Trevor Collins

Right.

Torture is not a great way to get truth out of anybody.

It's a good way to get what you want to hear out of somebody, though.

Naturally, historians believe that a lot of these people who confessed were either confessing truly because of torture, maybe didn't even know what they were agreeing to simply to avoid pain and what have you, or themselves might have been suffering from delusions.

It's really hard to bucket everybody.

True.

Yeah, you don't know someone suffering from like a, you know, sickness, mental illness, disability, things like that.

And then you just start putting these slapstick labels on.

Yeah, I'm going to talk about two cases, which will kind of give us a little bit more context, the second of which is quite long.

There's a quite a bit of things to discuss within that one.

And what's so interesting about that one is it also opens up the door to a true crime theory of a possible serial killer or some sort of extended 25 years of violence.

It is absolutely wild.

And obviously this then gets stirred up in the mix of the Europe witch trials, but

It is very, very interesting.

But first, let's talk about 1521, in which two French shepherds, you have Pierre Bergaux and Michel Verdun, who were part of the first French werewolf trials.

So we're talking turn of the century, literally 500 years ago.

Mm-hmm.

The two men did confess to making a pact with the devil in exchange for food.

They claimed that they met with a man dressed in black who gave them an ointment and when using that ointment they would turn into werewolves.

They confessed to attending midnight witch gatherings and hunting and eating children.