Mysterious Creatures : A Guide to Cryptozoology

The BEAST OF GÉVAUDAN, from an eighteenth-century print. (Fortean Picture Library)
Significant sightings: In June 1764, a young girl
was tending cows in the Fôret de Mercoire near
Langogne, Lozère Department, when she saw
what looked like an enormous wolf running toward
her. Her dogs panicked, and the animal injured
her badly, but the cattle drove the Beast off
with their horns. The first fatality was a fourteenyear-old
shepherdess named Jeanne Boulet, who
was mauled on June 30. Eleven other fatal attacks
on women and children took place through the
end of November, when an army unit stationed in
Languedoc was called in to hunt down the Beast.
On December 24, 1764, a seven-year-old boy
was killed by a similar wolflike animal, as were a
shepherd and two young girls before the end of
the year. On January 12, 1765, the Beast attacked
a group of children near Vileret d’Apcher
and seized an eight-year-old boy, but the others
drove it away by jabbing it with a blade attached
to a stick and throwing stones.
After the army under Captain Duhamel,
aided by a host of volunteers, failed to catch the
animal even though they slaughtered about 100
wolves, King Louis XV in February called in a
famous Norman wolf hunter named Denneval,
who fared no better. The king’s harquebusier
Antoine, Sieur de Beauterne, was sent to Gévaudan
in late July.
A girl of the village of Vachelerie, near Paulhac-en-Margeride,
disappeared on the evening
of September 8, 1765. After a shepherd found
her cap, Beauterne and some gamekeepers
found torn and bloodstained clothing and finally
the naked body of the girl, with fang
marks on her throat and one thigh eaten to the
bone.
By mid-September, seventy-three people had
been killed over a crescent-shaped area stretching
about 31 miles long. Then, Beauterne killed
an animal on September 20, 1765, near the
BEAST OF GEVAUDAN 41