Werewolf of Ansbach

In the summer of 1685, a wolf began killing livestock around Ansbach, a small principality of the Holy Roman Empire in what is now Middle Franconia. At first it was a shepherds' problem: torn lambs and missing cattle. Then it turned on people, above all on children, and fear spread through the whole district. Nobody doubted that the animal was real, for it had been seen and it had left tracks and bodies behind. The argument was about something else, and it was the thing that truly mattered: what that beast was.

Michael Leicht, the Pfleger who administered the district in the prince's name, had just died. No one mourned him: he had been hard on the peasants and left a hateful memory behind. When the wolf appeared, the conclusion imposed itself. That animal was Leicht, and he had come back.

What ran through Ansbach was not quite the lycanthropy of the witch trials. Nobody accused the wolf of having been a man who could change shape at will; no magic belt was hunted for; no case was opened over a pact with the devil. The belief was of another kind, and an older one: that of the dead man who will not lie still. Leicht had not turned into a wolf. Leicht had come back as one.

A printed broadsheet of the period, the sort sold for a few coins, drew it without ambiguity: the Pfleger, in wolf shape and wrapped in a white linen shroud, returning to his old lodgings to frighten the new tenants. That engraving explains the case better than any court document. What terrified Ansbach was not a monster of the woods but the powerful neighbour who would not leave them in peace even dead.

The drive was mounted on a grand scale, with dogs and local men, across the fields of Neuses near Eschenbach. They flushed the wolf from a nearby wood and ran it down in the open until it was cornered. Looking for cover, the animal leapt into an uncovered well, and there it ended: trapped at the bottom with no way out, it was killed where it lay.

There was no trial. No interrogation, no confession wrung out under torture, no sentence read aloud in a square. What Ansbach wanted to punish had been buried for some time, and the well merely handed them a body to do it with.

What came next is what makes this case unique. They hauled the carcass out of the well and paraded it through the market square. There they cut off its muzzle, so that it would no longer have a wolf's face, and on its head they set a mask, a wig and a false beard. Then they dressed it in a man's clothes. When they had finished, what stood before the crowd was no longer an animal: it was Michael Leicht.

So they hoisted it on a gibbet, in plain view of everyone. Ansbach did not execute a wolf: it executed its administrator, already buried, in the only body it could get hold of. And when the spectacle was over they neither buried it nor burned it. They had it stuffed and preserved for permanent display in a local museum, where it remained as visible proof that justice had caught up with Leicht.