The Mystery of the Beast of Gevaudan

May 1764, Gevaudan, France (modern day Lozere), a girl is working on a farm. Suddenly, out of the woods a large, mysterious wolf-like animal ferociously charges at the girl. Luckily the girl lived, the farms bulls chased the animal away, but others were not as fortunate. From 1764 to 1767 the beast terrorized the people of the Margeride Mountains with sudden, violent and erie attacks. Between 60 - 100 people were killed in attacks and a further 30 were also attacked.

The Beast was described as being a wolf like creature the size of a cow, with a wide chest, a long meandering tail with a lion like tuff of fur on the end, and a greyhound like head with small straight ears and large prominent fangs. The beast was said to have dark fur with a red taint, and an odd white stripe running down its chest. The young peasant girl described it: "It was as large as a cow, with claws the size of a man's hand." According to analysis of some tracks, it may have been able to leap over 9 metres.

What makes the story even scarier was the reported behavior of the beast. It chose to attack people rather than farm animals that were often in the same field, it had an aversion to cattle and it's method of killing was odd for a predator. It often targeted the head removing or crushing it and ignoring places regularly targeted like the legs and throat.

On January 12th 1765 Jacques Portefaix and six friends were attacked by the Beast; they managed to survive by driving it away by staying bunched together. Their fight caught the attention of King Louis XV who awarded 300 livers to the men. The King then organized for professional wolf-hunters, Jean d'Enneval and his son Jean-François, to kill the beast.

They arrived in Clermont-Ferrandon February 17th 1765, bringing with them eight blood-hounds which had been specially trained in wolf-hunting. They spent several months hunting wolves by night (despite most of the attacks being at dusk and dawn), believing them to be the beast. However the attacks continued, and by June 1765 they had been replaced by François Antoine, the king's harquebus bearer and master huntsman. He arrived in le Malzieu on June 22nd.

On September 21st, 1765, Antoine killed a large gray wolf measuring 80 cm high, 170 cm long and weighing 60 kg. The wolf was called 'Le Loup de Chazes,' after the nearby Abbey des Chazse. It was accepted locally that this was quite big for a wolf. Antoine officially stated: "We declare by the present report signed from our hand, we never saw a big wolf that could be compared to this one. Which is why we estimate this could be the fearsome beast that caused so much damage." The wolf was stuffed and sent to Versailles where Antoine became a hero, receiving a large sum of money as well as lands, titles and awards. However, on December 2nd. 1765 the Beast attacked again severely injuring two children. Dozens more deaths are reported to have followed.

Finally local hunter Jean Chastel killed the creature and marked the end of attacks. Great    controversy surrounds the finally killing of the thing. Jean claimed that while out on a hunting party, he kneeled down to read the bible and pray. During a prayer he spotted the creature    behind him, Chastel finished his prayer before turning around to shoot the beast. The strange thing about this story was that this was not normal behavior for the beast, it used to just attack on sight rather than stalk it's victims. Some people believed this to be proof that he had          participated with the beast or that he had trained the beast. A more logical answer is that the story was invented for religious motives.

This leads to the burning question, what was the beast of Gevaudan? No one actually knows for sure what it was, but there have been many theories put forward, both at the time of the attacks and present day.

The attacks sparked a frenzy of supernatural belief and theories about the beast. Some believing it was a hound from hell sent their from God as a punishment. Others believed that a witch or evil presence had summoned it. Their were even stories it was a transfigure, a "were-wolf". A story goes that three old women were going to church one morning when a man approached them. He offered to guide them on a short-cut to the church through the forest. The women kindly rejected his offer, but he continued to pester them. The man eventually walked off before touch one women on the hand with a fur coat. Suddenly round the corner comes french infantry warning people the beast had just been spotted near by. The origin of the story is unknown and how factual it is could be questioned, but it could also be evidence to support another story.

This theory says that the beast was in fact a group of wolves trained and aided by someone in violent attacks. Possibly Jean Chastel had trained the monster, this would explain the odd      circumstances around how he had killed the beast. This would also explain the other strange event surrounding the beasts remains. Two carcasses were both identified as being the beast, one was identified by the wounds on it's body victims had left whilst defending themselves the other because of the human remains found in it's stomach.

A different story states that the attacks were not all wolves, not even animals but people. This theory claims that the responsible party for the attacks were a group of mass murderers using wolf attacks to cover up their own gruesome murders.

One theory was the beast was a large wolf, as wolves were very common in those parts. But this theory was dismissed on the basis that the people of that area new wolves well, and this was not regular behavior for a wolf. A sensible theory is that it was a hybrid wolf or dog trained to kill, possibly by a Chastel family member. It could have even been a Dire Wolf, an extinct relative of todays wolves, possibly a creodont or mesonychid. So could it have been a different animal? An animal of similar description was the Tasmanian Tiger, now extinct. But how would a          Tasmanian Tiger get to the south-western mountains of France? The only european to have been to Tasmania was Abel Tasmine, and it would have been impossible for a Tasmanian Tiger to have survived the trip back to Europe. It could also have just been an escaped exotic animal from a circus, although there are no reports of this.

It would have been very easy for todays cryptozoologists to have identified the beasts species by means of its remains. Again the story also gets strange, the beasts coat and other remains were being kept in the French Museum of Natural History until in the early 1900's the museum just decided to destroy the remains because they were old and tattered. Now there is no physical  evidence left of the violent story. All there is to go on is the accounts of attacks which may not be entirely accurate.

Ultimately we will never truly know what the beast was. The mystery still lives today while the beast is long dead, or is it?