Creature record / 1685
Franconia. 1685. A wolf was loose in the Principality of Ansbach. First it took livestock. Then it took children. The people did not believe it was a natural animal. They believed it was Michael Leicht, a hated local official who had recently died. He was said to have been seen at his own funeral. A flyer showed him as a wolf in a white-linen shroud, returning to his old home. In October the wolf was killed in a well at Neuses. What followed was stranger still. Its body was dressed in men's clothing, given a mask, a wig and a beard, and hanged on a gallows outside Ansbach. Printers made broadsheets of it. They survive.
The Principality of Ansbach, also called Onolzbach, lay in Franconia, inside the Holy Roman Empire. The Thirty Years' War had ended in 1648. In its wake, forests regrew and wolves multiplied. That is the picture later drawn from Georg Meister's work on the future of the forest.