Short Stuff: Beast of Gevaudan

The first truly international news story covered a beast that terrorized the French countryside, eviscerating dozens of villagers for three years in the 1760s. How about that?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck and it's just us. But that's okay because
we know Dave's here in spirit watching over us like
this Obi wan kenobiesque type dude who uh just kind
of gently guides us in the directions he wants us
to go without us realizing that making us think that
we have free will, but it ultimately just being an illusion.

(00:27):
And this is the story of the Beast of Jevaudon.
That was a great Who was that? Oh, Mello leghostie.
We just walked through my basement and uh put a
little uh sleeping stuff on a napkin, put it in
my face and I woke up And now I'm recording?
Was it? Jeff Bridges? And you're Sander Bullock? What have

(00:50):
you ever seen the Vanishing? Was she in that? I
saw the original version? I didn't see that. They were
both very good on their own on their own for sure.
One of those rare one is where the adaptation is
as good as the original. Foreign Yeah, uh, Halloween in
August July, jeez, yeah, it will be on July, I think,

(01:12):
but yes, absolutely, we are talking about a horror show.
Horror movie horror deal and eight, and the fact that
it happened in the eighteenth century makes it even creepier.
You can, in exactly the same way that the legend
of Sleepy Hollow is still creepy and scary to this
day because it takes place in eighteenth century upstate New York.

(01:35):
This is creepy also in the exact same way. Right
seventeen sixties. Uh, we're talking about the South of France,
but not like, you know, the lovely seaside of the
South of France. This sounds like it's a little bit
more of a small town of Zebudin, and there is
some a lot of killing going on, and no one

(01:57):
knows what's doing the killing, but they know it's terrible.
Bodies are ripped to shreds, heads are missing, throats are
ripped out, and I think about a hundred people, give
or take, because you know this is also legend, were killed,
but it really did happen, and people were freaked out,
and we're like, there's a monster in these darwoods. Um. Yeah,

(02:19):
And they were understandably freaked out because those deaths were really,
really grizzly and gruesome. And I mean, if this is
a fairly sparsely populated area use a hundred people over
three years, and some of them are having their heads
pulled off and their entrails pulled out, like it definitely is,
and it definitely did. And they they documented the first

(02:41):
death and I believe June of seventeen sixty four, and
it was a fourteen year old girl named Jean Boulet
and she was just basically being like um little bo peep,
tending to her livestock, her family's live stock out in
the hills, and she was attacked and torn apart, and
she was the first fatality, but apparently she was the

(03:02):
second victim. And just a little before that, another um
young sheepherder was tending to their flock and um was attacked,
but their sheep banded together and chased off this beast
of jevou Dan and saved their life, that's right. And
so more attacks are following. M dozens of people are dying.

(03:26):
There's some women, mostly kids, a few lone dudes here
and there, and you know, described as a dog like
a wolf like creature, as big as a horse though,
and you know they really this was the time, this
is the seventeen sixties that they're they're talking real monsters here.
They're not saying, like, you know, it was probably a wolf,

(03:49):
They're saying that it was some beasts that they've really
never witnessed before. Yeah, I mean, there was a pretty
decent amount of superstition among the people who lived there,
I would guess too. But then also again, the fact
that people are being torn to shreds and it's so
happening so frequently, and their children are being killed too, Like,
you can kind of understand how they would attribute this

(04:11):
to a monster pretty much out of the gate. That's right,
But we're gonna take a break. We almost certainly know
what this beast was now, and we're gonna take a
break and reveal it right after this, So Chuck. One

(04:50):
of the things I saw about this was that this
is considered one of the first international media stories that
UM it was reported on by Evan yon Um newspaper,
and that those reports made their way to the Paris
newspapers and then from there they spread to the rest
of the world, and that it was being um written

(05:11):
about and covered all over the world from Europe over
all the way to Boston. From what I saw, and
that this was really the first time, and that part
of that media attention and media frenzy um really kind
of helped pump the story up into really huge proportions
for a little while. Yeah. So there's a book written

(05:32):
by a man named J. M. Smith, Historian, and it's
called and this one really annoys me because it's such
a great title. Did not need this colon. It should
just be called Monsters of the Jevudin full stop, but
it's called Monsters of the Vudin colon the Making of
a Beast. I don't know why that colon annoys more

(05:55):
than others. It's better, it's a better follow up subtitle.
And you know, let's have sandwich or something. At least
it's pertain into the to the main title. You you
were always seconds away from saying let's have a sandwich.
To be honest, I'm I'm a walking colon leading to

(06:15):
that you and Joey Triviani. Oh did he like sandwiches?
That was always the favorite joke. What's uh on friends?
What's his favorite food? Sandwiches? Uh? So yeah, this Uh
these days, basically everyone agrees that it was a wolf um.
Back then, apparently, this author argues there were certain social
factors at play. Where France was was not in the

(06:38):
best way as a country as a nation after the
war that they had, which war was that Seven Years War. Yeah,
the Seven Years War that they had fought, and um,
they sort of rallied around this story and came together
a little bit and this monster, but it was it
was a wolf. It was like you know, um, just

(06:59):
to give an example, like let's say your your your
country face the pandemic, how it would like bring everybody
together to kind of like defeat that that pandemic and
then everyone better off afterward. On the other side, this
is exactly what happened with the Beast of j Budin.
It brought France together. Uh, and it really brought a
lot of um France together in that like King Louis

(07:22):
the fifteenth got involved, started sending troops. There was a
hundred livre tour noir, which is a type of currency
French currency bounty and I did the calculations, that's twelve
ms of silver. That's a lot of silver reward. It
was I saw somewhere else that it was basically like

(07:43):
a year's wages for the average person in France at
the time. So it was a substantial reward, and there
were a lot of people looking for this wolf or
this monster, this beast. It was very much like Jaws um.
But the fact that they couldn't find it, and they
actually did find one wolf and kill it and stuff
it and send it off to Versailles Um and the

(08:04):
killing still continued, it made this this, this this problem
take on those really kind of supernatural proportions even more so.
Are you saying that the one they killed in June
of seventeen sixty seven was not? In fact the world
know this. This was a different wolf that was killed
before seen sixties And I think everybody believes that in

(08:24):
June of seventeen sixty seven, John chestel Um did kill whatever.
If it wasn't dull one, it was the last of
the ones that had been doing this. Well, this is
just like Jaws then, because in Jaws they had the
red herring shark that they killed and they they wanted
to cut it open, and the mayor said, I'm not

(08:45):
gonna let you cut that thing open in front of
everyone and let that child spill out of its guts.
And Richard Dreyfas said that there's no way that's the
shark because that the shark we're looking for has teeth
the size of a shot glass. It's one of my
favorite lines. That's a great it is a great line.
But then sakon and cut it up in the middle
of the night and it's not the shark and this
was not the wolf. I wonder though, like how much

(09:07):
Spielberg kind of took from this true life story to
add to Joe's because they're now that you're pointing it out,
there's a lot of similarities between the two. Like there
there were there were human remains. Oh yeah, it was
um Richard Belcherley, Yeah, yeah, what is going on? I
don't know, but um, they did find human remains in

(09:28):
these wolves that were killed, so there was there was.
It really supports this idea that it was a group
of wolves that were killing people and that even at
the time, even in this place, this little area was
overrun by wolves. There was a huge wolf problem, and
that's really what was the basis of all this this
these attacks. Right, they did not find the Louisiana license plate.

(09:51):
Sportsman's Paradise will be my last draws reference. That was
a that's a trivia question, right, there will be like,
oh yeah, um. But like we said, in seventeen sixty seven,
they did a man named Jean Cash Schastel. I guess
killed what who Everyone kind of agrees was the wolf

(10:12):
because the killing stopped after that, and you know, there
was still debate on whether or not it could have
been something else. I think wolf experts say, you know what,
back then, wolves would attack people much more than they
do now. Uh. And in the heat of the moment
with adrenaline going on, wolves can be really puffy at

(10:33):
certain times. They with their coats, they have really big
bones and long limbs that could people could easily exaggerate.
The size of this thing is maybe the size of
a horse. Yeah, because you know, over the years, there
were a lot of things that were attributed to this.
There was a hyena don, which was a prehistoric giant
hyena jack old type dog that would have just torn

(10:55):
you to shreds, probably not called dire wolf, same situation
that was long extinct. There was the idea that it
was actually human, a serial killer um who was actually
on the prowl, but probably not it because they were
just so prolific. If that was the case that a
human probably could not have carried out all these killings.
And then there was also the idea that a human

(11:16):
was involved, but that they were acting as a wolf
whisperer directing the wolves to kill like this. But then
people said, now it's it was probably just a lot
of wolves. There are a lot of wolves there, and
people were leaving their little kids out to tend livestock,
which you just don't see anymore, and there's far fewer wolves,
so that's all. It was just statistics coming back and

(11:38):
tearing people the shreds and a wolf being a wolf. Uh,
this would make for a good movie that I think.
The setting and everything, yeah, lends itself to to something
that could be kind of cool. Yeah. And one other
thing that's kind of cool about this is there were survivors,
um who were attacked, and some of them were like
little kids who fended off wolves. One girl did. She
had a bayonet attached to us staff and used it

(12:01):
to stab the wolf and uh, it's a beast of
je vou dan and um. Some some lived to tell
the tale, which is pretty cool. Wow. Yeah, definitely movie,
let's do it. Movie material. Chuck, Um, you got anything else? No, okay,
well then we'll see you later. Everybody okay, all right.

(12:23):
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