The Beast of Gévaudan (Cryptid) - Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World
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- čas přidán 8. 02. 2024
- France, 1764. A terrifying and unknown beast roams the countryside killing more than 100 men, women, and children, and injuring 200 more. A royal reward is even issued for its capture or death. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli ask what made the beast so ferocious, why it attacked so many people, and what kind of beast it actually was.
mysterious.fm/297
Further Resources:
• Romero and Schwalb’s book Beast: Werewolves, Serial Killers, and Man-Eaters: The Mystery of the Monsters of Gevaudan: amzn.to/3UzF2Lh
• Karl-Hans Taake’s book The Gevaudan Tragedy: The Disastrous Campaign of a Deported “Beast”: amzn.to/3OwCSbm
• Linnell et al.’s paper The Fear of Wolves: A Review of Wolf Attacks on Humans: web.archive.org/web/200812090...
• Tsavo Man-Eaters: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsavo_M...
• Man-Eater of Mfuwe: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mfuwe_m...
The "pray for the victims" part was actually the best part.....after everything, that is the most important part. Thank you Jimmy 🙏
I rooting for the Bovine Defenders in the upcoming sports bowl.
Sadly, the Cowboys will not be playing
The superball
😂@@tonyl3762
When I glanced at the title too quickly, I thought it said, "The Best of Gevaudan", and I thought to myself, "Huh, sounds like Jimmy is doing reviews of French New Wave bands now". 🤣
May God bless you all and St. Michael protect you all.
The movie The Ghost and the Darkness is about the man eaters of Tsavo. It's really good and I highly recommend it.
How you broke down every possibility is flawless. Thank you, Jimmy!
Thank you for this! One of my favorite tales!
I used to think it was the paranormal cryptid known as "the Dogman" (pretty much a werewolf creature). But, as you were going through the accounts, I was reminded of a book I read years ago by a hunter who specialized in hunting man-eating big cats. He said big cats become man-eaters in two ways: (1) When they become old. Unless we got guns, we're not beating a lion. Humans are easy prey; (2) If the big cat was not raised and trained to hunt prey, so dislocated or raised in the circus.
It also explains how all these professional hunters could not hunt it down: The hunters knew how to track creatures of France, but not how to track a big cat.
Very interesting. Perhaps an escaped exotic animal from some nobleman's private zoo? I wonder how it lived when it didn't take any human victims? If a few months went by sometimes between "meals", what did it eat? Carrion? The animal could have had mange or some other skin disease that accounts for the ropey tail and stench and even perhaps lack of visible stripes. A hyena that had been kept among people, in a zoo, for example, could have gone aggressive as you say.
Thanks Jimmy for the interesting show. I love how systematically you go through historical accounts, present various hypotheses, refute with evidence and then present your final argument with proofs. And you effectively hold my attention in your calm and low-key presentation style. Great show!😊
The one detail which occurred in several of the accounts which was not addressed is the fact of the creature having a strong terrible smell.
My "mysterious" brain went into high gear when the dead beast had a strong terrible smell... Any similarity to the Skinwalker Ranch wolf?
Another wonderfully thoughtful, intriguing, and, quite honestly, exciting mystery (as long as the word "exciting" can properly be used in this context, due to the many that died as a consequence of it), specifically near the end when the Tsavo lions are brought up as a reference to what "The Beast" may have been. But, I did wish to say, and this is my own pedanticness showing through, near the beginning of the show you mentioned that Louis XV was the son of Louis XIV, but Louis XV was actually Louis XIV's great-grandson.
Good episode! I was waiting to hear about a merchant coming across a castle while seeking shelter from a storm and encountering a beast, who his daughter falls in love with.
Thank you, Jimmy!
Here for Jimmy, commenting for the algorithm.
✌🏻💜😇
Thanks, I need to go rewatch Brotherhood of the Wolf again
I loved that movie. I went to see it twice when it was in cinema. Now I need to see it again. I didn’t know it was based on real events.
@@lovrobaksic4246, I remember the trailers saying it was based on a true story, but I was not old enough to see it in theaters at the time, had to wait for it to come out on DirectTV back in early 2000s. Though that was the dubbed version. Not much lost in translation really.
Fantastic episode, and thank you for the links to sources, and that book is a must have. I'm working on something set during the revolution involving monsters, and this is just perfect fodder for the imagination.
Saying the Tsavo man-eaters aren't easily recognizable as lions shouldn't be taken as typical for maneless lions. According to Colonel Patterson (the hunter who shot both man-eaters), at least one of the lion's bodies was savaged and almost destroyed by the railway workers after he killed it. Also, old taxidermy can look really weird.
The movie "Brotherhood of the Wolf" was made based on this story. I recommend the French language though as the English dub is horrible.
I was waiting for at least a cursory mention of the film - a little surprised that it wasn't brought up. There was considerable artistic license in the telling (18th century Native American martial arts master??), but it was nonetheless solid entertainment... and definitely worthy viewing sans dubbed version
Brotherhood of the Wolf was a movie about the Beast of Gevaudan ... The beast is an armored large lion which is controlled by a man.
It's the best 18th century France kung fu conspiracy thriller movie of all time, too. (I kid, but it is a great movie - not for the youngsters, though, not by any means.)
Well done movie, entertaining action and suspense yet without falling into cartoonish silliness. It went largely under the radar, but I think it qualifies as a cult favourite - as long as it's viewed in the French language option with subtitles. As mentioned elsewhere, the dubbed version is painfully bad
I never heard of this before. I love this show.
Very interesting and scary case! Well done, as usual. Keep up the good work.
It occurred to me this might me a male liger (the son of a male lion and a female tiger) escaped from a menagerie.
Enjoyed this episode, also looking forward to more alien abductions and ghost stories. Wizard Clip and Devils den were some of my favorites. Keep up the good work!
Another great presentation. But it is just one more thing hiding under my bed or in my closet when I go to bed at night 😱 😏
Pretty interesting, i am skeptical though. Thank you, Jimmy!
Eyo, that has to be a super ooooold map of brown bear populations you got there... I live in Slovakia, and we had bear overpopulations problems for like last 5 years.
You should have read "Monsters of the Gevaudan" by Jay Smith before doing this episode. The escaped lion hypothesis is very intriguing, but it is more likely that it was just wolf attacks blown out of proportion by the new media of the newspaper. A lot of the first hand accounts and descriptions of the creature were from newspapers from Paris, far away from the Gevaudan.
I think you overstate wolves' fear of man. Wolves killed hundreds to thousands of people in Europe every year in the early modern period. My hypothesis is that wolves fear of man today is partially a biproduct of humans hunting them to extinction in many areas.
Also, I'm not really a fan of the dramatizations. It can be confusing what is historical material and what is dramatized.
Jimmy has the greatest beard of all time. Truly epic. Great episode guys thanks.
I was thinking a liger (lion and tiger hybrid). I only looked at Google images; I'm not an expert like Napoleon Dynamite, and there aren't many to look at. They are big and chunky, small mane compared to a lion, tufted tail that's narrow in proportion to its body, some with subtle attenuated stripes that could look like spots, some with reddish fur. I was looking for a tail without rings but didn't see any that I'd say didn't have rings on them. Maybe it's possible to get a matching combination of traits? I don't know what a juvenile could look like. Just a thought.
Looking forward to listen
As soon as you got to the theories, a canine barked in the distance
Great episode. Wonderful work.
I think your theory perfectly lines up, especially with the evidence of the distinct look of other man killers shown at the end of the show. Upon further reading the wolf-dog theories are far too steeped in modern chauvinism. The behaviour of the Beast lines up much more with Lions (brazen, unafraid) and gives a special heroism to all the victims of the beast. Children, and women with the “heart of a lion” facing one down. I will pray for those victims. Very interesting that all the most famous man killer lions are maneless. I wonder if it is something congenital or genetic?
I wonder if there were any reports of a lion escaping from somewhere near by around the same time, or if they would have tried to cover up such a thing, especially once people started dying.
Thank you for this episode. It was Very informative
I reckon it could have been a dog with some sort of grudge against humans. While we've trained dogs to be friendly most of the time dog attacks, even fatal ones, still happen. If it was abused as a pup it could have learned to see humans in a negative light, causing it to become violently antagonistic towards them later in life.
About lions and manes, I've also read that the fur of man-eating lions becomes patchy and/or unhealthy, and most male lions that become man-eaters lose their manes.
1. I REALLY wanted to hear you explore Ligers.!
2. Necropsy, not autopsy.
Awesome episode!!!
Love your show.
I thouggt the same thing as Jimmy as he started telling the stories. It reminded me of The Ghost and the Darkness.
Watch of for the beast! Thank you Jimmy and Dom!
The lions of Tsavo were known for attacking humans. A very interesting story. 🦁
Well, you guys covered it, of course 😜
Amazing show kept my attention
Really cool episode
really
really
cool
Cool job! I love the beast's case and mistery! I also agree that there hasn't only one animal, but at last three:
1- A escapee subadult male lion, being the main beast and the one that attacked in a large range throught the Gevaudan region (80/90 km).
2- A wolfdog hybrid (the one killed by Jean Chastel) wich presumably belonged to, and was treined by, a psycho/maniac peasant or countt of the region. *Obs. The popular hypothesis of the identity of this psycho or maniac, who trained this canid hybrid, is Antoine Chastel, son of Jean.
3- A escapee hyena, specifically a striped hyena. Some documents of the time indicates that a hyena of this subspecies was indeed killed in Gevaudan but in 1766 (a year before the wolfdog death by Jean). Different of the lion and the wolfdog mentioned above, it's likely that the striped hyena don't took any major role in the attacks, and preffered to feed on the victims's bodies and livestock such hens, turkeys even sheep and goats.
Dom prounouncing those names in French was excellent! They speak more through the nose too a little, but all the silent letters and genders were good 👍
Fantastic episode as always! It’s funny, when I saw the topic of this episode I had planned on recommending an episode on the man eaters of Tsavo, although you guys are clearly already familiar with that story haha.
For anyone interested in that story, Bob Gymlan has a great video telling it in detail
"The Ghost & the Darkness" tells the story pretty well.
From the behavior it made me think of the stories I’ve heard of man eater tigers, who eat mainly humans due to being injured or having a grudge. Descriptions do match lions more. I don’t personally know much about lion man eaters.
Really fun episode
Thank you
Hi Jimmy,
One question I have that I dont think you addressed regarding your ultimate hypothesis of a lion is the stench that seems to have been brought up often. Are lions known to be particularly smelly?
Thank you!
Fascinating
I love this topic. Regarding the lion theory, at what point in history did it become common knowledge that female lions don't have manes?Although as you say it wasn't necessarily female, it is a good barometer of whether an average French peasant of the mid 18th century knew anything about them other than stained glass images in churches. If they knew this, then that seems to diminish the lion theory somewhat.
History Dose has a great documentary on this too!
There was great French film in the early 2000’s staring *Vincent Cassel!* 💯🎬👌🏽
Might I suggest that the lion was not the modern day sub-Saharan lion (Panthera Leo), but the now extinct (as of the 20th century) Barbary lion (Panthera Leo Leo)? Their fur patterns could more easily be mistaken as a stripe. They were also larger and located in North Africa on the Barbary coast and thus an exotic animal might well have come from there and escaped. Just a thought!
@Jimmy Akin really want to hear your take on Paul Thigpen's talk released today on the SOL foundation channel. That's the organization with David Grusch and Gary Nolan. Thigpen apparently talking about Catholic theology and how it relates to UAPand government disclosure, etc. Haven't watched it yet but rushed over to share with you!
czcams.com/video/AlMQf0ydV20/video.htmlsi=N9POrL_fZlUeOQqf
There was a movie around the early 2,000s entirled 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' that I believe was based on this story.
Anyone else find themselves singing “Kill the beast” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast while listening to this?
1:27:05 I think it was an alien since it was not a demon.
It could easily have been a wolf-dog hybrid with a mutation, right?
Scary
Ah, fuel for my next d&d campaign!
Dogman Werewolf > 23:55
Clearly a case of Bovine Intervention, and I ain't lyin' 🐮
I'd hazard that it was an escaped tiger from the king's zoo. A diplomatic gift from India or the British that escaped. It checks all the boxes really.
It sounds like a hyena. Perhaps someone brought home a wild animal from another far away region. Then the beast escaped and started attacking people.
The Beast went after teenagers? High school teacher run amuck. I can relate...
partial to the lion theory
❤️
1:01:00 I have another proposal: the fact that dogs have an intrinsic trust for human beings raises the probability of a dog or dog hybrid developing a preference on praying on humans. Before I explain why, consider homosexuality. It's a tendency that is diametrically opposed to the evolutionary interests of any human being, yet it exists. That's because necessarily homo sapiens needs to have in its genes the information concerning primary and secondary sexual characteristics for both sexes, or at least a sketch we can easily fill in with our thinking skills, that's why healthy men find women attractive, even if they've never seen one, and vice versa.
So for wolves, they probably aren't specifically scared of us, they have a generalized skill to measure how strong an opponent is, and we look strong to them, so they shy away. Dogs on the other hand need to have been given through artificial selection a sketch of what a human is, and also the instinct to be friendly to whatever fits that sketch.
Here's the simple model I'd propose: imagine the brain of a healthy adult mammal has some data, sorted in different "files". For dogs they have the file for human, and for men there's the files for men and women. Then, there's a relationship that they need to have to that file, stored in a different way, which is both influenced innately (through evolution) and by experience. We observe in humans a "flip" of the natural attitude towards those file, kind of like a computer bit-flip in a pointer that directs the code to a certain file.
The beast could have been a dogwolf that had mutated to flip its attitude towards humans, or simply to more strongly associate it to the behaviour of "hunt it!" than regular prey animals.
Evidence against this theory is that as far as I know it's not known that dogs are born that have a specific bloodlust for humans, but I just thought you might find this idea interesting!
The fossa got out of the zoo and looked for humans to feed him and disappeared.
Hey Jimmy I have a question that I would love you to tackle and I know this isn’t the place for it but I really don’t know how else to contact you.
In light of the ossuary of James the Just (granting it is authentic) it would seem that James would have to be Jesus’s stepbrother and not cousin. This confuses me because in Mark 6:3 we see James and Jose’s called his brothers and in Mark 15:40 we see a woman named Mary identified as the mother of James and Joses. Assuming that Mark didn’t blunder by identifying the Virgin Mary by a title other than “the mother of Jesus” this is a different person from the mother of Jesus. So from those parts of Mark we see James the lesser is called Jesus’s brother but we see he has a different mother.
I’m not saying they are children of the virgin Mary either because that is also ruled out by them having a different mother.
Would this not mean that the step brother theory doesn’t work either because it relies on the mother of James to be deceased?
What are the solutions to the problem if the ossuary is authentic?
I thought it was an alien
or
a demon
Or maybe the number of teenagers outside was more due to their age and duties on a farm. Sounds like a bear.
51:15 かわいい！
Varying descriptions of color.
First!!!
How about bearded lizards?😁
sounds like a hyena
Sorry Mr. Akin . BUT LOUIS XV WAS NOT THE SON OF LOUIS XIV BUT THE GREAT GRAND SON OF LOUIS XIV. Humbly accept my remark.
It is idiotic to claim that you deal with subjects from the angles of faith and reason. Faith and reason are mutually exclusive. And you cannot honestly deal with this subject without pussyfooting around the bloody details.
Just because you misdefine "faith" (I think that's a safe assumption) doesn't mean it is mutually exclusive with reason. Reason itself can demonstrate God's existence and the reasonableness of believing He revealed Himself. Reason itself presumes our physical brains can actually perceive and reason to truths and that fundamental principles of logic exist and have meaning.
Not all male lions have manes......