The Werewolf Trial Of Peter Stumpp

Peter Stumpp is one of the most disturbing figures in the entire history of European witchcraft — a wealthy German farmer who was tried and executed as a werewolf, whose confession is a catalogue of almost unimaginable horror, and whose death produced one of the most gruesome execution scenes ever recorded, preserved in a woodcut that survives to this day.

To understand him, you have to go back to the countryside around Bedburg, near Cologne, in the late 1580s. This was a region gripped by religious war, fear, and superstition, and for years the area had been terrorised by something in the woods. Livestock were found torn apart. Then people began to die — women and children, killed with a savagery that looked like the work of a beast. The locals became convinced that a wolf was hunting them. And in 1589, the story goes, a hunting party cornered the wolf — and when they closed in for the kill, the animal was gone, and in its place stood a middle-aged farmer named Peter Stumpp. He was arrested, and put to the torture of the rack.

The Horror

Under torture, Stumpp confessed to everything — and his confession is one of the darkest documents of the age. He said that at the age of twelve he had made a pact with the Devil, who had given him a magical belt, or girdle; and that when he put the belt on, he transformed into a wolf, “strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like fire,” with cruel teeth and mighty paws. When he took it off, he became a man again. As this wolf, he confessed, he had hunted the region for twenty-five years, killing around sixteen people. He admitted to killing and eating children — thirteen of them — and to tearing two unborn babies from the wombs of pregnant women and devouring their hearts. Most horrifying of all, he confessed to murdering his own son and eating the boy’s brain. He also confessed to incest with his daughter and to consorting with a succubus, a demon in the form of a beautiful woman. The magical belt was never found; the authorities said the Devil must have reclaimed it.

His execution, on the 31st of October 1589, in front of a crowd that included the Archbishop of Cologne himself, is one of the most brutal on record. Stumpp was strapped to a large wooden wheel. There, the executioner tore the flesh from his body in ten places with red-hot iron pincers, ripping it away from the bone. Then, with the blunt back of an axe, his arms and legs were systematically broken — a deliberate mutilation, done specifically so that he could never crawl out of his grave and return. Only then was he beheaded, and his body burned on a pyre. His daughter and his mistress, condemned alongside him, had already been flayed and strangled, and were burned with him.

The Modern Relic

What the authorities did next is the detail that has echoed for centuries. As a warning to the entire region, they raised the very wheel he had been broken on high into the air on a tall pole. On top of the wheel, they fixed the carved wooden figure of a wolf — the shape of the beast he had confessed to becoming. And above the wolf, at the very top of the pole, they mounted Peter Stumpp’s severed head, looking down over the land he had terrorised. It was a piece of pure medieval theatre, designed to be seen for miles.

The relic that survives is the record of it. The whole affair was written up in a sixteen-page pamphlet, printed in London in 1590, describing his life, his crimes, and his trial — and only two copies of that English pamphlet are known to still exist, one held in the British Museum and one in Lambeth Palace Library, rediscovered by a scholar in 1920. And printed with the account is a remarkable woodcut, attributed to the artist Lukas Mayer, which lays out the entire story in a single image — Stumpp as the wolf attacking, his arrest, and his execution on the wheel, ending with his head mounted above the carved wolf on the pole, exactly as it was done. Historians today are deeply divided on what really happened: whether Peter Stumpp was a genuine serial killer whose crimes were explained through the only framework the age had — the supernatural — or whether he was an innocent man, possibly a Protestant convert, tortured into a monstrous confession to make a political example in a region torn between Catholic and Protestant. What is beyond doubt is that a man was strapped to a wheel outside Bedburg, torn apart, and left with his head above a wooden wolf — and that four and a half centuries later, the woodcut showing it is still there to be seen.

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