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Bonus Feature: The Notes of Gerhard Fluchvater (redacted for public safety)

These are the notes transcribed by Gerhard Fluchvater from the typewriter ribbon he smuggled out of the laboratory where he worked during the Great War.  They have been translated from their original 1916 text, and have been redacted for public safety.  

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Report on the Laboratory Culture of Microorganism #919: Viral Lupus Noctu

(Names of the researchers redacted)

History

For centuries, accounts of individuals who transform into a cryptid wolflike state under the conditions of a full moon have been passed down through generations. These stories appear to have originated in the rural communities living in the mountainous region that comprises the Grand Duchy of Baden, the Kingdom of Württemberg, and the province of Hohenzollern of the Kingdom of Prussia, commonly referred to as the Black Forest. This phenomenon has been reported as far away as Stuttgart and as far south as Zürich, Switzerland.

The reports of such happenings are recorded by the Romans who held the area as early as 100 AD, and continue through the Alemanni and Frankish holdings in the subsequent centuries. Later, after the formation of the Holy Roman Empire, such occurrences continued. Church documents discuss the metamorphosis of certain individuals from the Black Forest region within the framework of demonic possession, and even allude to these individuals being put to death when exorcism proved useless. Interesting to note is that in the late 1700s, many of the region's butchers emigrated to the UK, ostensibly for better economic reasons. However, records indicate that it was due to a mysterious slaughtering of livestock, the resulting shortages of which made plying their trade impossible. Further panic over what locals named die Wolfsmenschen (the wolf-people) caused a significant number of natives to emigrate to the United States.

Research History

In 1893, the Medical Faculty of the [name redacted] appointed Dr. [name redacted] to perform the postmortem examination of three individuals known to be afflicted with this mysterious condition. His clinical notes reveal confounding results. The individuals – two men, ages 22 and 41, and a female aged 16 – presented similarly in the following way:

Each resembled a deceased human; none bore any resemblance to the consistent descriptions given by witnesses as being large, darkly colored, with prominent teeth, claws, and yellow eyes

Each was covered in stale blood which had a pungent odor of decay and ammonia

Each body wore shredded or stretched remnants of undergarments

Each was killed in similar ways; the older of the two men and the female were shot with bullets made with silver, the younger man stabbed through the heart with the silver tip of a walking stick.

Dr. [name redacted] cast doubt on the veracity of the claims, citing that never once had he examined a dead Wolfsmensch, only dead humans who appeared to be killed in ways consistent with the cautionary teachings of local folklore. This, and more specifically, he doubted the identity of the older male, as this individual was known to have lost a thumb in a lumber milling accident and his supposed corpse clearly had two. The ultimate conclusion of Dr. [name redacted]'s examination was that the individuals died as a result of widespread shared hysteria among the superstitious and uneducated rural community in which they resided. Yet, reports of Wolfsmenschen continued.

In 1904, Dr. [name redacted]'s work came under scrutiny by the Prussian government after a prison worker in [location redacted] named [name redacted] photographed a prisoner thought to be criminally insane after claiming to be able to transform into a monster. The photographic prints clearly illustrate a living creature consistent with the descriptions given in folk legend and by the residents of the Black Forest. The prints and glass plate negatives in [name redacted]'s possession were confiscated by the War Office and submitted to the [name redacted] Laboratory for further research. The prints appear to be genuine and clearly depict the transformation of a human male into an unidentified species.