THE CIA WEREWOLVES: Did MKUltra Experiments Trigger Town-Wide Lycanthropy In Pont-Saint-Esprit?

A documented mental condition meets a terrifying government conspiracy in 1951 France

Jul 14, 2025

The medical charts describe patients convinced their bodies were sprouting fur, their teeth lengthening into fangs, their hands morphing into claws as they watched.

This article is a more in-depth deep dive into the story heard in the recent Weird Darkness episode, “DID THE CIA TURN AN ENTIRE TOWN INTO WEREWOLVES? The Pont-Saint Esprit Incident” which you can listen to in this audio player.

The human mind can convince itself of almost anything. Throughout recorded history, people have genuinely believed they were transforming into wolves—not as metaphor or delusion, but as physical reality. They felt their bones crack and reshape. They tasted raw meat on their tongues. They heard their own voices deepen into growls. Medical professionals call it clinical lycanthropy, a recognized psychiatric condition where patients experience the unshakeable belief that they’re becoming animals. But in 1951, an entire French town experienced something far stranger—a mass outbreak that some believe wasn’t natural at all.

The Medical Reality of Believing You’re a Beast

Clinical lycanthropy isn’t about Halloween costumes or horror movies. It’s a documented psychiatric phenomenon where patients experience genuine physical sensations of transformation. Dr. Paul Keck’s 1988 study documented twelve modern cases, including a woman who stripped naked and crawled on all fours for two days, convinced she’d become a wolf. She could feel, she insisted, every individual hair pushing through her skin.

The condition appears throughout medical literature with disturbing consistency. A 20-year-old patient in McLean Hospital spent hours staring at his hands, watching what he described as “the bones lengthening, the joints reversing.” He refused to walk upright. Another case from 1975 involved a 49-year-old woman who howled uncontrollably and claimed she could smell prey from impossible distances. Brain scans of these patients show unusual activity in areas controlling body image and identity—their brains literally couldn’t recognize their own human form.

What makes these cases particularly unsettling is the patients’ absolute certainty. They don’t think they might be turning into wolves. They know it with the same certainty most people know they have two hands. One patient described feeling his spine elongate vertebra by vertebra. Another reported tasting blood in her mouth whenever she saw raw meat, even from across a room.

Europe’s Dark History With the Wolf-Men

Medieval and Renaissance Europe took these beliefs deadly seriously. The trials weren’t folklore—they were legal proceedings with documentation, witnesses, and executions. Between 1520 and 1630, France alone recorded over 30,000 werewolf trials. That’s not a typo. Thirty thousand people accused, tried, and often burned for the crime of lycanthropy.

The case files read like nightmares given legal form. In 1521, Pierre Bourgot and Michel Verdun stood trial in Poligny after Bourgot allegedly wounded a wolf that fled into the forest. Following the blood trail, he found Verdun nursing an identical wound in the exact same location. Under questioning—which in those days meant torture—both men confessed to making pacts with demons for the power to transform. They described the sensation of their skin splitting as fur emerged, their human thoughts fading into animal hunger.

Peter Stubbe’s 1589 trial in Bedburg, Germany, produced even more grotesque details. After investigators strapped him to a wagon wheel and began breaking his bones, Stubbe confessed to owning a magical belt given to him by the Devil. When worn, he claimed, it transformed him instantly into “a greedy, devouring wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like brands of fire.” He admitted to killing and eating fourteen children and two pregnant women. The court records describe finding partially consumed bodies with wounds that matched wolf attacks—except the bite radius was wrong, too wide for any natural wolf.

The Werewolf of Chalons case from 1598 disturbed authorities so deeply they ordered all trial documents destroyed after the execution. What survives comes from scattered references in other documents. The unnamed tailor reportedly lured children into his shop, slit their throats, and consumed their flesh. Investigators found barrels in his cellar. The contents were never officially described, but several witnesses fled the scene vomiting. One investigator’s personal journal, discovered centuries later, contained a single relevant entry: “The bones were so small. So many small bones.”

These weren’t isolated incidents of mass hysteria. The accused often provided disturbingly consistent details about their transformations. Multiple suspects across different regions and decades described the same sequence: first, a fever-like heat spreading from the chest outward. Then the sensation of bones cracking and reforming. The unbearable itching as fur sprouted. Finally, the moment when human thought dissolved into pure predatory instinct.

The Town That Howled: Pont-Saint-Esprit, 1951

August 16, 1951, started like any other day in Pont-Saint-Esprit, a quiet town in southern France. By sunset, the hospitals were overflowing with residents convinced they were transforming into animals. Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Physically becoming beasts.

The outbreak began at the local bakery. Within hours of eating bread from Raimond Maillet’s shop, customers reported bizarre symptoms. Maurice Amphoux felt his body burning from the inside. He told nurses his skeleton was “rearranging itself.” By evening, he was on all fours in the hospital corridor, snarling at anyone who approached. Nurses found him gnawing on his mattress, leaving deep teeth marks in the fabric.

Charles Granjhon’s case was even more disturbing. The 25-year-old apprentice baker didn’t just believe he was becoming a wolf—he acted on it. Witnesses watched him leap from a second-story window, convinced he could bound across rooftops. He shattered both legs on impact but felt no pain, still trying to run on broken bones, howling that his “wolf body” would heal instantly.

The numbers were staggering. Within 48 hours, over 250 residents showed symptoms. Thirty-two were hospitalized with severe manifestations. Seven died. The town’s single hospital couldn’t contain them. Patients had to be transferred to facilities across southern France, some requiring strait-jackets after attacking medical staff with fingernails they insisted were claws.

Dr. Albert Gabbai, who treated the first wave of patients, documented symptoms he’d never encountered: “The patients exhibit a complete dissociation from human identity. They move on all fours with surprising agility. Several have bitten staff members, insisting they need raw meat. Most disturbing is their absolute conviction—they describe feeling their bones elongate, their body hair thickening into fur. One patient spent six hours staring at his hands, documenting out loud every perceived change in their structure.”

The town descended into chaos. Groups of affected residents roamed the streets at night, howling in unison. The sound carried for miles across the countryside. Local farmers reported finding these groups crouched around livestock, though none of the animals were harmed—the “pack” seemed content to simply circle them, making low growling sounds.

The Official Story—and Its Holes

French authorities initially blamed ergot poisoning. Ergot, a fungus that grows on damp grain, can cause hallucinations and convulsions. It seemed plausible—the outbreak centered on a bakery, after all. Case closed, officials declared. Contaminated flour. Natural explanation. Nothing more to investigate.

But investigators found problems with this theory immediately. Ergot poisoning was well-documented in medical literature. It caused specific symptoms: gangrene in extremities, burning sensations, visual hallucinations. But synchronized delusions of transformation? An entire town experiencing the same specific fantasy of becoming wolves? No recorded ergot outbreak had ever produced anything similar.

More troubling were the test results. Or rather, the lack of them. Initial grain samples from the bakery showed no ergot contamination. Government officials ordered new tests. Those results vanished. The bakery’s flour supplier had their records confiscated “for investigation.” Those records were never returned. Witnesses who spoke to journalists began receiving visits from unnamed government officials suggesting they “misremembered” events.

Dr. Gabbai’s detailed medical notes disappeared from the hospital. He rewrote them from memory, only to have the second version confiscated “for public safety.” Years later, he would tell researchers: “They wanted us to stop asking questions. Every time we found something that didn’t fit ergot poisoning, someone would arrive to explain why we were wrong.”

The Sandoz Laboratory Connection

The ergot explanation might have stood if not for one detail authorities couldn’t hide: Pont-Saint-Esprit sat just 300 kilometers from Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. Sandoz was developing a new compound derived from ergot—lysergic acid diethylamide. LSD.

Albert Hofmann, the chemist who first synthesized LSD, worked at Sandoz during this period. His laboratory notebooks from 1951—later released by the company—show intense interest in “field applications” and “environmental distribution methods.” One entry from July 1951 reads: “The potential for aerosolized distribution remains theoretical but promising. Careful selection of test environment essential.”

But LSD typically causes visual distortions, euphoria, and altered perception. The Pont-Saint-Esprit victims experienced something far more specific—a shared delusion of lycanthropy that no laboratory test of LSD had ever produced. Unless, some researchers suggest, it wasn’t pure LSD.

Operation Midnight Climax and the Mind Control Programs

The Pont-Saint-Esprit incident becomes even more unsettling when placed in context. In 1951, the CIA was two years into MK-Ultra, their mind control research program. Declassified documents reveal the agency’s obsession with creating “behavioral modification compounds” and testing them on unwitting subjects.

Operation Midnight Climax, a MK-Ultra subproject, involved dosing unsuspecting victims with psychoactive compounds to observe their reactions. CIA operatives ran safe houses in San Francisco and New York where they filmed subjects without their knowledge. But these were controlled environments. The agency wanted data on “real world” applications.

A partially declassified 1953 CIA document references “the French incident” and “mass psychogenic potential.” Most of the document remains redacted, but visible portions discuss “unexpected uniformity of delusion” and “possible applications for battlefield psychology.” Another fragment mentions “lycanthropic manifestation exceeded projected parameters.”

Frank Olson, a CIA biochemist who worked on MK-Ultra, visited Pont-Saint-Esprit weeks before the outbreak. His family later discovered expense receipts from the trip in his personal effects. Olson would die two years later, falling from a hotel window days after threatening to expose CIA human experimentation. The agency initially claimed suicide. In 1975, they admitted to drugging him with LSD without his knowledge.

The White House Document

In 2009, journalist Hank Albarelli uncovered the most damning evidence yet. While researching Frank Olson’s death, he found a White House document referencing “the Pont-Saint-Esprit secret.” The partially redacted file, dated 1953, discussed “successful field test of aerosolized distribution” and mentioned both the CIA and Sandoz Laboratory by name.

The document’s most chilling section described “unexpected synchronicity of delusion manifestation.” It noted that subjects didn’t just hallucinate—they shared specific, detailed fantasies of transformation. The report called this “promising for crowd control applications” and recommended “further testing in isolated populations.”

Albarelli tracked down former CIA operative who agreed to speak anonymously. The source confirmed Pont-Saint-Esprit was “a test that got out of hand.” According to this operative, the plan involved dosing the town’s bread supply with a cocktail of LSD and other experimental compounds. The goal was to observe mass behavioral changes. The widespread lycanthropy delusions were “an unexpected but valuable data point.”

The Mind’s Power to Transform

Whether Pont-Saint-Esprit fell victim to natural contamination or served as an unwitting laboratory, the incident reveals something profound about human consciousness. Given the right trigger—be it mental illness, mass hysteria, or psychoactive compounds—the mind can override every signal from the body. People don’t just believe they’re transforming; they experience it with every sense.

Modern cases of clinical lycanthropy use antipsychotic medications to quiet the delusions. But patients often resist treatment. One told his psychiatrist: “You’re trying to cage the wolf, but it’s more real than this human shell.” Another patient, successfully treated, described recovery as “mourning the loss of my true form.”

The Pont-Saint-Esprit victims faced a different challenge. Their transformation was temporary, lasting days or weeks. But the memory persisted. Years later, survivors would catch themselves checking their hands during full moons. Some reported phantom sensations—feeling fur that wasn’t there, hearing sounds beyond human range. Maurice Amphoux, who recovered fully, told investigators in 1975: “I know it wasn’t real. I know that now. But for those three days, I was more certain of my wolf body than I’d ever been of my human one.”

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The Unanswered Questions

The French government still classifies most documents related to Pont-Saint-Esprit. Requests for information receive form letters citing “national security” and “public safety.” The CIA denies involvement, though they’ve also denied programs later proven through declassified documents. Sandoz Laboratories—now part of Novartis—claims their records from 1951 were destroyed in a fire. No evidence of this fire exists in Swiss municipal records.

What remains are the testimonies of survivors, the fragments of documentation that escaped destruction, and the undeniable fact that for one week in August 1951, an entire town believed they were becoming wolves. They felt their bodies rebel against human form. They moved as a pack. They howled at the moon with voices that carried across the valley, a sound that elderly residents say they still hear echoing on quiet nights.

The truth of Pont-Saint-Esprit may never fully surface. The human mind, whether through illness, contamination, or deliberate manipulation, can make the impossible feel inevitable. Somewhere between the medical reality of lycanthropy and the dark possibilities of Cold War experimentation lies a week when an entire town lost its grip on human identity. The wolves they became—whether born of fungus, LSD, or something more sinister—were real to them in every way that mattered.

SOURCES: Weird Darkness, Viral Nova, Mysterious Universe

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NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is not an AI voice.