qsy-complains-a-lot:The Beast of Gévaudan, 1764-67 FranceThe Beast of Gévaudan, named after the hist
qsy-complains-a-lot:The Beast of Gévaudan, 1764-67 FranceThe Beast of Gévaudan, named after the historical province of Gévaudan in the Lozère and Haute-Loire French departments, was an unidentified animal that went on a killing spree between mid-summer 1764 and June 19th 1767. It attacked a total of 210 people, injuring 49 and killing 113, of which 98 were partly eaten.Descriptions of the time vary, but generally the beast was said to be as large as a calf, had a large canine head with small straight ears, a wide chest, and a large mouth which exposed a set of massive teeth. The beast’s fur was said to be red in colour, but with its back distinctively streaked with black. Almost no contemporary accounts from survivors describe the beast as a wolf, the peasants of the time knowing full well what a wolf looked like.Pictured: not this.Likewise several reports go against the beast being a simple feral wolf, including its apparent ability to evade all the organized hunts organized by peasants and the king’s own arquebuse bearer alike, by traveling several kilometers out of their way. The king’s arquebuse bearer was a very prestigious position, at the time occupied by dragoon officer and Lieutenant of the Hunt Ec. François Antoine, and consisted in bearing the king and princes of blood’s firearms during a hunt as well as protecting them from any accident involving wild beasts.François Antoine shot and killed an enormous wolf in 1765 near the recently attacked abbayes des Chazes, afterward culling its mate and unnaturally large cubs. The beast presented signs of being the offspring of a wolf and some large dog breed, but even though Antoine claimed victory and sent the Loup des Chazes to be taxidermied in Versailles, the attacks resumed in December.Even when found, the beast displayed an unnatural resistance to bullets, which coupled with how suspiciously tame it was when it was finally put down on the 19th of June 1767 by Jean Chastel, a local, suggest to many that the Beast of Gévaudan may in fact have been a trained animal wearing some kind of protection and operating in tandem with a serial killer. It is suggested that the beast’s bulletproof nature was provided by a boar shield, explaining its strange color as well. Jean Chastel had been incarcerated “for his own good” after several altercations with the king’s hunters -before those departed the year before- and is now believed to be the center of a conspiracy involving the nobles of the region.The autopsy of the beast at the time found the creature to present features of both a wolf and a dog, indicating it might have been an hybrid, and noted the presence of a child’s femur head in the stomach of the beast. Its skin featured a dozen gunshot scars with even some pellets remaining under the skin from previous hunts.The corpse however started to rot during its travel to Paris, after which the king decided to have it buried in a location unknown to this day.The beast of Gévaudan was widely regarded at the time as an instrument of God’s wrath in a time of discontent in France, because of course it was. It influenced werewolf canons in many ways, not the least of which being the vulnerability to silver bullets.It was indeed reported by Jean Chastel himself that the fatal blow dealt to the beast -a shot that went through its neck and broke its shoulderblade- was dealt with a musket firing a ball-and-buckshot load melted down from a blessed silver cross. -- source link
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