The Beast of Veyreau: a child-killing beast on the Causse Noir

Around the year 1799. The Causse Noir in Aveyron, the old province of Rouergue. A limestone plateau of farms and hamlets around the village of Veyreau. The old Gévaudan lay close by, home of the infamous Beast of Gévaudan. Now something was taking children here. People believed that beast had come back.

The eve of Saint John. A summer day at Les Paliès. The animal appeared and seized a child, Pierre-Jean Mauri, aged 6. It carried him into the Madasse wood. He was found still quivering. Disembowelled.

The next victim was a child of Graille, tenant farmer at La Rougerie. The boy was minding oxen at the Saint-Martin fountain with his older brother. The elder tried to help. Then the beast reared up. "When the beast stood up on its hind legs, he was so frightened that he fled." A crowd searched. In the Malbouche field they found remains of limbs the animal had buried in the earth.

At La Bourjoie, Julien was knocking down walnuts. His small daughter was beneath the tree. The beast took her before his eyes. He chased it. He could not catch it. Days later she was found buried in moss. Her liver had been eaten.

A girl at Labadie survived. The animal tore a large piece of skin from her sides. Her older brother fought it off and got her into the house.

The peasants called it "a wolf but not a wolf." It was "slimmer and more willowy than a wolf," with "the head and muzzle of a large greyhound." Its howls were like the braying of a donkey. It came into villages in daylight. It passed through herds without harming them. It attacked only children, eating first the liver and then the limbs.

It moved with uncanny agility. It "was seen in one place, and four or five minutes later it was seen in another place perhaps a league away." When men shot at it, it rolled on the ground and disappeared with enormous speed. One day at noon it crossed Veyreau itself. People took it for a dog. The moment someone tried to stroke it, it vanished. After some six months or a year, it disappeared for good. No one ever learned how it ended.

Contemporaries argued over what it was. Mr Caussignac said a hyena. Mr Gaillard, curé of Saint-André, thought it a loup-cervier, a lynx. Ordinary people called it a loup-garou. A werewolf.

The story survives mainly through Casimir Fages, priest of Veyreau, who compiled a parish account around 1870, roughly 70 years after the events. It rests on oral tradition and the registers. A margin note beside Mauri's baptism entry reportedly reads "dévoré par la bête féroce." No official hunt is recorded. Historian Jean-Marc Moriceau includes the case in his catalogue of about 3,000 wolf attacks on people in France, which points to a predatory wolf, or perhaps several animals blended into one beast. Others have proposed a wolf-dog hybrid, or an escaped exotic animal.

John Knifton translated the account into English in 2016 and took the peasants at their word, suggesting an unknown wolf species. Brent Swancer's 2022 retelling added a dark coat, glowing eyes and the size of a horse, details not found in Fages's text. The Beast of Veyreau remains a grim footnote to Gévaudan. It took children for six months or a year. Then it was gone.