In 1975, a 49-year-old woman was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Kentucky.

She told doctors she was transforming into a wolf.

She could feel her body changing. She saw fur growing on her hands and face. Her teeth were becoming fangs. Her face was elongating into a snout.

She dropped to all fours. She howled. She scratched at the floor. She tried to bite staff members.

When shown her reflection in a mirror, she saw a wolf staring back.

This wasn’t the Middle Ages. This wasn’t folklore or superstition.

This was a documented psychiatric case in a modern American hospital.

She wasn’t pretending. She wasn’t performing. She genuinely believed and perceived that she was turning into a wolf.

This is clinical lycanthropy—a rare psychiatric condition where patients believe they are transforming into an animal, most commonly a wolf, and experience perceptual changes that support the delusion.

Not Folklore—Medical Reality

The word “lycanthropy” comes from Greek: lykos (wolf) + anthropos (human).

In mythology and folklore, lycanthropy refers to werewolves—humans cursed to transform into wolves under a full moon.

But clinical lycanthropy is a real, documented psychiatric syndrome.

It has nothing to do with curses, full moons, or supernatural transformation.

It’s a delusion—a fixed, false belief—combined with perceptual distortions that make patients genuinely see, feel, and believe they’re becoming animals.

And it’s not limited to wolves. Documented cases include patients who believed they were transforming into:

  • Dogs
  • Cats
  • Horses
  • Birds
  • Snakes
  • Frogs
  • Bees

The animal varies, but the core experience is the same: the patient perceives their body transforming into a non-human creature.

The First Documented Modern Case

While lycanthropy beliefs have existed throughout history, the first well-documented clinical case in modern psychiatry was published in 1852.

A French farmer became convinced he was a wolf. He attacked and killed multiple people, believing he was hunting prey. He was found eating the flesh of a young girl, claiming it was his nature as a wolf.

He was institutionalized, not executed, because physicians recognized his condition as a psychiatric delusion, not demonic possession.

By the 20th century, clinical lycanthropy was recognized as a distinct psychiatric phenomenon, usually associated with psychotic disorders, severe depression, or neurological damage.

What Patients Experience

Clinical lycanthropy isn’t just a belief—it’s a multi-sensory delusion.

Patients don’t just think they’re turning into an animal. They see and feel it happening.

Visual Hallucinations

Patients see physical changes in their body:

  • Fur growing on their skin
  • Claws replacing fingernails
  • Facial structure changing (elongating snout, fangs)
  • Eyes changing color
  • Body shape morphing

When they look in a mirror, some see an animal. Others see a hybrid—part human, part animal.

Tactile Hallucinations

They feel the transformation:

  • Itching or tingling as “fur grows”
  • Sensation of their bones shifting
  • Teeth sharpening
  • Claws extending

Behavioral Changes

They act like the animal:

  • Walking on all fours
  • Howling, barking, growling
  • Attempting to hunt or stalk
  • Eating raw meat
  • Scratching, biting, or clawing

These aren’t conscious performances. Patients genuinely believe they need to move and behave like the animal they’re becoming.

Identity Shift

Some patients retain awareness that they were once human but believe they’re transforming.

Others lose human identity entirely and believe they are the animal, with no memory of being human.

Case Studies: The Medical Record

Clinical lycanthropy is rare, but dozens of cases have been documented in psychiatric literature.

Case 1: The Wolf-Woman of Kentucky (1975)

The 49-year-old woman mentioned at the beginning was hospitalized after wandering in the woods for days, acting like a wolf.

She exhibited:

  • Quadrupedal walking
  • Howling
  • Aggression toward staff
  • Belief that she had fur and fangs

She had a history of psychotic depression and drug use (LSD and other hallucinogens).

Treatment with antipsychotic medication (chlorpromazine) gradually reduced the delusion over several weeks. She eventually regained her sense of human identity.

Case 2: The Man Who Became a Dog (1989)

A 24-year-old man with no prior psychiatric history began believing he was transforming into a dog.

He barked. He refused to eat with utensils, insisting on eating from a bowl on the floor. He tried to sleep in a kennel.

He described feeling his body changing—his face stretching, his sense of smell becoming more acute, his thoughts becoming “simpler and more instinctual.”

Brain scans showed no structural abnormalities. He was diagnosed with acute psychotic episode. Antipsychotic treatment resolved the delusion within weeks.

Case 3: The Bird Delusion (1977)

A 37-year-old woman believed she was turning into a bird.

She climbed to high places and attempted to “fly” by jumping off furniture and ledges, resulting in multiple injuries.

She described feeling her arms becoming wings and her bones becoming hollow.

She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic features. Mood stabilizers and antipsychotics stopped the delusion.

Case 4: The Frog Transformation (1987)

A 26-year-old man in Iran believed he was becoming a frog.

He crouched in a squatting position for hours. He caught and ate insects. He attempted to jump long distances.

He said he could feel his skin becoming moist and cold, and his tongue elongating.

Treatment with antipsychotics resolved the delusion.

Case 5: The Snake Patient (2006)

A 32-year-old man was hospitalized after he began crawling on the ground, hissing, and refusing to stand upright.

He believed he was transforming into a snake. He said his spine was fusing, his legs were merging, and scales were forming on his skin.

He had a history of schizophrenia. Adjustment of his antipsychotic medication stopped the delusion.

The Neuroscience: Why Does This Happen?

Clinical lycanthropy is not a distinct disease—it’s a symptom that can arise from several underlying conditions:

1. Psychotic Disorders (Schizophrenia)

The most common cause. Lycanthropy can emerge during acute psychotic episodes, often involving hallucinations and delusions.

2. Bipolar Disorder with Psychotic Features

Lycanthropy can occur during severe manic or depressive episodes with psychosis.

3. Severe Depression with Psychotic Features

Some cases involve depressive delusions where patients believe they’re being punished by being turned into an animal.

4. Drug-Induced Psychosis

LSD, PCP, methamphetamine, and other hallucinogens have been linked to temporary lycanthropic delusions.

5. Brain Lesions or Neurological Damage

Rare cases involve tumors, strokes, or traumatic brain injury affecting regions involved in body perception and identity.

6. Epilepsy (Temporal Lobe Epilepsy)

Seizure activity in the temporal lobes can produce complex hallucinations, including feelings of transformation.

The Body Schema Hypothesis

One theory: lycanthropy involves disruption of the body schema—the brain’s internal map of the body.

Normally, your brain has a coherent model of your body’s shape, size, and boundaries.

In lycanthropy, this map becomes distorted. The brain generates a new body schema—one that matches an animal.

This would explain:

  • Why patients feel physical changes (their internal body map has changed)
  • Why they adopt animal postures and movements (they’re moving according to the new schema)
  • Why mirrors sometimes show animals (the brain interprets visual input through the distorted body map)

The Identity and Self-Concept Theory

Another theory: lycanthropy involves breakdown of self-concept and identity.

The brain’s sense of “who I am” becomes unstable. In trying to reconstruct identity, the brain latches onto an animal identity instead of a human one.

This may be influenced by:

  • Cultural narratives (werewolf myths, shapeshifter stories)
  • Personal associations (feeling “like a wolf” metaphorically becomes literal)
  • Symbolic expression of internal conflict (feeling “beastly,” “savage,” or “inhuman” manifests as literal transformation)

The Cultural Connection

What’s striking is that the type of animal patients transform into often reflects cultural context.

In Western countries:

  • Wolves and dogs are most common (reflecting werewolf mythology)

In areas with strong religious traditions:

  • Some patients believe they’re transforming into animals as divine punishment or demonic possession

In cultures with shapeshifter myths:

  • Patients may believe they’re transforming into culturally relevant animals (foxes in Japan, hyenas in parts of Africa)

This suggests that cultural narratives shape the content of the delusion, even though the underlying mechanism (psychotic break, body schema disruption) is neurological.

The brain doesn’t randomly pick an animal. It draws on culturally available stories and symbols.

Treatment and Prognosis

Clinical lycanthropy is treatable.

Most cases respond to:

Antipsychotic medication:

First-line treatment. Medications like risperidone, olanzapine, or haloperidol reduce psychotic symptoms, including the transformation delusion.

Mood stabilizers (if bipolar disorder is the cause):

Lithium or valproate can prevent future episodes.

Treatment of underlying neurological conditions:

If caused by brain lesions or epilepsy, treating the primary condition often resolves the lycanthropy.

Psychotherapy (after acute phase):

Cognitive-behavioral therapy can help patients process the experience and prevent relapse.

Prognosis:

Most patients recover fully with treatment. The delusion typically resolves within weeks to months.

However, if the underlying condition (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder) isn’t managed, lycanthropy can recur.

The Historical Connection

Clinical lycanthropy gives us insight into historical “werewolf” cases.

Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period, there were documented trials and executions of people accused of being werewolves.

Many of these individuals likely suffered from clinical lycanthropy or other psychotic disorders.

For example:

Peter Stumpp (Germany, 1589):

Confessed (under torture) to transforming into a wolf and killing multiple people. He was executed.

Modern analysis suggests he may have had a psychotic disorder involving lycanthropic delusions.

Jean Grenier (France, 1603):

A teenager who claimed he transformed into a wolf and attacked children. He was spared execution and instead institutionalized in a monastery.

Descriptions of his behavior suggest a psychiatric condition, possibly lycanthropy combined with developmental disorders.

The Werewolf of Châlons (France, 1598):

A tailor who believed he was a werewolf and killed multiple people. He was executed, and records of his case were destroyed due to the horrific nature of the crimes.

In each case, the belief in transformation was real to the individual, whether due to psychosis, delusion, or neurological disorder.

They weren’t “pretending” to be werewolves. They believed and experienced it.

The Wondering

When a patient looks in the mirror and sees a wolf, what are they actually seeing?

Are they hallucinating—seeing something that isn’t there?

Or is their brain reinterpreting what’s there—taking the image of a human face and processing it as a wolf because that’s what their distorted body schema expects?

We don’t know.

What we do know:

The brain constructs your sense of what your body is.

You assume you feel your body as it objectively exists.

But your body is mediated by the brain’s internal model.

If that model changes, your experience of your body changes.

In clinical lycanthropy, the model breaks. The brain decides you’re an animal, and suddenly:

  • You see fur.
  • You feel claws.
  • You move on all fours.

Not because your body changed, but because your brain’s map of your body changed.

And that raises a question:

How do you know your own body?

You trust the brain’s model. But what if the model is wrong?

Lycanthropy patients show that your experience of your body is constructed, not given.

The brain builds it. And the brain can rebuild it as something else entirely.

The Line Between Myth and Mind

Lycanthropy exists in two forms:

Mythological: Humans cursed to transform into wolves under the full moon.

Clinical: Humans whose brains convince them they’re transforming, creating a full sensory experience of becoming an animal.

The first is fiction.

The second is documented medical reality.

And the disturbing truth is that the experience is nearly identical.

A person in the Middle Ages who believed they were a werewolf and a modern psychiatric patient with clinical lycanthropy both:

  • See their bodies changing
  • Feel the transformation
  • Act like animals
  • Lose their human identity

The only difference is how we respond.

In the past, we called it demonic possession and burned them.

Now, we call it a psychiatric disorder and treat them with antipsychotics.

But the experience—the terrifying, all-consuming belief that you are no longer human—is the same.

The Final Question

When a patient with lycanthropy looks at their hands and sees claws, are they wrong?

Objectively, yes. Their hands are still human.

But subjectively, they see claws. They feel claws. Their brain insists those are claws.

So from the perspective of their lived experience, the claws are real.

And that’s the deepest mystery of clinical lycanthropy:

Reality is what the brain says it is.

Change the brain, and you change reality.

Not the objective world. But the world as experienced.

For a person with lycanthropy, they are transforming.

The fur, the fangs, the animal body—it’s not imagined in the sense of “made up.”

It’s perceived. Generated by the brain. Experienced as real.

And if the brain says you’re a wolf, then—for you, in that moment—you are.

Until the medication kicks in.

And you wake up human again.

Confused. Horrified. Wondering how you could have believed something so impossible.

But you did. Because your brain told you it was true.

And in the end, what else do we have to rely on?

Medical and Research Sources:

  • Keck, P. E., Pope, H. G., Hudson, J. I., McElroy, S. L., & Kulick, A. R. (1988). “Lycanthropy: alive and well in the twentieth century.” Psychological Medicine, 18(1), 113-120.
  • Blom, J. D. (2013). “When doctors cry wolf: A systematic review of the literature on clinical lycanthropy.” History of Psychiatry, 25(1), 87-102.
  • Garlipp, P., et al. (2004). “Clinical lycanthropy: a case report.” Psychopathology, 37(2), 51-53.
  • Nejad, A. G., & Toofani, K. (2005). “Co-existence of lycanthropy and Cotard’s syndrome in a single case.” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 111(3), 250-252.
  • Moselhy, H. F. (1999). “Lycanthropy: new evidence of its origin.” Psychopathology, 32(4), 173-176.

This concludes the Stories Unintended series. Each case reminds us that the mind’s grip on reality is more fragile—and more fascinating—than we imagine.