The Schwaben Creek Werewolf

As far as the Schwaben, or Swabian, Creek Werewolf legend goes, there's two versions I've found on the internet.

First, from Hell Horror comes the "Norththumberland" County Werewolf:

In the Northumberland Country of Pennsylvania, a tale is told of a young sheep herder, and her lycanthropic admirer. The young girl was a cheerful child, and liked by everyone in the community, especially a solitary old man who everyone regarded with fear. The old man would always follow the young girl, and also sit and watch her as she tended to her father's flock of sheep.

Although many wolf attacks were reported even during broad daylight, the flock that the young girl tended to remained unharmed. This went on for several years, until a farmer spotted a wolf in the moonlight. He took a shot at it, and the wolf cried out, then retreated into the bushes. When the man went to check if his shot had killed
the wolf, he found the old man dead with a bullet in his chest. The girl continued to tend to her sheep herd and never once was it attacked by wolves.

The site not only has no citations, it actually lists this material as copyrighted by them. Hardly. The exact same story appeared on "The Werewolf Page", right down to the misspelled "Norththumberland" and the reference in the first line to the Northumberland "Country." Sadly, the Werewolf Page seems to be gone, though you can still find it in Google's cache.

The second, more accurate, version can be found at Penda's Realm.

In Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, a recluse rumored to be a werewolf, took a shine to The Paul Family's 12-year old daughter, May. He never made any improper motions towards her, but would watch from a distance while she tended sheep. What was even stranger was that the wolves seemed bold enough to attack and run off with sheep from other herders, but May's sheep were never bothered. One fateful night, a hunter spied a large wolf in the brush took aimed and fired, figuring he could collect the 25-dollar bounty on wolves. In the morning, the hunter went to retrieve the corpse, having lost it in the dark. He was astonished to discover that the blood trail ended at the body of the recluse.

The site cites The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shapeshifting Beings, by Brad Steiger as the source. Who knows where Brad found out about it, I don't read books. Maybe John L. Moore knows.

Pennsylvania Dutch engineering

I hear they invented a dual-headed screwdriver to speed up their work.

But seriously, one of the troubles dealing with translation is the spelling. Is it "Osama" or "Usama"? Is it "Turin" or "Torino"?

In our case, "Schwaben Creek" is spelled as "Swabian Creek" in many Genealogical records. Or maybe it was always spelled that way and we're dumber than a Grit magazine.

Werewolfology and the troubles with creating a Unified Were Theory

Trying to create a Unified Were Theory is as ridiculous as trying to create a Unified Winter Solstice Holiday. Let's put trees in our house like the pagans did, have a magical man give kids presents like the Greeks did, and celebrate the birth of God's Son like every other religion did. Yeah, that will catch on.

My aimless rant is not entirely without purpose. While trolling the internet for werewolf information, I came upon Yet Another Collection of Werewolf Information. Don't know how original it is, but according to the site, one of the telling features of a werewolf is that he was born on the 25th of December. Now we know the real reason Jesus snuck off to the Garden of Gesthemane at night.

The site, http://www.mythicalrealm.com/legends/werewolf.html, has a decent compilation of werewolf-like myths from different cultures. Again, I can't vouch for the info, but apparently, some Native American cultures, specifically in the Pennsylvania area, believed in "wererats", who prefer carrots dipped in ranch dressing instead of human flesh.

That can't be true.

Another site, on Xanga (http://www.xanga.com/wrewlf98) has a recent post with a similar collection of "facts". They seem to be mainly culled from a page that currently isn't accessible, but included is a paragraph on the Northumberland County werewolf. If you know the story, don't bother checking it out, as it is the same paragraph that has been plagiarized in every collection of werewolf stories I've seen.

I think it would be very interesting to find some primary or even secondary sources of the Northumberland County werewolf.

Hellhounds, Werewolves and the Germanic Underworld

Alby Stone has an interesting thesis at At the Edge entitled Hellhounds, Werewolves and the Germanic Underworld. It goes through a series of connections starting with the appearance of dogs in many mythologies' stories of travel to the land of the dead. Stone looks at all sorts of older texts and draws some interesting conclusions about, well, hellhounds, werewolves and the Germanic Underworld.

What I found of particular interest was in the middle as Stone breaks down the various entymological theories on warg. According to this article,

This is a complex word: it is often used simply to mean 'wolf', but it also denotes an outlaw or the state of outlawry, in which case it refers to those who have committed crimes that are either unforgivable or unredeemable, and who are cast out from their communities and doomed to wander until they die. Outlaws were traditionally forest-dwellers, and could be legitimately killed.

It would be easy to assume that outlaws were called warg simply because their offences were of an especially savage kind, and that they were likened to wolves, wild, bestial, and uncivilised, as a result.

Stone then goes on to talk of how in some criminial justice systems, these outlaws were not just likened to wolves, but were literally declared to be wolves, and given all the legal protections of wolves, namely none. Fascinating stuff.

The article ends with an in-depth look at how ergotism and werewolfery are connected, what with the ergot theory being all the rage today in werewolf theory. Still, without making any judgement calls, Stone points out not only the physiological similarities, but the linguistic ones as well.

Good stuff all around, and though At the Edge is no longer published, the site has archived all their articles, a treasure-trove of mythological musings.

Werewolf Legends from Germany

As opposed to the post below, this site offers up a fairly comprehensive list of Werewolf Legends from Germany, hence the title of this blog post. Each tale is cited by its original source, which in some cases are first-hand accounts. Now that's good werewolf research!

On becoming a werewolf

Obviously, there are as many different ways to become a werewolf as there are werewolf stories. Every culture gives their own explanation of these transformations, running the gamut far from the single version expunged by Hollywood.

This page spells out one such transformation ritual. I have no idea where it comes from. The site appears to be somewhat researched, but no citations are used anywhere. It has a heavy bias toward European myths, and much of the ritual contains elements common in German, French, and English myths.

The rest of the site is a mix of semi-useful and useless information, though the major problem is how the author tries to over-simplify werewolf lore into a unified theory. The history of werewolfery offers such complex and often contradictory information, that to attempt to amalgamate it into a single explanation means picking and choosing which myths you think are "true." And that's just silly.

The Book of Were-Wolves

Yet another amazing resource! Mythology Web has Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Were-Wolves in its entirety. I remember being unable to locate a copy of this book a while back, even though it seems to be one of the most commonly referenced works to appear in current werewolf research.

Werewolves on Wikipedia

Wikipedia has an amazingly thourough article on werewolves, as Wikipedia is wont to do. The page is filled with links galore for the beginning of any type of werewolf research you may wish to pursue. I've seen a lot of other pages rip off this article word for word, so it must be good. So good, I've added it to the sidebar of our blog so you can always find it.

Off to a great start

Werewolves
Originally uploaded by !Habit Forming.

What a way to begin our very own blog about werewolves.