In a Galicia of harsh roads, scattered villages and nights where superstition still carried more authority than most institutions, a story began to take shape that seemed impossible: a small, unassuming travelling salesman who could persuade poor women to leave their homes, who vanished with them down lonely roads, and who always came back alone.
He said he brought news. He said he knew where they were. He said they had found work. He said a great many things.
Too many.
Case File
His name was Manuel Blanco Romasanta, though history remembers him by another: the Werewolf of Allariz. The nickname sounds lifted from folklore, the kind of tale told by the fire to keep children from wandering too far from the village. But what unsettles about the Romasanta case is not the myth. It is precisely the opposite: beneath the skin of the lobishome there was a real criminal file, real testimonies, real victims, and a nineteenth-century justice system trying to decide whether it was facing a murderer, a sick man, or something that should not exist.
Romasanta was born in Galicia in the early 1800s, into a rural world where poverty was not a circumstance but almost a season of the year. He worked as a weaver and travelling peddler. That occupation mattered: it let him move freely, learn the back roads, come and go from villages, talk to everyone, and disappear without his absence raising any alarm.
He was not the physical monster the nickname might suggest. Contemporary accounts describe a short man — barely over four foot three — with an unthreatening, even mild appearance. And there lies one of the keys to the case: he never needed force from the outset. Persuasion was enough.
His victims were mostly women and children from vulnerable backgrounds. Romasanta earned their trust with promises of work, travel and better prospects. He offered to place them as servants in wealthy households. He played the protector, the go-between, the bearer of good news.
The method attributed to him had a chilling coldness. First he would approach. Then he would persuade. Then he would walk the victim down some isolated road. And finally, the person would vanish.
The terrible thing is that, for a time, disappearance did not automatically read as crime. In the poverty of nineteenth-century Galicia, people left. There were servants, day labourers, women seeking employment, families on the move out of sheer necessity. Absence could easily be mistaken for fate. And in a country with no fast communications, no forensic science and none of the modern machinery of investigation, that confusion was the perfect hiding place.
Then the suspicions began. Too many people had vanished near Romasanta. Too many explanations came out of his mouth. Too many roads led back to him.
He was arrested in 1852 in Nombela, in the province of Toledo, where he was living under a false identity. The judicial case file, preserved in the Historical Archive of the Kingdom of Galicia, runs to more than two thousand handwritten pages. Its opening line still chills the blood: "Formal proceedings against the werewolf Manuel Blanco, for several murders."
The story already had every ingredient needed to devour public attention: a travelling salesman, missing women, human fat allegedly sold as tallow in local markets, terrified villages, and a defendant who, once he began to speak, offered no ordinary defence.
He offered a monster.
Romasanta claimed he suffered a curse. According to his own account, he transformed into a wolf for three consecutive nights, and in that form he attacked and devoured his victims. The word hanging over the entire trial was lycanthropy.
Today that defence can be read in several ways. As superstition. As strategy. As delusion. As a desperate attempt to shift responsibility onto an outside force. Or as some mixture of all of the above, because human nature has that miserable habit of refusing to arrive in neatly labelled categories.
In the mid-nineteenth century, however, the idea was not pure folklore. Clinical lycanthropy — the genuine, documented belief that one transforms into an animal — was beginning to surface as an uncomfortable medical question. The judicial debate became trapped between two worlds: what if the accused truly believed he transformed? What if he was acting under serious mental disturbance? What if he was not fully responsible for his actions? What if it was all theatre?
The press seized on the story immediately. The case travelled from local interest to national obsession, carried by all the language of a classic cause célèbre: murderer, lobishome, fat-thief, soul-snatcher. The judicial reality moved along one track; the myth ran along another. As usual, the myth ran faster.
The Romasanta case reached the courts carrying an uncomfortable question at its core: how do you try a man who claims to have killed while transformed into an animal?
The justice system did not simply accept the supernatural explanation. The judges moved between criminal responsibility, confessions, material evidence and a medico-legal debate with no clear precedent in Spanish law at the time. Spain was passing from rural superstition to the modern judicial file, from oral legend to mass press, from fear of the wolf to fear of the human killer. And as with every shift between eras, the transition was not clean. It was muddy, contradictory and loud.
First came the death sentence. Then the case took a turn that few could have predicted.
A French hypnotist known as Monsieur Philips, writing from Algiers, intervened in the case, arguing that Romasanta was not an ordinary murderer but a subject who deserved scientific study rather than execution. The petition reached the Crown. And Queen Isabella II, in a twist that reads like something invented by a feverish novelist, commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment.
A murderer who claims to be a wolf. A French hypnotist writing from North Africa. A queen intervening in the fate of the condemned. A justice system unsure whether it faces a monster, a sick man, or a fraud. None of it needed inventing. The nineteenth century came that way straight out of the factory.
The question remains open because the case allows for several readings.
One possibility is the fully conscious killer. Romasanta may have used the wolf story as a culturally effective alibi. In a society where belief in curses, lobishomes and dark forces was still very much alive, presenting himself as the victim of a transformation could sow doubt, shift the blame, and turn murder into fate.
Another possibility is a genuine mental disturbance. Some later studies have linked his case to clinical lycanthropy, a documented condition in which a person sincerely believes they are transforming into an animal. Under that reading, Romasanta would not be a calculating manipulator but someone trapped inside a delusion that the medicine of his era had no name for.
But there is a third reading, perhaps the most uncomfortable one: he may have been both at once. A man capable of killing, and also capable of wrapping himself in a delusional or theatrical explanation. The criminal mind rarely hands over its keys on a silver tray. It tends to throw them down a well, and then charges admission to look inside.
This is worth pausing on. Because every famous case runs the risk of swallowing its own victims. And in the Romasanta case, the werewolf myth is so powerful it can turn real suffering into gothic stage dressing.
The victims were not minor characters in a legend. They were women and children from poor backgrounds, people with little social protection and even less public voice. That vulnerability was not incidental. Romasanta does not appear as a predator who struck at random. He appears as someone who understood, very precisely, where to look: wherever a disappearance might be explained away late, badly, or never at all.
The story of the Werewolf of Allariz is not frightening because a man claimed to turn into a wolf.
It is frightening because perhaps he never needed to turn into anything.
Romasanta belongs to a decisive moment in the history of crime reporting. The nineteenth-century press discovered that crime sold newspapers. Readers wanted detail, names, monsters, explanations. They wanted horror, but also order. They wanted to peer into the abyss with the comfort of closing the paper afterwards. A very human habit: watching someone else's blood while the coffee is still warm.
The case offered all of it. Rural mystery, courtroom drama, confession, medicine, religion, a queen, hypnosis, a commuted death sentence, and an unforgettable nickname. That is why it survived — not only in archives, but in books, films, documentaries and popular memory.
But beyond the spectacle, the Romasanta case speaks to things that are still very much alive. It speaks to how a society explains the incomprehensible with whatever tools it has at hand. It speaks to how predators exploit trust, poverty and the invisibility of their victims. It speaks to the blurred line between criminal responsibility, mental illness and manipulation. And above all, it speaks to our enduring need to put a face on evil.
In the nineteenth century, that face belonged to a wolf. Today we would use different names, different diagnoses, different headlines. But the unease would be exactly the same.
Romasanta died in prison, though even his final days are surrounded by conflicting accounts. Some sources place his death in the Ceuta prison, taken not by anything dramatic but by an ordinary illness, after the death sentence had been commuted. As a narrative ending, it is not a bad one: the man who claimed to be a wolf was undone not by a silver bullet, nor by a torch-bearing mob, but by something far more mundane. Reality has that kind of irony. Rarely elegant, but reliably effective.
On one side of his story stands the village, the ancestral fear, the curses and the dark roads. On the other, the courtroom, the press, forensic medicine and a state trying to impose a rational explanation. In the middle stood Manuel Blanco Romasanta.
Perhaps he lied. Perhaps he believed it. Perhaps he understood, better than anyone, that in a land full of imaginary wolves, the safest hiding place for a murderer was to become one of them.
But the truly terrible thing about this case is not the possibility that a man believed himself a wolf.
The terrible thing is that, for far too long, others believed that was all he was.