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Werewolf legends are well known. According to them, many people possessed the power to transform themselves into wolves by putting on a wolf belt. They would then roam about at night attacking their enemies or their enemies' cattle.
In Fahrenholz in the year 1682 a number of people were accused of being able to transform themselves into wolves and were put on trial.
Only thirty years ago [in the 1840's] numerous examples of this kind of magic were related in all children's rooms, although there have been no wolves in Mecklenburg for more than one hundred years. This proves how widespread these legends formerly must have been.
Beyer, in the Meklenburgische Jahrbücher (20, 161), states that "So far as I remember, in my youth I only heard of male werewolves, never females. However, in other regions gender makes no difference."
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1.
A man possessed a wolf belt, that is, he had the ability to transform himself into a wolf (werewolf). Once the huntsmen organized a fox hunt and had placed a dead horse in the woods as bait for the foxes. The werewolf went there and was eating from the horse. The huntsmen surprised him and shot at him. He fled, and when they went to the house of the man they suspected of being a werewolf, they found him in bed with a bullet wound.
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2.
A young woman whose husband was often unexplainably absent came to the suspicion that he was a werewolf.
One day both were working in the field. The man again left his wife. Suddenly a wolf came forth from the bushes, ran toward her, grabbed her red woolen skirt with its teeth and shook her back and forth. With screams and blows from her hay fork she drove him away.
Soon afterward her husband emerged from the same bushes into which the wolf had disappeared. She told him of her frightening experience. He laughed, thereby revealing the red woolen threads from her skirt that were stuck between his teeth.
She reported him to the judge, and he was burned to death.
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3.
A woodcutter was working in the forest with his brother. The latter went away, and soon thereafter a wolf came out of the nearby bushes. The woodcutter wounded him on his right front leg with his ax, and the wolf retreated howling.
That evening when the woodcutter returned home he found his brother in bed with his right arm hidden beneath the covers. Only after repeated threats would he reveal his arm, and on it was the same wound that the woodcutter had given to the wolf.
He reported his brother, who was burned to death.
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