Scary Creatures from France and Switzerland: A Monster Mash

Halloween doesn’t have the same popularity here in Europe as it does in the United States, though U.S. media centered on the holiday have, over the decades, brought it to European attention and, to a milder extent, celebration.

Each year since moving to Switzerland, at least two or three small groups of kids stop by for candy in less elaborate and more homemade costumes than I’ve seen at home.

Given the arrival of spooky season, I thought I’d research creepy and eerie tales in France and Switzerland. I didn’t find as many campfire-legend tales as I’d expected. However, I did uncover one good mythical monster to share from each country, and that’s not nothing!

France’s Beast of Gévaudan

The Beast of Gévaudan sounds like a French legend, though it’s a historically recorded event—and one to bolster the beliefs of werewolf fans.

Starting in the summer of 1764 and continuing for about three years, a monster attacked the heads, necks, and throats of about 300 people, killing nearly 100, in the Gévaudan region of France. The problem became big enough to involve the king, aristocracy, and military. Several hunting expeditions ensued—none successful until June 1767, when a local farmer shot and killed the beast. (How did they know they’d got it? One: When they cut the animal open, they found human remains. Two: The killings stopped.)

To this day, no one knows the nature of the beast. Most experts believe the Beast of Gévaudan to have been a wolf or a pack of wolves, though a few have suggested escaped lions or even some sort of vestigial creature held over from prehistoric times.

We’ll never know.

Switzerland’s Barbegazi

Switzerland has many reputedly haunted properties and mischief-making imp-like beings—though I didn’t uncover any that seemed especially terrifying.

However, I did discover a new favorite mythical creature: The Barbegazi.

A term messily combining the French words “barbe” (beard) and “glacée” (iced), these all-white furry snow gnomes have massive feet they use to slide down mountains in the Alps during the winter, often helping shepherds find lost sheep and whistling to warn humans of pending avalanches, which they surf. They’ll even kindly dig out a human from time to time, too.

Scary? Nope, super fun, though.

Alas, people rarely see barbegazi, due to their preference for extremely low temperatures.

Not Monster Cultures?

From what I can find, it doesn’t seem that France or Switzerland have much of a culture of monstrous creatures to fill that subgenre of horror tale.

I’ve dug around and discovered scary stories, indeed, but the stories I’ve found with French and Swiss origins mainly focus on eerie and uncanny mysterious happenings, ghosts haunting the present, and humans (fully real and fully alive, albeit nefarious) doing very, very wrong.

Which made me wonder: Why do some cultures have scary, inhuman creatures in their spooky folklore and others do not?

And alas, I couldn’t find much by way of legitimate explanation. If any cultural historians focused on this area of research (please tell me they exist!) tumble onto this article, I’d love for them to enlighten me.

The Monster Hunt Shall Continue!

One story with links to Switzerland that’s certainly disturbing—though more of a societal critique than a jump-scare sort of tale—is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which a 1818 visit to the villa of Lord Byron in the village of Cologny near Lake Geneva in Switzerland inspired her to write. (A book well worth a read if you haven’t read it, by the way. The book is—surprise, surprise—nothing like the movie.)

I didn’t include Frankenstein’s monster in this post though, because, well, he’s not particularly Swiss. Nor do the Swiss consider him part of their folklore.

I’ll keep hunting monster tales in France and in Switzerland, don’t you doubt it. And as I uncover them—bwaa-ha-ha—I’ll add them to this list!