In the year 1692, an 86-year-old man who lived in the town of Mālpils in Latvia stood before a judge and calmly proclaimed that he was a werewolf working for the benefit of the community. The man, known as Thiess of Kaltenbrun, made a series of curious statements during his testimony, describing not only the habits of werewolves but also offering a vivid account of Hell.
Thiess’s confession, preserved in the transcripts of the court proceedings, has long struck researchers as highly unusual. Bruce Lincoln, who translated the trial record from German into English, has described it as “one of the best surviving pieces of evidence for a werewolf’s self-understanding.”
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The story of Thiess of Kaltenbrun begins a year earlier, when the judges of Jürgensburg, a town in Swedish Livonia, summoned him as a witness in a case concerning a church robbery. They were aware that local people regarded him as a werewolf who had consorted with the Devil, but at first they showed little interest in such allegations, which had no bearing on the matter before them. Nevertheless, Thiess himself volunteered the information. He freely admitted that he had once been a werewolf, though he insisted he had given it up ten years earlier.
He went on to recount an incident from 1681, when he had previously appeared in court after accusing a farmer from Lemburg of breaking his nose. According to the story he told at the time, he had descended into Hell in the form of a wolf, where the farmer, whom he described as a practising witch, had struck him across the face with a broomstick decorated with horses’ tails. The judges then had dismissed his account with laughter, though one of them did verify that his nose had indeed been broken.
On this occasion, however, the judges of Jürgensburg decided to take his claims with greater seriousness. Seeking to determine whether he was mad or of sound mind, they questioned several people in court who knew him. These witnesses testified that, so far as they could tell, Thiess was perfectly rational.
Thiess of Kaltenbrun claimed that on the night of St. Lucia’s Day, and often also on the nights of Pentecost and St. John’s Day, he and other werewolves left their human bodies and took on the form of wolves. When pressed on how this transformation occurred, he at first explained that they donned wolves’ pelts. He even claimed to have obtained his own from a farmer in Marienburg, though he added that he had passed it on to someone else years earlier. When the judges asked him to name these individuals, however, he altered his account, saying instead that he and the others went into the bushes, undressed, and then transformed.
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Once changed, Thiess said, they roamed the countryside, descending on farms and tearing apart livestock wherever they found it. The meat, he added, they did not eat raw. Rather, they roasted it before consuming it. When the judges asked how wolves could manage such a task, Thiess clarified that at this stage they had resumed human form. They seasoned their food with salt, he said, though they never had any bread to accompany it.
He also described how he had first acquired the ability. In his telling, he had once been a beggar when a “rascal” drank a toast to him, thereby passing on the power to become a werewolf. The same gift, he explained, could be transferred to another. One had only to breathe into a jug three times, offer it with the words, “It will be for you as it was for me,” and persuade the other person to drink. Yet Thiess claimed that he had never succeeded in finding anyone willing to take on the role from him.
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Thiess went on to describe how the werewolves journeyed to Hell, which he located “at the end of the lake called Puer Esser, in a swamp below Lemburg, about half a mile from Klingenberg.” Ordinary people, he explained, could not perceive this place, for “it’s not on top but under the earth, and the entrance is protected by a gate that no one can find, except someone who belongs inside.” Once there, the werewolves fought both the Devil and the witches who served him, beating them with long iron rods and driving them off like dogs. Thiess insisted that the werewolves “cannot tolerate the Devil,” describing them instead as “God’s hounds”
When the judges of Jürgensburg asked why they would willingly descend into Hell if they so despised the Devil, he responded by telling them that he and his companions undertook these journeys to recover livestock, grain, and fruits of the earth that witches had stolen. If they failed in this task, the harvest would suffer. He recounted that only the previous year he had made such a journey, returning with as much barley, oats, and rye as he could carry in order to ensure abundance.
At this point, the judges noted a contradiction. Thiess had earlier claimed to have abandoned his life as a werewolf ten years before, yet now he admitted to having travelled to Hell in that very form just a year earlier. Confronted with the inconsistency, Thiess conceded that his earlier statement had been false.
The judges of Jürgensburg then asked Thiess what became of the souls of werewolves after death. He replied that they went to Heaven, while the souls of witches were consigned to Hell. The judges then questioned this, asking how it was possible for the werewolves' souls to go to Heaven if they were the servants of the Devil. Once more, Thiess reiterated that the werewolves were not servants of the Devil, but of God, and that they undertook their nocturnal journeys to Hell for the good of mankind.
Despite this insistence, his testimony raised doubts about his religious orthodoxy. The judges began to question whether he was a devout adherent of Lutheranism. They asked if he attended church, listened to sermons, prayed regularly, and took part in the Lord’s Supper. Thiess admitted that he did none of these things, explaining simply that he was too old to understand them.
It later emerged that, aside from his claims of nocturnal journeys, Thiess practised forms of folk magic within his community. He acted as a healer and charmer, blessing grain and horses and employing incantations to ward off wolves and to stop bleeding. These activities, though not uncommon in rural society, further complicated the judges’ efforts to determine whether he was a harmless eccentric, a pious visionary, or something more troubling.
At the end of the trail, the court decided that the accused was involved in acts that was unbecoming of Christians. The judges announced that “nor did he uphold the vow he previously swore to the local Herr Pastor, nor did he listen to the Holy Word, nor did he present himself to take the Holy Sacrament. Rather, since he pronounced all sorts of prophecies and blessings strongly forbidden by the highest divine and lay authorities, thereby powerfully sinning against himself and the others whom he led into superstition, it is fair to consider this and punish him according to the severity of the law.” In the end, he was sentenced to be flogged and banished for life.
The case of Thiess of Kaltenbrun fascinates scholars precisely because his testimony looks so implausible on the surface. What makes it valuable is not whether it is factually true, but what it reveals beneath the surface about belief, society, and legal culture in 17th-century Livonia.
Thiess’s story is strikingly unusual within the context of early modern witch trials. Instead of confessing to serving the Devil, as most accused were expected to do, he claimed that he and other werewolves were “hounds of God” who descended into Hell to fight witches and demons and recover stolen grain. This completely inverted the standard demonological framework which portrayed werewolves and witches as agents of Satan.
The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg have drawn parallels between Thiess and the benandanti folk tradition of early modern Friuli in northeastern Italy, in which local Friulians fell into trance states in which they believed that their spirits left their bodies to battle malevolent witches, in doing so protecting their crops from famine. In Ginzburg's view both the benandanti tradition and Thiess's werewolf tradition represented surviving remnants of a shamanistic substratum that had survived Christianization.
References:
# Thiess of Kaltenbrun. Wikipedia
# Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln. Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf
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