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You can find scores of people transforming into werewolves in folklore, books, and pop culture—and there have been a few cases in which real people went down in history as lycanthropes. Here are a few of them.

The only written record of the case of Peter Stubbe, a.k.a. the Werewolf of Bedburg, is a lurid pamphlet that was circulated in London in 1590. Stubbe (also spelled Stumpp or Stumpf), who “from his youth was greatly inclined to euill,” made a deal with the devil and requested specifically to “woork his mallice on men, Women, and children, in the shape of some beast, wherby he might liue without dread or danger of life, and vnknowen to be the executor of any bloody enterprise, which he meant to commit.”

The devil gave him a belt, “which being put about him, he was straight transfourmed into the likenes of a gréedy deuouring Woolf”:

“Strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkeled like vnto brandes of fire, a mouth great and wide, with most sharpe and cruell teeth, A huge body, and mightye pawes: And no sooner should he put off the same girdle, but presently he should appéere in his former shape, according to the pro∣portion of a man, as if he had neuer beene changed.”

The pamphlet pegged Stubbe as a serial killer who murdered and sometimes ate his victims over a 25-year period. He was also accused of incest with his daughter as well as killing and eating his son. (Modern historians speculate that Stubbe was railroaded for political purposes or to calm those who were terrified of the demons that were killing the townspeople.)

When he was captured, Stubbe told all about his deal with the devil and the magic belt that turned him into a wolf, confessing to murder, incest, and cannibalism. Stubbe’s execution on October 31, 1589, in Bedburg, Germany, was an exceptionally gruesome process: He was first lashed to a wheel, where the flesh was torn from his body with red-hot pincers. Next, his arms and legs were broken, his head was chopped off, and his body was burned. Stubbe’s girlfriend (a distant relative) and daughter, both accused of incest, were also tortured and burned alive. After the executions, a wolf’s body was set up in public, and its head replaced with Stubbe’s, as a warning to anyone else contemplating lycanthropy.

What we know about Jacques Roulet, called the Werewolf of Angers or the Werewolf of Caud (after two French towns), comes from an 1865 account by the antiquarian writer Sabine Baring-Gould. In 1598, the mutilated body of a teenage boy was discovered in the woods, and wolves were spotted nearby. Not far away, Roulet was found wounded and half-naked. After he was arrested and confessed to the murder, Roulet revealed that he was given a salve that transformed him into a wolf. The boy wasn’t even his first kill, he said—he had murdered and eaten others.

Unlike in other cases, there appears to be no clear record of Roulet having been tortured into making a confession, and he did not confess to making a deal with the devil. Roulet was sentenced to death for murder, lycanthropy, and cannibalism, but after an appeal he was judged mentally ill or and instead committed to an asylum and religious education for two years.

About 1572, in the town of Dole, France, several children went missing and were later found torn apart in the woods. That autumn, townspeople were charged with finding the werewolf responsible. In November, a hunting group witnessed a wild animal attack on a child, and someone recognized that the beast had features that resembled the local hermit, Gilles Garnier.

A week later, when another child disappeared, Garnier and his wife were arrested. Fifty witnesses testified against Garnier, and he was put on the rack. He confessed to being a lycanthrope and to hunting, killing, and eating children who ventured into the woods, saying that he shared the meat with his wife. In January 1573, Garnier was burned at the stake. Modern speculation is that Garnier was guilty of murder and cannibalism (he likely found children easier to catch than wildlife), but the werewolf confession is attributed to either mental illness or torture.

The Werewolves of Poligny were three men accused of lycanthropy in France in 1521. A traveler who had been attacked by a wolf tracked the injured animal to Michel Verdun’s house, where Verdun was found dripping blood. He was arrested and, under torture, confessed to being a werewolf and implicated Pierre Bourgot and Philibert Montot. Bourgot in turn confessed, and told a tale of making a deal with three mysterious men, dressed in black, to protect his sheep. Bourgot said he only found out later that the deal entailed renouncing God and his baptism. Bourgot said in the years that followed that Michael Verdun gave him an ointment that turned him into a wolf, and together they killed at least two children. It’s not clear whether Philibert Montot ever confessed, but he was executed along with the other two accused werewolves.

One notorious werewolf case involved an actual wolf. In 1685, the principality of Ansbach (now a district in Germany) was part of the Holy Roman Empire. It was plagued by a wolf that preyed on livestock—and eventually moved on to eating people. The citizens thought they were being terrorized by a werewolf, and they believed they knew exactly who it was: Their unnamed, hated (and dead) mayor, who had returned to the world of the living in the guise of a wolf.

A hunting party with dogs drove the wolf into a well, where it was killed. Still believing it was a werewolf, the citizens chopped off the wolf’s nose, dressed it in a man’s clothing, added a human mask, and hung the body from a pole. The carcass was later installed in a local museum.

Vseslav was the ruler of Polotsk, a region that is now part of Belarus, from 1044 to 1101 CE. History records him as a strong leader and warrior, but he was also said to be a sorcerer. (In fact, in Russian literature, he’s called Vseslav the Sorcerer.) Soon after his death, he was named a werewolf in folktales; this reputation was recorded in the Old Slavic poem “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” in which the prince was said to race from town to town as a wolf.

Dozens of people were accused of supernatural crimes in a series of witch and werewolf trials that took place in 17th-century Estonia. One 18-year-old citizen named Hans was convicted of both lycanthropy and witchcraft. Though he denied making a pact with the devil, Hans admitted that he had been a werewolf for two years, and had become one of the beasts after he was bitten by a man dressed in black who was, of course, a werewolf himself. The court decided Hans must have made a satanic deal, which made him guilty of witchcraft as well. The teenager was put to death.

A version of this story was published in 2011; it has been updated for 2023.

Democracy is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor—and neither is its essential mechanism, the free and fair election. Read on to learn more about how people around the world—and how some people who are currently out of this world—vote when Election Day rolls around.

Voters in the U.S. may head to the polls on Tuesdays, but the rest of the world prefers to save its votes for Sunday. Interestingly, countries in which English is the primary language tend to be the exception to this rule; in Canada, citizens vote on Mondays, while British citizens vote on Thursdays, and Australians and New Zealanders on Saturdays.

The American vote wasn’t always limited to Tuesdays by law; instead, it’s a holdover from the 19th century, when farmers often had to travel long distances to their polling stations, and needed enough time to make it back home for market day on Wednesday.

India is home to nearly 100 million eligible voters, which makes it the world’s largest democracy. In order to accommodate an electorate of that size, the government holds elections over the course of weeks or even months. The last major general election in 2019, in which Indians voted for the 543 members of its parliament, took place seven phases over five weeks.

People in France and Sweden don’t need to worry about making time to register ahead of Election Day. The government automatically registers voters when they’re eligible—in France, that’s as soon as people turn 18. Sweden relies on tax registries to create lists of eligible citizens.

Every Australian over 18 is required by law to register to vote and to participate in federal elections [PDF]. Anyone who doesn’t show up on Election Day is fined AU$20 ($13 in U.S. dollars). Failure to pay that fine results in even steeper penalties and can result in civil charges.

Since 1988, Brazilian citizens have had the right to vote at age 16. (Voting is required for almost everyone between the ages of 18 and 69, and anyone who doesn’t vote is subject to a fine.) Those who are 16 and 17 are also eligible to vote in Austria, Nicaragua, and Argentina, and 17-year-olds can cast votes in Indonesia and Sudan. Select states in Germany have given 16-year-olds the vote in local and statewide elections, and in 2014, for the first time ever, Scottish teens aged 16 and 17 were allowed to vote on a referendum (16-year-olds can now vote in all Scottish Parliament elections).

Studies of elections in which 16- and 17-year-olds can participate have shown that giving young people the ability to vote may translate into a more engaged citizenry as those voters grow older. What’s more, teens who choose to participate in elections are often as well informed about the candidates and the issues as their older counterparts.

Since 2005, Estonians have had the ability to vote online instead of waiting in line at their local polling stations. Although in-person voting is still more popular, in the 2023 parliamentary election, more than half of those voting took advantage of the online voting system. The Estonian system is workable because every citizen receives a scannable ID card and PIN, which he or she can use to fulfill a number of civic responsibilities, from filing taxes to paying library fines. (Although an Estonian’s ID card and PIN are used to confirm his or her identity on Election Day, the vote itself is encrypted, rendering it anonymous.)

According to the Pew Research Center, 62.8 percent of eligible voters (and 94.1 percent of registered voters) performed their civic duty during United States’s 2020 election cycle. That’s an improvement from 57.2 percent of eligible people voting in the 2012 election, but recent turnout still ranks lower than in other developed nations, including Sweden (80.3 percent), South Korea (76.7 percent), and Iceland (75.8).

Beginning in 1930, when women were given the right to vote in local elections, men and women in Chile headed to separate polling locations. That year, a separate registry was created to accommodate newly registered female voters, who were still prohibited from voting in national elections. The custom of separating men and women on election day persisted even after suffrage was granted in nationwide elections (and the country’s voting registries were combined) in 1949. Sixty-three years later, the government decided that voting doesn’t have to be segregated by gender; however, separate voting is still widely practiced.

But they’re far from democratic. Although 99.7 percent of the electorate participated in the 2015 local elections, citizens didn’t have much of a choice when it came to choosing whom they wanted to endorse. Everyone on the ballot was selected ahead of time by North Korea’s ruling party; to vote, North Koreans simply had to drop a printout of the names in a box to indicate their support. A separate box was present at polling locations, which voters could use to register their rejection of the given candidates. However, all of the candidates chosen received 100 percent of the vote—which means either no one opted to dissent, or if they did, their votes weren’t counted.

There’s no law in the United Kingdom barring King Charles III from participating in elections. But his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, rarely voted so as to appear as objective as possible. During Britain’s contentious and controversial Brexit referendum in 2016, a Buckingham Palace spokesman told reporters, “It’s very clearly the convention here, that the queen is above politics … it’s a convention that the royal family do not vote in general elections, and this is very much an extension of that convention.”

In Gambia, citizens cast their votes by dropping marbles into color-coded metal drums with pictures of the candidates. Each drum is rigged with a bell, which the marble dings after it’s dropped in. (If the bell rings more than once, poll workers know someone has broken the rules.)

That’s because media (or social media) coverage of anything that could influence the outcome is illegal before 7 p.m. on Election Day. According to one report, “Talking heads on television can’t mention something as mundane as a candidate’s attire, much less who might win. Political parties are even directed by authorities to ‘unpublish their [social media] pages.’” Anyone in violation of the restriction on Election Day chatter faces a fine of up to NZ$20,000 (nearly $12,000 in U.S. dollars).

American astronauts aboard the International Space Station have had the ability to vote since 1997, when Texas lawmakers passed a measure that allowed secure ballots to be sent to space by Mission Control in Houston, Texas. Once astronauts make their selections, their ballots—PDFs of the paper ballots they’d receive in the mail—are beamed back down to Earth, where clerks open the encoded documents and submit a hard copy of the astronaut’s ballot to be counted.

In the tiny European country of Liechtenstein (population: 40,000) citizens vote for politicians, referenda, and whether to grant citizenship to those who have applied after residing in the principality for 10 or more years.

In the days leading up to a 1967 mayoral election in Ecuador, a company ran election-themed ads, suggesting consumers vote for its popular brand of foot powder “if they want well-being and hygiene.” The foot powder won, thanks to the large volume of write-in votes it received.

A version of this story was published in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.