Monstrum Athenaeum Tearing open the cryptid world of werewolves, vampires & zombies.
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News outlets including the Huffington Post are carrying a video of a werewolf filmed in a Brazilian backyard that has frightened the locals so much that the authorities had imposed a curfew.
The video was taken in the town of Sao Goncalo de Campos and shows a backyard with trees and a rope swing. From the left of the screen, a shadow appears and the creature comes into view. It proceeds along the edge of the shot before turning and leaving the way it came. A close up included on the shot showed a creature that walked like an ape but had a long snout like a dog.
The credibility of the video is supported by additional eye witness reports of the creature, with a number of residents reporting sightings and one local man having a close encounter that he barely escaped from. The man, named Pingo, described encountering a black creature which was covered in hair and stood around 1.5 meters in height. Lucky for him, the beast appeared to be writhing around on the ground in pain; perhaps he stumbled across it before it had completed its transformation. Following the reports, the local authorities instituted a 9 pm curfew to avoid any further close encounters.
Interestingly, this is not the only report of a shape shifter from the north-east of Brazil either. After searching, we found that Phantoms and Monsters posted a reader submission in 2013 from a man living in Oros, Ceara, who claims to have encountered a werewolf.
The man and a friend were sitting outside his home, near a lake in the area when they heard strange noises. The friend, a shepherd in the area, remarked that he had lost two sheep that week in an area where there are many stories of people using wolf masks to steal sheep and of strange large dogs. Around 11pm they heard grunting noises from the swampy area at the rear of the property and saw something stand up. It was over 2 metres in height and stood like a man but had the head and upper body of a wolf.
The men tried to scare off the creature by firing a few shots from a shotgun but the creature charged towards them – on all fours. They fired again and one of the shots hit the creature, driving it away into the valley. The men tried to pursue the creature but lost it and despite efforts to track the animal at a later date, they never saw it again. They reported it to the local authorities but they refused to investigate the sighting or put any warnings in place, unlike the authorities around Sao Goncalo.
Brazil is a country that has a large number of folklore stories regarding werewolves and other shape shifters. With these recent sightings, it seems that many of these stories, passed down verbally through the generations, may well have been based on sightings of real creatures such as these detailed here.
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