MANUEL BLANCO ROMASANTA The Werewolf of Allariz Spain.
The real story of a serial killer.
Do you think there can be a Werewolf?
If you think it's silly, this story may make you think differently.
Myths and legends for centuries have ensured that monsters do exist. From time immemorial the myth of the Werewolf has terrorized generations of people, with Vampires. Their eternal rivals
But ... what would you think?
If I tell you that in Spain, very close to Galicia, the evidence of a serial killer who was tried as a real Werewolf is documented.
Manuel Blanco Romasanta, the most famous peddler and merchant in the Spanish region of the forests of Ourense, would eventually become a case of medical lycanthropy and, in turn, the first sequential murderer of the Iberian Peninsula.
This man born in Ergos was the seventh son of a marriage already quite old. According to legend, this boy was born in 1809 feet first on a stormy full moon night, so the customs of the town of those years were immediately branded as being marked by bad luck.
This would not be unreal, at 22 this boy would marry a young neighbor who would die shortly after. Romasanta was one of the few in her locality to go to school and learn to read and write.
Saying that he was a man is still in doubt, since his birth certificate reflects him as "Manuela", that is to say, female. But apparently it is not until the age of 8 that his parents begin to treat him as male. Some forensics have conducted studies in this regard, concluding that Romasanta may have suffered from hermaphroditism, an unknown medical condition at the time, and that, as is known, it gives the individual female sexual organs with hormones and male conditions.
No one could predict the wickedness of that little brown-haired man who was only 1.40 cm tall. In the beginning he worked as a tailor, and after the death of his wife he fled his past by practicing on the roads as a peddler, which allowed him to know the roads and forests in detail.
His first murder is believed to have been in 1844, when he was accused of cold-blooded killing Vicente Fernandez, a León bailiff to whom he owed a considerable debt. On that occasion, he was legally accused, sentenced to 10 years in prison that he never paid, because he managed to flee to the border with Portugal before he was arrested.
According to Romasanta himself in his police confession, which currently rests in the historical archive of Galicia, after this murder the curse that his mother-in-law had given him began to take effect on him, who also accused him of having caused the death of his wife. This curse would be the cause of his transformation into a Werewolf during the nights when there was a full moon, which filled his head with voices that incited him to kill and eat human flesh.
This perverse murderer would be made to confess to the brutal and bloody death of 17 women and children, in police writings the evil Werewolf recounts in horrifying detail how for months he selected his victims, convincing lonely women that he could get him a good I work in the Capital as a servant of a Bishop thanks to his commercial influences.
The supposed lycanthrope convinced the girls to sell all their belongings to pay for the trip to the capital. He offered to take them as part of his trade trips, once underway he would detour along lonely roads in the woods, arguing that they were safer and much faster, since he knew many shortcuts.
When night came, supposedly by the influence of the moon, he was endowed with a supernatural force, while at the same time it overwhelms him with a voracious hunger, making him jump on the innocent women when they were neglected, tearing the veins from his neck with his teeth to drink the falling blood, then ripping their bellies apart with his own sharp nails, while the girls are still alive raving and drowning in their own blood.
It is believed that this man devoured the entrails of his victims first and then fed on the rest of their body for days. The bones found showed bite marks and trenches made with knives when tearing the meat. Some even more gruesome versions of the story tell how he distilled all the fat from their bodies to put them in bottles, which he then sold in Portugal as essential oils for making perfumes.
Suspicions began to focus on Manuel Blanco Romasanta, the possible butter remover.
Many years passed before the people of the towns began to suspect that the unfortunate women had not reached a happy destination.
Despite the cunning murderer delivering alleged letters from the victims to their relatives written by himself, his tricks began to unravel when the police tracked down a murderer they called the butter remover, this because they had been discovered in certain warehouses. Of soaps, oils sold as raw materials that were really of human origin, by that time the police presumed that the murderer had claimed 6 fatalities, completely ignoring the entire ruse that the skilled peddler Romasanta had maintained for years with the women of the remote villages.
The relatives of the disappeared began to think that something bad had happened to those women, when the husband of one of them tried to track her down to get her children back without obtaining any results where she was supposed to have gone to work.
This information alerted the police who suspected that the shopkeeper Romasanta had much to explain. These suspicions allowed the discovery of many belongings of the victims that had been sold by the peddler in other towns.
The trail that the police followed led them to determine that were passed, Manuel Romasanta, many women and children disappeared and died in strange circumstances.
Finally, in July 1852, Manuel Blanco Romasanta was arrested in Toledo, in the trial he was charged with the death of at least 17 women and children, of which he only admitted to having eaten 9 people, supposedly in his phase as a werewolf.
In his account to justice, the prisoner argued that he was the victim of a curse that transformed him into a giant beast thirsty for human blood. He claimed to have first transformed in the Couso Mountains, where according to him, he encountered two other large animals of the same kind with the same curse, he says they stared at him as he convulsed and writhed on the ground until he completely transformed into a 4-legged animal to roam with them for about 5 days hunting and killing in the forests.
Judicial Romasanta's case added a police file of more than 2,000 pages for a trial lasting more than a year, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment that can still be read in the historical archive of Galicia. Until the end of his days Romasanta assured that there were 2 other werewolves just like him named Antonio and Don Genaro who supposedly lived in Valencia, and were responsible for the other deaths, however, the police could never locate or catch these characters.
Little more than a century and a half have passed since those events, and despite the time, when walking through the forests of Galicia people still feel the threat of the myth of the Werewolf, it may be a superstition, but there are myths that were reality and myths impossible to extinguish, this is one of them!
This is a free adaptation of the Original Legend of werewolf Manuel Blanco Romasanta by @susurrodelmisterio for read.cash
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