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Sun Spots, v. 3, issue 4, whole no. 12, November 1940
Page 16
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November, 1940 SUN SPOTS Page 16 THERE MAY BE WEREWOLVES By Manly Wade Wellman Three housewives, pallid of face and wide of eye, stood before the judge. Their lips trembled, but their stammered accusations were made in deadly earnest. A neighbor women, a strange, taciturn creature who gathered herbs at night, had frightened them by turning in to an animal.-- This a good place for the reader to pause and grim contemptously. Why offer such outworn legends in a twentieth-century magazine? Surely such things never were true, and the last belief in the waned at about the time of the Salem witch trials. But let the reader pause just a moment more. This is no myth of dead years and ancient creeds, no importation from a barbaric land and era. It happened in the autumn of 1936, in a suburb of New York City. Names are omitted here, for obvious reasons, but they are given, together with full statements of most amazing events, in the court records of the community; and the affiar made the front page of metropolitan newspapers, crowding back the latest dispatches about the panish Civil War and the campaign of Roosevelt for re-election. Under oath, the three witnesses elaborated upon their story. The neighbor women was a sorceress, they insisted. Trough the open windows of her home, she had been seen to perform mysterious ceremonies, including the stewing of herbs and the making of wild gestures. Then, continued the accusers, she changed shape. Once she had appeared to become a dog-like thing, which howled. Again, her head shrank and distorted, while horns sprouted from the malformed brow, she walked around on all fours like a beast. On another occasion, fire gushed from her mouth, as though she were a dragon. The heroine of this tale was summoned before the Recorder. She brought with her an attorney, who echoed her scornful denial of the charges. True, she had gathered herbs -- but only to make medicine for rhematism. All else was malice or mistake. Police Recorder Brown agreed with the defendant, scoffed at the plaintiffs and called in a priest, Father Vincent Lanvi, to reassure them. "Seeing is believing," insisted one of the accusers; and the testimony of the three was echoed by many of their neighbors who were interviewed by reporters. Had the three witnesses sworn that Teresa Czinkota committed murder before their eyes, there is little doubt that she would have been convicted and punished, perhaps by death. As it was, the Police Recorder premptorily branded the story impossible. He dismissed the charges, and reprimanded the complainants. But is it impossible? Curious, horrible, and fantastic is the legend, common to every age and clime, that certain people, gifted in sorcery or perhaps suffering from a mysterious curse, turn to beasts and most frequently into wolves. A Louisiana Negro, a college graduate, has to me that he saw a whole throng of such monsters dancing awkwardly on their hinder paws among the moss-bearded trees at the brink of a southern swamp. An old indian once warned me against eating a rabbit -Continued on next page -
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November, 1940 SUN SPOTS Page 16 THERE MAY BE WEREWOLVES By Manly Wade Wellman Three housewives, pallid of face and wide of eye, stood before the judge. Their lips trembled, but their stammered accusations were made in deadly earnest. A neighbor women, a strange, taciturn creature who gathered herbs at night, had frightened them by turning in to an animal.-- This a good place for the reader to pause and grim contemptously. Why offer such outworn legends in a twentieth-century magazine? Surely such things never were true, and the last belief in the waned at about the time of the Salem witch trials. But let the reader pause just a moment more. This is no myth of dead years and ancient creeds, no importation from a barbaric land and era. It happened in the autumn of 1936, in a suburb of New York City. Names are omitted here, for obvious reasons, but they are given, together with full statements of most amazing events, in the court records of the community; and the affiar made the front page of metropolitan newspapers, crowding back the latest dispatches about the panish Civil War and the campaign of Roosevelt for re-election. Under oath, the three witnesses elaborated upon their story. The neighbor women was a sorceress, they insisted. Trough the open windows of her home, she had been seen to perform mysterious ceremonies, including the stewing of herbs and the making of wild gestures. Then, continued the accusers, she changed shape. Once she had appeared to become a dog-like thing, which howled. Again, her head shrank and distorted, while horns sprouted from the malformed brow, she walked around on all fours like a beast. On another occasion, fire gushed from her mouth, as though she were a dragon. The heroine of this tale was summoned before the Recorder. She brought with her an attorney, who echoed her scornful denial of the charges. True, she had gathered herbs -- but only to make medicine for rhematism. All else was malice or mistake. Police Recorder Brown agreed with the defendant, scoffed at the plaintiffs and called in a priest, Father Vincent Lanvi, to reassure them. "Seeing is believing," insisted one of the accusers; and the testimony of the three was echoed by many of their neighbors who were interviewed by reporters. Had the three witnesses sworn that Teresa Czinkota committed murder before their eyes, there is little doubt that she would have been convicted and punished, perhaps by death. As it was, the Police Recorder premptorily branded the story impossible. He dismissed the charges, and reprimanded the complainants. But is it impossible? Curious, horrible, and fantastic is the legend, common to every age and clime, that certain people, gifted in sorcery or perhaps suffering from a mysterious curse, turn to beasts and most frequently into wolves. A Louisiana Negro, a college graduate, has to me that he saw a whole throng of such monsters dancing awkwardly on their hinder paws among the moss-bearded trees at the brink of a southern swamp. An old indian once warned me against eating a rabbit -Continued on next page -
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