A werewolf in Pa.? How a stranger watching a lovely sheepherder spurred a legend

Pennsylvania is a place full of strange creatures not formally recognized by the state Game Commission.

There's the squonk , a thing so ugly it does nothing but cry. There's also the Giwoggle , which is some sort of bird-wolf-horse hybrid created by witches. And let's not forget about good old Raystown Ray .

But a girl in Northumberland County in the 19th century had an encounter with an arguably more terrifying — and certainly more widely known — kind of cryptid: A werewolf.

By many accounts, including " Monsters of Pennsylvania: Mysterious Creatures in the Keystone State (2010) ," May Paul was your average farm girl wandering the fields of Schwaben Valley looking after her flock of sheep. Then, one day, she noticed a dark man staring at her.

Some stories say how the man was a known hermit in the area. Other versions like that in " Hunting the American Werewolf: Beast Men in Wisconsin and Beyond (2006) " paint him as a total stranger. There's even another very similar story, as told by PAWilds , where the girl in question is named Elizabeth Paul and the man is her lover (archivist and curator at Duquesne University, Thomas White, believes the lover and the werewolf to be the same, although he's not entirely certain).

What remains a common thread in all the stories is this: The man was older than May. He would simply sit and watch her from afar. "Monsters of Pennsylvania" claims the two did eventually strike up a sort of friendship, but either way people in the area who caught wind of the man watching May found it a little bit weird.

On top of that, White's " Supernatural Lore of Pennsylvania: Ghosts, Monsters and Miracles (2014) " notes how the area was struggling with a wolf problem at the time: Flocks of sheep were being picked off, one by one, by a great gray beast. All but May's, that is.

Needless to say, it didn't take too long for people to suspect May's admirer of being a werewolf.

That's an interesting rumor to start, for a variety of reasons (obviously). But when it comes to paranormal legends in general, it's easy to see how certain rumors spur stories: That weird old lady living by herself becomes a witch. The site of a violent death becomes haunted.

However, in an email to PennLive, White explains that the leap from weirdo-to-werewolf wasn't that big back then. Like many things in this country, he writes in "Supernatural Lore," werewolf legends were imported to the United States via the immigrants that settled here long before the Revolutionary War.

"While shape changers have existed in the legends of most cultures around the world, our modern conception of the werewolf emerged during the Middle Ages and early modern era," White told PennLive. "Similar to witches, werewolves were thought to have made a pact with the devil or became a werewolf because of magical means, or perhaps by being a terrible person.

"It was during a time (especially after the Protestant Reformation) that theological ideas about the devil and what he could do were being refined. The idea of a man turning into a beast was viewed as a mockery of God's creation."

White adds that the resurgence of the wolf population during this era — along with religious wars and the trials of those supposedly of paranormal persuasions — didn't exactly help the case for accused werewolves like May's stranger, either.

However, the staring man's fate wasn't dealt with by an angry mob or by the end of a rope. Fed up with their sheep getting treated like a buffet, people in the area began to keep rifles at the ready in order to shoot wolves dead.

One shooter was successful. To his surprise, after he followed a blood trail the wolf left behind, he found the body of the stranger sprawled on the ground, a bullet hole in his heart.

Locals eventually called the place where the stranger died "die Woolf man's grob" — the wolfman's grave. Some swear they've seen other wolves drop by to pay their respects at the stranger's unmarked grave over the years, according to a 2023 Penn State . Others have spotted the old man's ghost, sitting silently right where he used to watch May tend to her sheep.

But unlike other legends like Pittsburgh's Green Man and the Witch of Monongahela , the origin of this one is hard to pinpoint: There are many May and Elizabeth Pauls buried around the state that were around during the time the legend took place, but linking viable candidates as being the center of the story is a difficult task due to the scantness of records and reliable information.

"We will never know what happened with May Paul and the man/werewolf," White said. "Certainly many people believed there was something to the story at the time, and something definitely unusual happened.

"Most legends have some kernel of truth or some event that spawned them. Sometimes you can figure out what that is; sometimes you can only guess."