The Monstrefact: The Rougarou

of cage and werewolf. It's a little more complicated than that, however, the Rogharu is arguably the most well known South Louisiana monster, but as Nathan J. Ravoulais discusses in his excellent book Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, despite the monster's popularity in literature and pop culture, there's not much folkloric

meat on the bone. Here. He points out that primary sources and first person accounts are relatively scarce compared to more obscure creatures and figures of the region, with no common cycles of motifs or specific tale types associated with it. While a shallow understanding of the Roguaru seems to permeate South Louisiana traditions. Many aspects of the monster were seemingly codified by the popular nineteen forty five folk tale compilation Gumbo Ya Ya. So let's get to know this monster

first off? Is it a werewolf? Well? On one hand, it undeniably draws from European werewolf traditions, particularly those of the French Lugaroo, brought over to the Americas by French colonists. Many of those traditions are more closely aligned with European werewolves, which we've discussed on the show before, focusing on monstrous transformations that bridge the worlds of human civility and destial wildness.

Though some of the Lugaro tales of French folks had their own unique twists, such as those related in Brad Steiger's The Werewolf Book, in which a drunken abbot is saved from a clouder of murderous cats by a wolfman who turns out to be a high ranking member of the church and later admonishes the abbot for his over indulgence. But speaking of transformations, interesting transformations and mergers tend to occur when a folkloric tradition travels across an ocean for starters.

While conflict between man and wolf is long standing and well documented in Europe as well as in French Canada, where the traditions also spread, wolves were an uncommon sight in South Louisiana. Populations of the southwestern red wolf in Louisiana were declared extinct in the wild by nineteen eighty,

though reported sightings continue to occur. So while the creature's mainland European ancestors were seen as werewolves, the South Louisiana rugaru is often not described as a wolf, or even partially wolf at all, but rather a dog or even an owl. Rabelais points out that the roogaroo is equally integral to the folklore of the indigenous home of people of what is now Louisiana and Mississippi, thus injecting older local concepts about the relationship between humans and native animal

species into the mix. While we lack great central narratives of the rugaroo, the basic sketch tends to follow a certain pattern, that of a bite transmitted lacanthropy of sorts that mainly seems to originate as a curse for one's individual sense. But here's the interesting thing. While you might expect this to dramatically manifest, as say, a murderer curse to transform into a murderous beast, the actual attributed transgressions are generally far less severe, such as skipping Catholic mass

to go hunting or swearing too much. In other accounts, the creatures actually hunt violators of length. According to Rabelais, In some tellings, the curse of the rugaroo is disturbingly tied to marrying outside of one's own race, so it would seem that on the whole, the curse befalls not those who commit mortal sins, but casual church skippers, cursors, and those not engaging in sin at all, but rather

violating racist values and racist secular laws. On the other hand, while European tales of the werewolf are typically bloody, murderous affairs, the Roguaru's main threat is one of transmission by bite. While they are to be avoided, they're not murderous or innately evil creatures, though they may be employed as nursery

bogies by parents to scare children into good behavior. Instead, the roguaru seems to occupy a moral gray zone between wildness and humanity, between urban and rural, between sin and salvation. Thinking back to the tale of the drunken French Abbot, we don't seem to see tales of the roguaru in the clergy, but as rabbola At points out, we might actually detect a strong anti clerical sentiment in the tales of this particular creature, as we see in much of

South Louisiana folklore. Perhaps the harshness of the curse in response to slight or non existent sins is in fact the point of the stories. Dark misfortune visited not on the most deserving of human sinners, but rather those who, by following their passions, cross slightly over some perceived societal line or dogmatic norm of the church. The werewolf is generally a point of contemplation on the liminal, and so in this the traditions of the roguaru would seem quite fitting.

Tune in for additional episodes of the Monster fact the Artifact were animaliustupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.