Description

A twelve-year-old boy refuses to leave the house on the night of a full moon — because he's convinced he's becoming a wolf. It sounds like something out of a dusty book of legends. It was written up by doctors and published five years ago.

This week, we follow that one impossible sentence — I am becoming a wolf — back through the centuries. From the oldest werewolf ever written down to the movie rulebook Hollywood invented barely eighty years ago, then out into the real history: the beast that brought a kingdom to its knees in the mountains of France, a thirteen-year-old boy who confessed to being a wolf and the court that showed him mercy, and the cursed loup-garou who came knocking on the doors of French Canada.

Light a candle, get cozy, and come find out why, four hundred years on, our fear still wears the same face.

⚠️ Content warning: This episode includes descriptions of violent death and harm to children, a child confessing to violent acts, and a child experiencing mental-health distress. Please listen with care.

Clinical / the boy & the moon

• Guessoum et al. (2021), "First Reported Case of Clinical Lycanthropy in a 12-Year-Old," Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 75(2) — the 2020 boy.
• Guessoum et al. (2021), "Clinical Lycanthropy, Neurobiology, Culture: A Systematic Review," Frontiers in Psychiatry 12.
• Rotton & Kelly (1985), "Much Ado about the Full Moon," Psychological Bulletin 97(2) — the moon debunk.

Origins

• Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk I (Lycaon); Petronius, Satyricon §61–62; Herodotus, Histories IV.105; Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet VI.

The stories

• Smith (2011), Monsters of the Gévaudan (Harvard UP) — Gévaudan.
• Machielsen (2019), "The Making of a Teen Wolf," Folklore 130(3) — Grenier.
• de Lancre (1612), Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et démons — primary source, Grenier.
• "Loup-garou," The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Trials & film

• Schulte (2009), Man as Witch; de Blécourt, ed. (2015), Werewolf Histories — the trial craze.
• The Wolf Man (1941, Siodmak) and An American Werewolf in London (1981) — the modern rulebook.