Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Beast of Gevaudan

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

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? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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 Kenobi-esque type dude who 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. And this is the story of the beast of Jevodan. That was a great, who was that? Oh, Bella Legosi. Some creep just walked through my basement and put a little sleeping stuff on a napkin, put it in my face and I woke up and now I'm recording. Was it Jeff Bridges and your Sandra Bullock? What? Have 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, for sure. One of those rare

ones where the adaptation is as good as the original foreign film. Oh, yeah, that's good. Halloween in August? July. Yeah, it'll be on July, I think, but yes, absolutely. We are talking about a horror show, horror movie, horror tale, and the fact that it happened in the 18th century makes it even creepier. Totally. Exactly the same way that the legend of Sleepy Hollow is still creepy and scary to this day because it takes place in 18th century upstate New York. This is creepy also in the exact same way. Right, 1760s. 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 Géboudin, and there is a lot of killing going on, and no one 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 dark woods. Yeah, and they were understandably freaked out because those deaths were really, really grisly and gruesome, and I mean, if this is a fairly sparsely populated area, if you lose a hundred people over three years, and some of them are having their heads pulled off and their entrails pulled out, it definitely is, and it definitely did, and they documented the first death in, I believe, June of 1764, and it was a 14-year-old

girl named Jean Boulet, and she was just basically being like Little Bo Peep, tending to her livestock, her family's livestock out in the hills, and she was attacked and torn apart, and she was the first fatality, but apparently she was the second victim, and just a little before that, another young sheep herder was tending to their flock, and was attacked, but their sheep banded together and chased off this beast of Jevoudin and saved their life. That's right, and so more attacks are following, dozens of people are dying, there's some women, mostly kids, a few lone dudes here and there, and described as a dog-like or wolf-like creature, as big as a horse though, and this was the time, this was the 1760s, that they're talking real monsters here, they're not saying,

it was probably a wolf, they're saying that it was some beast that they've really never witnessed before. Yeah, I mean, there was a pretty decent amount of superstition among the people who live 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 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. Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation, if you do,

you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help, this I promise you, seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you, and so will my husband, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy, you may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest,

I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking, you might not smoke, but you're gonna get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck, one of the things I saw about this was that this is considered one of the first international media stories that it was reported on by the Avignon 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 written 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 really kind of helped pump this story up into really huge proportions for a little while. Yeah. So, there's a book written 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 Jevoudin, full stop. Sure. But it's called Monsters of the Jevoudin, colon, The Making of a Beast. I don't know why that colon annoys me more than others. It's a better follow-up subtitle than, you know, let's have a sandwich or something. At least it's pertinent to the main title.

You were always seconds away from saying, let's have a sandwich. Pretty much. I'm a walking colon leading to that. You and Joey Tribbiani. Oh, did he like sandwiches? That was always the favorite joke on Friends, what's his favorite food sandwiches? So, yeah, these days, basically everyone agrees that it was a wolf. Back then, apparently, this author argues there were certain social factors at play where France was not in the 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 they sort of rallied around this story and came together a little bit. And this monster, but it was a wolf. It was like, you know, just to give an example, like, let's say your country faced a pandemic, how it would, like, bring everybody together to kind of, like, defeat that pandemic, and then you'd be better off afterward on the other side. This is exactly what happened with the Beast of Jaivudin. It brought France together. And it really brought a lot of France together, and that, like, King Louis the 15th got involved,

started sending troops. There was a 2700 livre tournois, which is a type of currency, French currency, bounty. And I did the calculations. That's 12 kilograms of silver. That's a lot of silver reward. It was, I saw somewhere else that it was basically, like, 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. 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, and the killing still continued, it made this problem take on those really kind of supernatural proportions even more.

So are you saying that the one they killed in June of 1767 was not, in fact, the wolf? No, this was a different wolf that was killed before June of 1767. I think everybody believes that in June of 1767, Jean Chastel did kill whatever. If it wasn't the 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. Yeah. And they wanted to cut it open. And the mayor said, I'm not going to let you cut that thing open in front of everyone and let that child spill out of its guts. Yeah. And Richard Dreyfus said that there's no way that's the shark, because 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 the sneaking and cut it open in the middle of the night and it's not the shark. And this was not the wolf. I wonder though, like how much Spielberg kind of took from this true life story to add to Jaws, because now that you're pointing it out, there's a lot of similarities between the two. Like there was a novel. There were human remains. Oh, yeah. It was Richard Belcher. What is going on? I don't know. But they did find human remains in these wolves that were killed. So 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 these attacks. Right. They did not find the Louisiana license plate, Sportsman's Paradise. That will be my last Jaws reference. That's a trivia question right there. True Jaws fans will be like, oh, yeah. But like we said, in 1767, they did a man named Jean Chastel, I guess, killed who everyone kind of agrees was the wolf because the killing stopped after that. Right. 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 in the heat of the moment with adrenaline going on. Wolves can be really puffy at certain times. They wear their coats. They have really big bones and long limbs that could,

people could easily exaggerate the size of this thing as 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 hyenodon, which was a prehistoric giant hyena jackal type dog that would have just torn you to shreds. Probably not that. Dyer wolf, same situation that was long extinct. There was the idea that it was actually human, a serial killer who was actually on the prowl, but probably not it because they were just so prolific if that was the case. A human probably could not have carried out all these killings. And then there was also the idea that a human was involved, but that they were acting as a wolf whisperer directing the wolves to kill

like this. But then people said, no, it was probably just a lot of wolves or a lot of wolves here 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 tearing people to shreds. And a wolf being a wolf, this would make for a good movie. I think the setting and everything lends itself to something that could be kind of cool. And one other thing that's kind of cool about this is there were survivors who were attacked and some of them were like little kids who fended off wolves. One girl did, she had a bayonet attached to a staff and used it to stab the wolf and or the beast of Javudan. And some lived to tell the tale, which is pretty cool. Wow.

Yeah, definitely movie. Let's do it. Movie material, Chuck. You got anything else? No. Okay. Well, then we'll see you later, everybody. Okay. All right. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.