In the autumn of 1888, in the hamlet of Trapari near the town of Pleternica in eastern Croatia, a farmer named Toma Milinković told a story to an older woman from the neighborhood. The woman happened to be the mother of Friedrich Salomon Krauss, an Austrian ethnographer born in nearby Požega. She passed the story to her son in Vienna. He filed it away. Twenty years later, he published it in a book.
The book was Slavische Volksforschungen (“Slavic Folk Research,” Leipzig, 1908). The story appeared in Chapter VI, titled simply “Der Werwolf.” It is eight pages long. It concerns a woman, a wolf, a flock of sheep, and a set of clothes worn inside out.
What makes this story worth telling is not the transformation itself. Stories about people turning into wolves are found across every culture that shares territory with the animal. What makes this one extraordinary is everything that surrounds it: the man who collected it, the world in which it was told, the ritual logic that structures every detail, and the questions it raises about where the werewolf ends and the witch begins.
The Story
The account, as Krauss recorded it, goes like this.
Not far from Pleternica, in the area known as Trapari, a wealthy man kept a large flock of sheep. The flock was well guarded: two shepherds, six dogs. And yet, every day, a wolf appeared as if from nowhere, killed and devoured several sheep, and vanished. No tracks. No remains. Not a scrap of wool or bone. Only missing livestock.
This went on until nearly three-quarters of the flock were gone. The farmer, desperate, sought advice. Someone (Krauss does not specify who) told him this was no ordinary wolf, and gave him a set of very specific instructions.
Before sunrise, he was to put on all his clothes inside out, from his shoes to his hat. Then he was to drive the sheep to a nearby stream, climb a tree, and wait.
He did exactly that.
Around noon, an old woman from the neighborhood came to the stream carrying a wooden bucket. She lay down on the grass, rolled three times, and transformed into a wolf.
The wolf seized the fattest ram from the flock and devoured it completely. Nothing remained. No wool, no bones, nothing.
The farmer recognized her. He did not shoot. He climbed down from the tree and went directly to her house.
When he confronted her, she had already returned to her human form. He reproached her severely. Later, when her own sons learned what she had been doing, they too chastised her.
From that day forward, she never again turned into a wolf. No more sheep were lost.
The Man Who Caught the Story
The chain that brought this account into print is almost as interesting as the account itself.
Friedrich Salomon Krauss was born on 7 October 1859 in Požega, a town twelve kilometers northwest of Pleternica, in the Slavonian heartland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He came from a Jewish family. He studied classical philology at the University of Vienna under Theodor Gomperz and received his doctorate in 1882. His first publication, at age twenty-two, was a German translation of Artemidorus’s Oneirocritica, the ancient Greek manual of dream interpretation. This would later matter: Sigmund Freud cited Artemidorus repeatedly in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and scholars have documented that Freud’s reading of the text developed in critical dialogue with Krauss’s translation.
In 1884-85, commissioned by Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and the Vienna Anthropological Society, Krauss traveled through Bosnia, Herzegovina, Slavonia, Croatia, and Dalmatia to document folklore. He recorded vast quantities of epic poetry from Bosnian Muslim guslar singers. One transcription, the epic Smailagić Meho taken from an eighty-five-year-old singer named Ahmed Isakov Šemić in Rotimlje, Herzegovina, later became foundational for the Parry-Lord oral-formulaic theory of Homeric composition.
Krauss was, by all accounts, the first person to investigate South Slavic folklore scientifically. He published prolifically: Sagen und Märchen der Südslaven (1883-84), Südslawische Hexensagen (1884), Volksglaube und religiöser Brauch der Südslaven (1890). In 1903, he coined the word “paraphilia” in a Viennese medical journal, proposing it as a neutral scientific term to replace “sexual perversion.” In 1904, he founded Anthropophyteia, a yearbook collecting sexual and erotic folklore that other scholars routinely expunged from published collections. Krauss argued the material was scientifically essential. The editorial board eventually included Freud and the anthropologist Franz Boas.
In 1913, the journal was banned and Krauss was convicted of pornography in a Berlin court. The conviction destroyed his finances and his reputation. He never held a university professorship. He lived and died as a Privatgelehrter, an independent scholar. He died in Vienna on 29 May 1938, two months after the Nazi annexation of Austria, a seventy-eight-year-old Jewish man in a newly hostile city.
His mother, who had collected the Pleternica werewolf story fifty years earlier, is buried in Pleternica.
The informant chain, farmer to mother to son, is worth pausing on. Krauss did not interview Toma Milinković directly. His mother functioned as a field contact in his home region, collecting stories from neighbors who trusted her as one of their own. This is not a scholar with a notebook interrogating a suspicious peasant. It is a neighbor telling a neighbor, in a kitchen or by a fence, a thing that happened. The twenty-year gap between telling (1888) and publication (1908) is also characteristic: Krauss accumulated material over decades and published when the scholarly framework was ready.
What “Vukodlak” Actually Means
The word matters. In South Slavic languages, the creature is called vukodlak. The etymology is well established: Proto-Slavic *vьlko-dlakь, composed of *vьlkъ (“wolf”) + *dlaka (“hair, fur, hide”). Literally: “wolf-haired” or “one wearing wolf’s skin.” The linguist Petar Skok confirmed this in his Etimologijski rječnik (1971), the definitive etymological dictionary of Serbo-Croatian. There is an alternative hypothesis, that the second element derives from a Balto-Slavic root meaning “bear” (cognate with Lithuanian lokys, Latvian lācis), making vukodlak a “wolf-bear” compound. Some scholars combine both theories, arguing that the Indo-European bear-name taboo preserved the actual bear-word as a word for “hide.”
The word traveled. It became Romanian vârcolac, Greek vrykolakas, Polish wilkołak, Czech vlkodlak, Ukrainian vovkulak. In Istria, where Croatian, Slovenian, and Italian traditions converge, it became kudlak or fudlak.
But here is the crucial distinction, and it is the thing that separates South Slavic werewolf belief from nearly everything in Western European tradition.
In the West, a werewolf is a living person who transforms into a wolf. The mechanism varies: a devil’s pact, a magic ointment, a wolf-skin belt. The transformation is typically voluntary. The person is morally culpable. The werewolf trials of early modern Europe (Peter Stumpp in Bedburg, 1589; Gilles Garnier in Dole, 1573; Jean Grenier in France, 1603) treated werewolfism as a crime, on par with witchcraft.
In the South Slavic Balkans, the vukodlak is overwhelmingly something else entirely: an undead revenant. A dead person who rises from the grave. As the folklorist Maja Pašarić has documented, in most Croatian traditions vukodlaks “aren’t people shifting into wolves during a full moon, but a type of the undead, representing people who come back after death.” The creature might appear as a bloated corpse covered in dark hair. It might manifest as a black ram, a donkey, or, in the Velebit mountain region, a waterskin filled with blood. The transformation is involuntary, caused by improper burial, a cat jumping over the corpse, or being born with a caul. The creature attacks its own family first, then neighbors, then livestock. It spreads disease.
And here is where it gets linguistically strange. In Serbia, the word vukodlak was considered too terrifying to say aloud. So vampir was used as a replacement, a euphemism for the unmentionable. This is parallel to the famous Indo-European bear-name taboo, where the actual name of the bear was replaced by euphemisms across multiple language families (the English word “bear” itself means “the brown one”). The Serbian euphemism nepomnik, “the one who should not be mentioned,” makes the taboo explicit.
Over the centuries, the two concepts fused. In western Serbia and Montenegro, vukodlak came to mean “vampire.” The 1971-72 Yugoslav Academy Dictionary listed both under a single entry. The werewolf ate the vampire, or the vampire ate the werewolf. Depending on the region and the century, they are the same creature, different creatures, or two aspects of a single supernatural complex. The scholarly debate (Sabine Baring-Gould, H.F. Tozer, Montague Summers) has never been fully resolved. The South Slavic evidence suggests it cannot be, because the boundary was never stable.
The Pleternica woman is the exception. She is a living person who voluntarily transforms. This places her in a minority strand of the tradition, closer to the Western model but still distinctly Slavic in every detail of the ritual. The question is whether she is really a vukodlak at all, or whether she belongs to a different category: the vještica, the witch.
The Ritual Grammar
Now let us look at what the farmer was actually told to do. Four distinct elements, each with its own logic.
Put on all clothes inside out, from shoes to hat.
This is one of the most widespread apotropaic practices in European folk magic. In Ireland and Scotland, turning a coat inside out breaks the enchantment of the “stray sod,” fairy-cursed ground that causes disorientation. Three-quarters of documented “pixy-led” accounts from Devon include this remedy. In the Germanic Walpurgis Night tradition, wearing clothes inside out and walking backwards to a crossroads makes witches visible. In Russian folklore, the Leshy, the forest spirit, is himself characterized by inversion: his left side fastened on the right, shoes on the wrong feet. To escape him, you adopt his logic: turn everything inside out, switch your shoes between feet. The folklorist Katharine Briggs proposed the most cited explanation: it functions as “a change of identity,” slipping the person out of the spell’s target.
In the Pleternica story, the inversion serves a specifically revelatory function. Without it, the farmer presumably could not have witnessed the transformation. The inverted clothing did not protect him. It made him able to see.
Drive the sheep to a nearby stream.
Running water functions as a supernatural boundary across European folk belief. Vampires cannot cross it. Witches are weakened by it. In Celtic Beltane traditions, water drawn at dawn contained protective properties. The stream is a liminal space: the border between the ordered village and the wild beyond. The woman had to approach the water to transform, as though the boundary between human and wolf could only be crossed at a place where another boundary already existed.
Climb a tree.
Trees connect the three cosmic realms in Slavic mythology: the upper world (crown), the middle world (trunk), and the underworld (roots). The oak was the tree of Perun, god of thunder. In Serbian folk belief, St. Sava was said to climb a tree on his feast day while wolves gathered below, and from that elevated position he assigned each wolf its prey for the coming year. Mircea Eliade documented the shamanic practice of climbing a birch tree with notched steps, each step representing a heavenly level. The farmer was not just finding a good vantage point. He was ascending to a position from which supernatural events become visible.
Wait until noon.
This is the detail that stamps the story as unmistakably Slavic. In Western European werewolf tradition, transformations happen at midnight, under a full moon. Neither appears here. Instead: noon. In Slavic folklore, noon is one of the most dangerous liminal hours. The Poludnica (Lady Midday, the Noonwraith) is a demon who kills, causes disease, or drives people mad at the stroke of twelve. Noon and midnight are the two hinges of the day, the moments when the boundary between worlds thins. The woman transforms at noon because noon, in Slavic folk belief, is when the membrane between the natural and the supernatural is thinnest.
The four elements together form a complete ritual field: alter your identity (clothes), position yourself at a boundary (stream), elevate yourself to the visionary plane (tree), and wait for the liminal moment (noon). Each element addresses a different dimension of the problem. Together, they create the conditions for seeing what is hidden. This exact four-element combination does not appear in any other documented folk account. But each element individually has deep roots across European tradition.
She Rolled Three Times
The woman’s method of transformation also deserves attention. She lay down on the grass, rolled three times, and became a wolf.
This fits within a well-documented Slavic pattern. In East Slavic and Polish traditions, a sorcerer could transform by rolling over three knives stuck point-up in the ground. Rolling over the first: the head became wolf-like. The second: the torso. The third: the legs. To reverse the process, roll over the knives in the opposite order. But if someone removes one of the knives while you are in wolf form, the reversal is incomplete, and you remain partly wolf. The number three is ritually significant across all Slavic folklore. The combination of rolling, three repetitions, and a liminal location (stream, crossroads, threshold) represents the core transformation formula.
But this method is more commonly associated with sorcery and witchcraft than with the involuntary vukodlak tradition. A person who rises from the grave as a vukodlak does not perform a ritual. They simply rise. The Pleternica woman’s deliberate, voluntary, repeatable transformation places her squarely in the domain of folk magic practice.
In South Slavic tradition, female shapeshifting belongs overwhelmingly to the category of vještice, witches. The mora, a female demon who sits on sleepers’ chests, could take the form of hair or straw and pass through keyholes. The Albanian shtriga transforms into a cat, bat, or owl and drains life force from children. In Serbian folklore, a witch’s soul leaves her sleeping body in insect form; if you turn her body face-down while she is gone, the returning soul cannot re-enter, and the witch dies. The category boundaries are fluid. In Istria, where Croatian, Slovenian, and Italian traditions converge, the system is formalized into a dualism: a person born with a caul becomes either a krsnik (protector, good) or a kudlak (evil, vampiric). Both shapeshift into animals. The krsnik appears as a white animal, the kudlak as a black one. They battle at night, defending or attacking the community. This dualism traces back to the pre-Christian myth of Perun versus Veles, the sky god against the underworld serpent.
The Pleternica woman fits uneasily into any single category. She is called a werewolf, but her method is a witch’s. She transforms voluntarily, but she is not malevolent in the full demonological sense: she eats sheep, not people. She is discovered, confronted, and shamed into stopping, not killed or burned. The community treats her as a problem to be solved, not a monster to be destroyed.
This is characteristic. In the Balkans, the supernatural was managed through social pressure, not inquisitions. There were no werewolf trials in Slavonia. Compare this to the case of Thiess of Kaltenbrun (Livonia, 1692), an eighty-year-old peasant who voluntarily told a court he was a werewolf, then insisted that werewolves were “Hounds of God” who descended to hell three times a year to fight witches and recover stolen grain. The judges could not force his testimony into the expected diabolical framework, so they convicted him of heresy. Carlo Ginzburg’s work on the Italian benandanti and Livonian werewolves argues that scattered European traditions of ecstatic shapeshifters represent survivals of a pre-Christian agrarian cult involving spirit journeys in animal form to protect crops. Whether or not one accepts Ginzburg’s reconstruction, the Pleternica case belongs to the same world: a community where shapeshifting is not diabolical but domestic, not a crime against God but a disturbance of the social order.
The World of 1888 Slavonia
To understand why this story was told as fact, you need to understand the world in which it was told.
In 1888, the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia was an autonomous territory within the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary. Požega County, where Pleternica stood, had a population of roughly 229,000 spread across nearly 5,000 square kilometers. Trapari was a hamlet: perhaps 150 to 250 people. The population was overwhelmingly agricultural, living in houses built from packed mud and straw with thatched roofs, organized into extended family households called zadruge that could contain up to a hundred members.
The literacy rate tells the story most directly. In 1880, roughly 75% of the rural population of Croatia-Slavonia could not read or write. By 1910, illiteracy had dropped to 46%, but the 1880s were the last decade when the oral world was still fully intact. Knowledge, history, morality, entertainment, news, and the explanation of unusual events were transmitted by voice. The werewolf story was part of this system: not a campfire tale, but a working piece of the community’s explanatory framework.
Wolves were real. In 1894, the Croatian wolf population was estimated at 600 to 1,000 animals, with at least one wolf killed in each county that year. They ranged throughout Slavonia. Wolf attacks on livestock were a genuine economic problem. The Pleternica story’s premise, a wolf killing sheep daily, mapped directly onto lived experience. The supernatural explanation (a woman-werewolf) overlaid a genuine material anxiety. This made the narrative more plausible, not less. The audience knew wolves. The question was not whether wolves killed sheep. It was why this particular wolf left no trace.
The zadruga system was collapsing. An agrarian crisis between 1873 and 1895, driven by cheap American grain flooding European markets and the phylloxera epidemic destroying vineyards, devastated Croatian villages. Between 1890 and World War I, an estimated 500,000 people left Croatia, mostly for the United States. Legal attempts to reconcile modern civil code with zadruga customary law had failed. The old communal structures were fragmenting.
And in December 1888, the same year Toma Milinković told his wolf story, the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb established its Board for Folk Life and Customs (Odbor za narodni život i običaje) at the initiative of its president Franjo Rački. The editor of its journal wrote that it was launched because “national treasures are disappearing at a terrible speed, as if carried away by the whirlwind of modern culture.” In 1897, Antun Radić, the founder of Croatian ethnography, published his systematic framework for studying rural folk culture. He considered peasant traditions authentic and worthy of study on their own terms, not as curiosities to be pitied or corrected.
The Pleternica werewolf story sits at the exact threshold: the last generation of fully oral, pre-modern village life being captured by the first generation of systematic ethnography. Toma Milinković told the story as something that happened. Krauss published it as something that was believed. The gap between those two framings is the distance between the old world and the new.
What the Story Holds
So here is what exists.
A farmer in a Slavonian hamlet, in a world where three out of four people could not read, where real wolves killed real sheep, where extended families of a hundred people lived under one roof and resolved problems through confrontation and shame rather than courts, told a story about his neighbor turning into a wolf by the stream at noon. He told it to a woman from the neighborhood. She told it to her son, an ethnographer in Vienna who had transcribed Bosnian epics, coined a word still used in psychiatric manuals, published a journal with Freud on its masthead, and would die two months after the Nazis marched into his city.
The story was published in a book that also contains chapters on returning souls, vampires, the mora, witches, forest women, and love magic. It sits within a tradition where the word for “werewolf” and the word for “vampire” can be the same word, where female shapeshifting blurs into witchcraft, where transformation happens not under a full moon but at noon, where the counter-magic is not a silver bullet but a coat worn inside out, and where the resolution is not execution but a stern talking-to from your own sons.
Is it true? That might be the wrong question. We know wolves were real in 1888 Slavonia. We know livestock predation was a genuine economic threat. We know the beliefs surrounding vukodlaks were consistent, internally coherent, and shared across a vast geographic area for centuries. We know the ritual elements, clothes inside out, running water, tree-climbing, noontime transformation, each have deep and independently documented roots in European folk magic. We know the informant chain is solid: named teller, named intermediary, named publisher.
What we do not know is what Toma Milinković actually saw. Or what the old woman actually did by the stream. Or whether the sheep really stopped disappearing after the confrontation, and if so, why.
The Pleternica account is one of those stories that sits at the edge of several categories at once: werewolf and witch, fact and belief, the last oral world and the first written record of it. It does not resolve into a neat explanation. It holds its ambiguity the way the old villages held their dead: close, present, and not fully accounted for.
The story was told once, in a kitchen or by a fence, in a hamlet of maybe two hundred people, in the autumn of 1888. It passed through three people and twenty years to reach print. It has now survived 137 years. Something in it, some quality that lives in the gap between the natural and the unexplained, refuses to stop moving.
