.

FINLAND WERWOLVES

Finland teems with stories of werwolves--stories ancient and modern, for
the werwolf is said to still flourish in various parts of the country.

The property is not restricted to one sex; it is equally common to both.
Spells and various forms of exorcism are used, and certain streams are
held to be lycanthropous.

However, in Finland as in Scandinavia, it is very difficult to procure
information as to werwolves. The common peasant, who alone knows
anything about the anomaly, is withheld by superstition from even
mentioning its name; and if he mentions a werwolf at all, designates him
only as the "old one," or the "grey one," or the "great dog," feeling
that to call this terror by its true name is a sure way to exasperate
it. It is only by strategy one learns from a peasant that when a fine
young ox is found in the morning breathing hard, his hide bathed in
foam, and with every sign of fright and exhaustion, while, perhaps, only
one trifling wound is discovered on the whole body, which swells and
inflames as if poison had been infused, the animal generally dying
before night; and that when, on examination of the corpse, the
intestines are found to be torn as with the claws of a wolf, and the
whole body is in a state of inflammation, it is accounted certain that
the mischief has been caused by a werwolf.

It is thus a werwolf serves his quarry when he kills for the mere love
of killing, and not for food.

In Finland, perhaps more than in other countries, werwolves are credited
with demoniacal power, and old women who possess the property of
metamorphosing into wolves are said to be able to paralyse cattle and
children with their eyes, and to have poison in their nails, one wound
from which causes certain death.

To illustrate the foregoing I have selected an incident which happened
near Diolen, a village on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Finland, at
the distance of about a hundred wersts from the ancient city of Mawa.
Here vegetation is of a more varied and luxuriant kind than is usually
found in the Northern latitude; the oak and the bela, intermingled with
rich plots of grass, grow at the very edge of the sea--a phenomenon
accountable for by the fact that the Baltic is tideless.

For about half a werst in breadth, the shore continues a level,
luxuriant stretch, when it suddenly rises in three successive cliffs,
each about a hundred feet in height, and placed about the same space of
ha