In the New World, werewolf legends tend to center on isolation from and rejection by humans, often with insinuations that people who become werewolves have been up to unsavory things. This doesn't happen just in Americas, either; Armenian folklore tells of women who, as a consequence of some deadly sin, suffer visitations from spirits that force them to transform into wolves and kill children. A New World example of this is the French-Canadian legend of the loup-garou, which has variations all over North America, a creature said to be created when someone refused the sacraments for a certain period of time. The loup-garou comes from France-duh-which has one of the most active werewolf traditions in Europe. French court records are full of werewolf trials, and that's not even counting the Beast of Gèvaudan, which killed as many as eighty people in the 1760s.
Loup-garou legends from precolonial Illinois say that after the initial transformation, a loup-garou was doomed to 101 nights of transformation, followed by days of melancholia and sickness. The only way to get out of the sentence early was if someone managed to draw blood from the loup-garou, and in this case, neither party involved could ever speak of the incident until the remainder of the 101 days had passed. There's even a Cajun version called a rougarou, which lives in the bayous and can transform into a kind of were-crocodile. Like the loup-garou, the rougarou is often a man transformed because of a rejection by human society, especially religious beliefs.
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Supernatural the book of monsters, demons, spirits and ghouls
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