed miles away. Across the Baltic, in Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania, peasants told stories of neighbors who slipped into wolf shape at the crossroads. In Slavic country, the vukodlak in the Balkans, a creature that would centuries later blur with another monster we might come back to, the vampire. By the early Middle Ages, the werewolf was everywhere and it was about to get a lot more dangerous to be one.

[00:15:20]Between roughly 1450 and 1650, Europe lost its mind. We remember it as the era of the witch trials, and it was. But running parallel to the witch panic, sometimes overlapping with it, sometimes mistaken for it, was a second wave of accusations, werewolf trials, [music] real ones with real court records and real verdicts. The numbers are difficult [music] to pin down, but historians estimate that several hundred people in early modern Europe were formally accused of being werewolves. Most of them were tortured, many of them confessed, some of them, and this is the part that is still hard to make sense of, they insisted it was true. The most infamous case took place in the German town of Bedburg, [music] just outside of Cologne, in 1589. The accused was a wealthy farmer named Peter Stump.

[00:16:09]According to the pamphlet that circulated after his trial, which is admittedly the kind of source you should read with both eyes open, meaning a lot of skepticism, Stump confessed to a quarter century of murders. He claimed that the devil had given him a belt that when worn transformed him into a greedy, devouring wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like fire. He confessed to killing 14 children and two pregnant women. The belt, naturally, was never found, and Stump was executed in one of the most brutal public spectacles of the century. It began with Stump being securely strapped to a large wooden breaking wheel, a torture wheel.

[00:16:53]Executioners used red-hot [music] iron pincers to slowly tear the flesh from his body in 10 different designated places, effectively skinning him alive in front of a massive crowd. Following the flaying, an axeman used the blunt, heavy side of an axe head [music] to systematically strike and smash Stump's arms and legs. According to superstitious beliefs of the era, shattering the limbs was a practical measure to ensure that if his werewolf spirit attempted to reanimate the corpse, it would be physically unable to hunt or walk.

[00:17:27]>> [music] >> To finally end of Stump's life, a swordsman stepped forward and decapitated him. His mutilated torso and severed limbs were then dragged to a massive [music] bonfire pyre alongside the bodies of his daughter and mistress who had also been condemned as accomplices. As a final deterrent, the town council erected a tall wooden [music] pole in the center of Bedburg.

[00:17:49]The torture wheel with the figure of a wolf perched atop it was mounted to the top and directly above the wolf figure, Stump's severed head was impaled upon a spike for all to see. What was actually happening in Bedburg? [music] Historians have offered every kind of answer. A serial killer given the only vocabulary his century had for serial killing, a scapegoat in a religious war between Catholics and Protestants, a man broken by torture agreeing to anything to make it stop, a community looking for a name to give to the unbearable fact that [music] their children had been disappearing into the woods.

[00:18:27]We may never know. A century and a half later in the rural hills of south central France came the most famous werewolf panic in European history and [music] the strangest because the beast at the center of it was almost certainly real. Between 1764 and 1767 [music] in the region of Gévaudan, something began killing people, mostly women and children while they were tending sheep.

[00:18:53]Over the course of 3 years, it was credited with more than a hundred [music] deaths. The witnesses described it consistently, larger than a wolf, reddish fur, a long tail, a broad chest, teeth that the survivors said were unlike [music] any animal they had ever seen. King Louis the 15th sent professional wolf hunters. They killed wolves, but the attacks continued. He sent his own personal gunbearer who killed a very large wolf, but the attacks continued. Finally, a local hunter named Jean Chastel shot a creature that when its stomach [music] was opened was found to contain human remains, and the attacks stopped. What was this beast? [music] A wolf? A pack of wolves? A wolf-dog hybrid? An escaped exotic animal? No one has ever been sure, but for 3 years in a Christian Enlightenment era European kingdom, ordinary people went to bed [music] believing that a werewolf was hunting their children. And to be honest, they were not entirely wrong to be afraid.

[00:19:53]>> [music] >> You would think that by now we'd be done with this story. We have electric lights. We have satellite imagery. We have wildlife biologists [music] who can tell you to a reasonable degree of certainty exactly how many wolves are in a given forest and what each of them had for breakfast. [music] The forests have gotten smaller. The villages have gotten bigger. The dark in most of the places we live isn't really all that dark anymore. [music] And yet, in 1936 in a remote stretch of Wisconsin called Bray Road, just outside the town of Elkhorn, a [music] young man driving home at night reported that something stepped into his headlights.

[00:20:29]>> [music] >> Something that walked on two legs.

[00:20:31]Something with the head of a wolf. He told almost no one. There was no internet. There was frankly no one who would have believed him. More than 50 years later, in late 1991, the sightings [music] began again. Same stretch of road. Same description. A reporter for the local Walworth County paper, a woman named Linda Godfrey, was assigned what her editor thought would be a fun fluff piece. A goofy story about country folks seeing things. She came back 2 weeks later and told her editor that she didn't think the witnesses were lying.

[00:21:03]This creature, sometimes called the Beast of Bray Road, sometimes just the Bray Road Beast, has been reported by now hundreds of times, always in the rural Midwest, always in marginal light, always by witnesses who, almost without exception, sound less excited than embarrassed to have seen it. On Halloween night, 1991, at approximately 8:30 p.m., 18-year-old Doris Gibson was driving her blue Plymouth Sundance on Bray Road through the foggy night when her vehicle suddenly jolted. Doris thought she had hit something or run something over, but it was dark outside, so she hesitantly exited her car to investigate. [music] That is when she saw a large figure coming towards her through the black night. [music] It was huge, with a broad hairy chest, and she could hear the sound of two feet hitting the road.

[00:21:52]Doris dove back into the driver's seat of her Plymouth, slammed the door, and jammed the key into the ignition. And just as she sped away, the beast launched itself through the air and landed on the trunk of her car. But, it was a rainy and fog- soaked night. The creature was unable to keep a grip on the slick metal of her car. As Doris sped away to safety, the terrifying creature [music] tumbled down onto the road. The whole event had been so surreal that Doris was sure she had imagined it, until she inspected her car the following morning and found the telltale claw marks across the back of her Plymouth's trunk. A few hundred miles east, in the forests of northern Michigan, there's another one. They call him the Michigan Dog Man. The earliest report on record dates to 1887, when two lumberjacks in Wexford County claimed they were attacked by an animal that stood upright. The story was treated as a tall tale, the way lumberjack stories generally were, and it was forgotten. It was resurrected by a radio DJ in 1987. A man named Steve Cook, at a station in Traverse City, recorded a song called The Legend. It was supposed to be a joke for an April Fools' broadcast. It mentioned, by year, a series of incidents in which an upright wolf-like creature had been sighted in the Michigan woods. Within days, the radio station's phones began to ring. Not with complaints, but with reports. People called in to say that they too had seen the thing in the woods. Some of the encounters they described predated the song by decades. Some of them came from witnesses who had never told anyone and who, hearing it on the radio, finally felt that they could. The song is still played every October on stations all over the Upper Midwest. And the calls?

[00:23:34]Well, they've never really stopped.

[00:23:36]There are hundreds of these stories now, thousands depending on who's counting.

[00:23:40]The Dogman of Defiance, Ohio, the werewolf of Wisconsin, the Rougarou of the Louisiana bayou, sightings in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, in upstate New York, in the bush country of Australia, in the Mexican Sierra Madre, in the forests outside of Tokyo. The witnesses are usually sober. They're frequently sheepish. They're almost never trying to sell you anything. And they describe with strange uniformity an animal that the world is not supposed to contain. And the descriptions match across cultures, across centuries, [music] across people who have never met each other and have no shared frame of reference. [music] The description that a Greek poet wrote down 2,000 years ago about a king who was punished for a crime so dark that the gods had to turn him into something else to hold it. The honest answer is that we don't know what people are seeing on Bray Road or in the Michigan pines or in the long shadows at the edge of a Greek mountainside 3,000 years ago.

[00:24:37]Maybe a misidentified animal. Maybe a trick of the light. Maybe a story so old and so deep in us that we keep, against our better judgment, dressing it up in the clothes of our own century and sending it back out into the trees. What we do know is this. For as long as human beings have lived near wild places, we've told one another the same story that on certain nights and certain woods, the line between what we are and what we could be becomes very very thin.

[00:25:09]Thank you so much for joining me for this special episode of Based on True Events. It's something that I wanted to do because it's Memorial Day and everyone's camping and you know, having cookouts and I thought a campfire story would be fun. But if you want to see more of this, let me know in the comment section. Don't forget to like this video if you liked it, share it if you think it's worth sharing, and subscribe if you haven't already. And until next time, stay kind, [music] stay beautiful, and stay safe out in those woods. Bye.

[00:25:43]>> [music]