Peter Stumpp: The Most Infamous Werewolf Trial in History and the Man Who Confessed to Everything

In 1589 in the German town of Bedburg near Cologne, a farmer named Peter Stumpp was arrested, tried, and executed for being a werewolf. The trial produced a confession of extraordinary detail and horror: Stumpp claimed to have been given a magical belt by the devil at the age of twelve that allowed him to transform into a wolf at will, and to have used this ability over the following twenty-five years to commit a series of attacks on people and animals across the region. He confessed to killing and eating cattle, sheep, men, women, and children. He confessed to killing his own son and eating his brain. He was convicted of all of it and executed in a manner specifically designed to be as public and as terrible as possible.

The case became the most widely publicised werewolf trial in European history, circulated across Germany, the Netherlands, and England through printed pamphlets that described the crimes and the execution in graphic detail. It shaped how subsequent generations understood the werewolf, and it established a template for werewolf trial confessions that influenced prosecution and popular belief for decades afterward.

The Confession

Stumpp’s confession, as recorded in the pamphlet accounts, described a career of supernatural predation stretching back to childhood. The devil’s belt was the enabling mechanism: wearing it, he became a wolf of great strength and ferocity. Removing it, he returned to human form. The belt was never found, which the pamphlet accounts explain by noting that Stumpp claimed the devil had taken it back.

The specific crimes he confessed to were calibrated to represent the full range of werewolf transgression as the period understood it. He had attacked animals. He had attacked strangers. He had attacked and killed children. He had attacked his own family. The escalating intimacy of the victims, from animals to strangers to children to family, traced a path of increasingly severe transgression that the period’s moral framework required a true werewolf to have followed.

The confession was obtained under torture, which is the essential context for everything that follows from it. The strappado, the rack, and other instruments of the period’s judicial torture were applied to Stumpp before he confessed, and the confession that emerged matched precisely what his interrogators expected a werewolf to have done. This does not necessarily mean none of the crimes occurred — some killings in the region were apparently real — but it makes the specific supernatural elements of the confession impossible to evaluate as evidence of anything except what the period’s judicial torture produced.

The Execution

The execution of Peter Stumpp on the 31st of October 1589 was one of the most elaborate public spectacles of judicial violence in the period’s already considerable repertoire. He was placed on a wheel and his flesh torn from his body with red-hot pincers in ten places. His limbs were broken with the blunt end of an axe to prevent him from rising from the dead. His head was struck off. His body was burned. The wheel on which he had been broken was mounted on a pole with a wolf effigy on top and a representation of sixteen of his victims around it, as a permanent public reminder of what had been done and why.

Two others were executed alongside him: his daughter and his mistress, convicted as his accomplices. The daughter was burned alive.

The execution’s elaborateness was partly punitive, partly deterrent, and partly theatrical in the specific sense that public executions in this period were understood as performances of justice that the community was required to witness and that communicated the state’s power and the seriousness of the transgression. A werewolf required a response proportionate to what a werewolf was understood to represent.

The Pamphlet and Its Reach

A pamphlet describing Stumpp’s crimes, trial, and execution was printed in Cologne shortly after the execution and translated into English and Dutch within a year. The English translation, published in London in 1590, is the source most widely available to English readers today and is the basis for most subsequent accounts of the case.

The pamphlet’s reach made Peter Stumpp the defining werewolf case in Protestant Europe. It was cited in subsequent werewolf discussions, influenced the treatment of later accused werewolves, and established the devil’s belt as a standard element of werewolf transformation lore that had not been prominent in earlier accounts. The case was not simply a reflection of existing belief but an active shaper of it.

For more on the werewolf tradition, the Werewolf Trials of Europe article covers the full history of werewolf prosecution across the continent. The Gilles Garnier article covers the earlier French werewolf trial that Stumpp’s case echoes. The Lycaon article covers the mythological origin of the werewolf in ancient Greece.