Witching Hour - Legends: The werewolf tale of le Detroit

Witching Hour - Legends A bride, a werewolf and a catfish. In Hamlin's 1883 Legends of Le Detroit, a loup garou snatches a bride at her own wedding in Grosse Pointe. Her groom chases it to the shore, where it vanishes into a catfish's mouth.

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Witching Hour is our nightly local history and folklore feature. Ghost stories and legends are retold as stories people tell, not reported as fact. Sources are listed below the story.

Tonight's Witching Hour is a legend from the old French settlement along the Detroit River.

The book

In 1883, Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin published Legends of Le Detroit in Detroit. She wrote that its tales had been handed down from generation to generation in the old French families settled along the river, and the Detroit Historical Society says the stories came down through her own family.

The Detroit Historical Society calls one of them perhaps the most familiar of all: Le Loup Garou, a werewolf tale. Hamlin set it at Grosse Pointe.

The legend

The story goes that a trapper's daughter named Archange was about to marry a young farmer named Pierre when a monster with a wolf's head crossed her path near the lake. Her father knew it at once as the loup garou.

In the tale, a hunter had already tried to kill the beast with a bullet made from a silver coin. He only cut off its tail.

On the wedding day, the legend says, the loup garou rushed into the celebration and carried Archange off into the forest. The men searched and found nothing.

The odd part

Later, the story goes, Pierre chased a loup garou to the edge of the lake. A catfish rose to the surface, opened its mouth, and the creature vanished. Hamlin closes the tale with a line that has outlived it: to this day, no Canadian will eat catfish.

Charles M. Skinner later retold the same tale in his book Myths and Legends of Our Own Land.

Where the werewolf comes from

The loup-garou was not invented on the Detroit River. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes it as a figure of French Canadian and European folklore, a person who can change into an animal, often a wolf, and in French Canadian tales the curse was often tied to a religious failing.

This is a legend, not history. Nobody was carried off by a werewolf at Grosse Pointe.