In Bedburg, Germany, Peter Stumpp was executed after a sensational trial in which he confessed, likely under torture, to being a werewolf who had murdered and devoured numerous victims over twenty-five years. The trial produced a lurid pamphlet that circulated widely across Europe, depicting Stumpp with a wolf's head strapped to his body on the breaking wheel. The case combined folk belief in lycanthropy with the witch-hunting hysteria of the period.

The Stumpp case fed the European literary tradition of the werewolf, influencing Gothic poetry and fiction from the Romantic period onward. The pamphlet literature surrounding the trial represents a precursor to sensationalist journalism, and poets from Coleridge to the German Romanticists drew on werewolf trials as symbols of suppressed human violence and the thin boundary between civilization and bestiality.