Where Wolf archive Case 001
Germany · Electorate of Cologne · 1589

The Werewolf of Bedburg was a farmer. The wolf outlived him.

Peter Stumpp died on 31 October 1589. The belt that supposedly turned him into a wolf was never found, and the sixteen page pamphlet about him is still the reason the word means what it means.

What is actually recorded

Stumpp was a wealthy farmer near Bedburg, born around 1530, probably Protestant, and by the 1580s a widower with two children: a daughter, Beele, and a son whose age is not recorded. His left hand had been cut off at some earlier point, leaving a stump. In German, Stumpf.

In 1589 he was tried for werewolfery, witchcraft and cannibalism. He was stretched on the rack, and before further torture began he confessed.

What he confessed to is the part that made the case famous. He said he had practised black magic since the age of twelve, and that the Devil had given him a magical belt. Put it on and he became, in the words of the English pamphlet, a creature with eyes that "in the night sparkled like fire" and a mouth of sharp and cruel teeth. Take it off and he was a man again.

He told the magistrate the belt was hidden in a certain valley. The magistrate sent men to fetch it. No belt was found.

The one object that would have proved the story did not exist, and the trial continued anyway.

What the village already thought of him

Alongside the wolf, Stumpp confessed to a long list of things a village court cared about: killing and eating fourteen children and two pregnant women, one of the children his own son, an incestuous relationship with his daughter, and intercourse with a succubus.

Every one of those came out under threat of torture or after it. That does not make them true. It makes them what the court needed to hear, and the court had already decided what he was.

Read this before the gore There is no independent evidence for any of the killings. The only detailed account is a pamphlet written to sell. A historian's job here is not to decide whether he did it. It is to notice what the trial was for.

The execution

On 31 October 1589, Stumpp was executed at Bedburg alongside his daughter Beele and a woman named Katherine, described as his mistress. His daughter and Katherine were flayed and strangled first, and their bodies burned with his.

Stumpp was torn with red hot pincers in ten places, his limbs broken with the blunt side of an axe, then he was beheaded and his body burned on a pyre. The authorities erected a pole with the torture wheel on it, a figure of a wolf, and his severed head at the top, as a warning.

The warning was not for wolves. It was for anyone in the Electorate who might be next.

The detail that makes the case

His hand was already gone before the trial. The name Stumpf probably came from it.

The story then did something neat and terrible. It said that the werewolf had had its left forepaw cut off, and that when the man was found with a missing left hand, the injury proved the man and the wolf were the same. A nickname became evidence. The record of his body was used as proof of a creature that had never been caught.

Why we still know his name

Because of a pamphlet. A True Discourse. Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of One Stubbe Peeter, a Most Wicked Sorcerer was printed in London in 1590, sixteen pages, translated from a German original that no longer survives. Two copies exist, one in the British Museum and one in Lambeth Palace Library. The occultist Montague Summers found it again in 1920 and reprinted the whole thing in his book on werewolves.

That pamphlet, not the man, is the historical event. It travelled. It was read in England, quoted in later witch accounts, and copied into the image of the werewolf that Europe carried for the next two centuries. A farmer in a small German town became the template.

Secondary accounts also survive: the diaries of Hermann von Weinsberg, a Cologne alderman, and illustrated broadsheets printed in southern Germany. They confirm that the trial happened and that it was talked about. They do not confirm the wolf.

What this case teaches

The werewolf trial was not a hunt for a monster. It was a legal procedure for removing a person the community had already decided to remove, dressed in the only language that made the removal look like justice.

Stumpp was rich, difficult, and had a body the village could point at. The wolf gave them a reason.

Sources

Case 001. Next: the werewolf trials of Franche-Comté, where the courts executed more than a hundred people for a crime that does not exist.