For three years, a creature stalked the mountains of southern France — killing over 100 people, evading the king's best hunters, and defying every explanation. Nobody ever agreed on what it was.
Between 1764 and 1767, a creature killed an estimated 100 to 113 people in the Gévaudan region of southern France — attacking with unusual aggression, targeting the throat, and seemingly impervious to bullets. Witnesses described something wolf-like but distinctly wrong: too large, too fast, with a reddish pelt and a long tufted tail.
King Louis XV took the crisis seriously enough to send professional wolf hunters with trained bloodhounds. They failed. He then dispatched his personal arquebus bearer, François Antoine, with a royal mandate to end the killings. Antoine killed a large wolf in September 1765, stuffed it, and exhibited it at Versailles as proof. The killings resumed within weeks.
The beast became a national scandal. European newspapers mocked France's inability to stop a single animal. The bishop of the region declared it divine punishment for human sin. Citizens began carrying makeshift weapons to cross their own fields. A 20-year-old woman named Marie-Jeanne Vallet became a local hero after driving a spear into the creature's chest — it fled but wasn't killed.
The attacks finally ended in June 1767 when a local hunter named Jean Chastel shot and killed an unusually large animal. Legend — invented by a novelist, not contemporaries — claims he used silver bullets blessed by a priest. The creature's remains were described as wolf-like but 'very different from wolves seen in this country.'
What the beast actually was has never been settled. The most accepted theory is a large Italian wolf. Other proposed candidates include an escaped lion from a private menagerie, a striped hyena, a maned wolf, or a hybrid wolfdog. No bones survive for analysis — the carcass rotted during transport to Paris.
The beast has never left French culture. It inspired the 2001 film Brotherhood of the Wolf, numerous novels, a Netflix production, and an entire ecosystem of local tourism. A festival, museum, and monument to Marie-Jeanne Vallet still stand in the region today.