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villages of eastern France. Church bells are a reassuring reminder that all is well.

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But four centuries ago the bells had another meaning.

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In 1573, terror stalked the land.

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A rumor swept through the village that a monster was prowling the countryside, devouring women and children.

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The villagers were killed.

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Three villagers who started the beast swore it had the features of a local man named Gilles Gognet.

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Gognet, a poor, hungry recluse, was arrested and brought to trial.

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But his crime was not murder or cannibalism.

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He was accused of being a werewolf.

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A flesh-eating wolf disguised as a human is a legend of evil as old as time.

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But Hollywood would reinvent the myth and transform a man into a wolf man.

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Whenever the moon is full, so the story goes, the demon within takes hold.

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Triggered by a curse or a magic potion, wolf-like hair begins to grow and with it the urge to kill.

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Today the werewolf remains one of our most enduring myths. But did they really exist?

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Ancient books record thousands of alleged cases.

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This one contains the story of the most notorious werewolf of the 16th century, Gilles Gognet.

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In it, his accusers testified they saw a wolf man.

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But did they see a wolf who looked like a man?

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Or a man who looked like a wolf?

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This is not Hollywood makeup. The hair is real.

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Each year, Robert's International Circus tours Mexico, delighting audiences young and old.

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Most of its performers are unknown, but no other circus in the world has an act like the Gomez Brothers,

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built as the wolf boys.

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People know them as the wolf boys, but I also present them as the most famous Mexican kids in the world, Danny and Larry.

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Circus owner Roberto Compa and his son Mundo took Danny and Larry out of a carnival when they were boys

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and trained them as trapeze and trampoline artists.

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Born with a rare medical condition called hypertrichosis, thick, soft hair completely covers their faces, even their eyelids.

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Well, I've had this hair for 18 years, and I think if I didn't have it, no one would recognize me.

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It's because of my hair that everybody notices me. But then again, I have no choice.

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Danny and Larry are unique. They're the sixth generation of their family to inherit hypertrichosis,

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which simply means excess body hair.

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In all other respects, they're perfectly normal and healthy.

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Larry and Danny's family isn't the only one to ever live with a strange condition.

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In fact, similar cases of this genetic abnormality have shown up all around the world.

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This Burmese family suffered from the same condition and could only earn a living in the circus.

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In Austria, a cast that was owned by Petrus Gonzales contained portraits on the wall,

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which document one of the earliest known cases from the 1500s.

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Petrus Gonzales married a woman who was perfectly normal, but records show their children all inherited his wolf-like features.

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Could 16th century werewolf, Zil-Gonye, have been misunderstood too?

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Modern evidence may show us another reason why Gonye behaved like a werewolf.

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When Truth or Scare continues.

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Don't go away! Discovery kids will be right back after these messages.

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When suspected werewolf, Zil-Gonye was arrested.

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He was presumed guilty and tortured until he confessed the details of his crime.

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16th century law set forth the telltale signs of a werewolf, and Gonye fit the description to a T.

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There was one more crucial piece of evidence against him.

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A jar of strange ointment found with him when he was captured.

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In his testimony, Gonye said he made a pact with an evil spirit he encountered in the forest.

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The spirit gave him a magic potion to rub over his body.

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It was this potion he said that transformed him into a werewolf.

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Who he met in the forest and why is unknown.

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But if his trial were held today, the magic potion would be a real one.

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The potion could be explained, and James Duke would be called to testify.

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Duke thinks Gonye may have been ill and gone to a witch for treatment.

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Apparently they didn't have real doctors in, and a witch with someone who through experience knew the healing power of the plant.

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Duke is an expert when it comes to the healing power of plants.

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He's not a witch, but he knows how they may have used plants to make powerful special potions.

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A botanist with the United States Department of Agriculture for nearly 30 years,

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he traveled the globe learning the secrets of foculars and witches,

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a practice that's changed little in 400 years.

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She would talk to you just like a doctor today, get an analysis.

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After she'd figured out what was wrong, she'd probably go get some of her dried herbs

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or maybe go into the forest and pull up the right herbs. They knew which herbs did what.

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A witch needed a sensitive tongue and strong nerves.

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Modern pharmacists use accurate scales to fill a prescription,

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but witches relied on trial and error, using smell and taste to judge the potency of plants.

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A bitter taste or slight burning sensation meant the herb was strong.

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It was a high-risk game of guesswork for both the witch and the patient.

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Nobody really knew the strength of these things.

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One, we might cure your convulsions, another might be ten times as strong and potent,

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and might actually cause convulsions, another could be closer to fifty times more potent

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and might kill you. So without careful measuring, you don't know the potency of a medicinal plant.

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Some of the herbs witches used contained mind-altering chemicals that could cause sinister symptoms.

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If you apply the concoction that your witch had fixed for you, it just might cause you to hallucinate.

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And among the hallucination possible, one might be to imagine that you're a wolf.

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Did a witch's potion turn Gilgonye into a werewolf?

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The salve was put on the skin because if you took it early, it would taste bad,

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and sometimes it would make you sick. So rub it on the skin, it gives you the chance to enter the skin.

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Sometimes it gets in the bloodstream faster that way. You bypass the nausea and the vomiting,

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and sometimes you have the side effects quicker.

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What witches couldn't control was the impact of their concoctions on the psyche of their patients.

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The sensation of turning into a monster who could kill could be like falling under a horrifying spell.

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A scary as it sounds, there are people who still use these witch recipes.

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They live in the rainforests of Peru. They're called curridero. Duke has been studying these modern medicine men for many years.

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My shaman in the forest, instead of turning into a wolf, he turns into a jaguar, and he likes it,

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and he returns for his own sake.

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It is a communion with the gods.

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Was convicted werewolf, Gilgonye, a victim of a witch or a witch?

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I think it's a very good idea to have a good relationship with a witch.

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I think it's a good idea to have a good relationship with a witch.

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I think it's a good idea to have a good relationship with a witch.

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Was convicted werewolf, Gilgonye, a victim of a witch or a prisoner of his own brain?

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After four centuries, a link may have been found between mentally ill patients and the legend of the werewolf.

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When Truth or Scare returns.

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Don't go away. Discovery Kids will be right back after these message.

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Kids, where it's your world.

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Confessed werewolf, Gilgonye testified that a magic ointment had turned him into an animal with a lust for blood.

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The courts found him guilty of being a werewolf.

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But was he?

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Four centuries later, a witness would come forth to testify that werewolves like Gilgonye

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may not have been perpetrators of dastricly deeds, but prisoners of their own minds.

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Chief psychiatrist Harrison Pope of McLean Hospital in Massachusetts was interested in finding out more about mycanthropy,

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a mental illness that causes people to believe they're animals.

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Among the various patients that we saw here at the hospital, there were some who had visible barking, growling, crawling on all fours,

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feral posturing lying on the ground or under the bed.

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It is a fascinating phenomenon that so many of the patients believed that they were wolves or dogs out of a choice of thousands of possible animals.

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Now, what it is in the human brain that causes people to choose this particular type of delusion, we do not know.

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To try and discover the origins of lycanthropy in the brain, Pope and other experts used an MRI.

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Also in the temporal lobes, you can see there is a large degree of atrophy.

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Behind the eyes on either side of the skull are the temporal lobes, which play a primary role in sound, smell and memory.

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Irritation of certain spots in the temporal lobes can cause hallucinations such as imaginary odors or voices.

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In most people, they appear full and healthy.

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But in some psychotics, they are shrunken, causing abnormal electrical signals, called complex partial seizures.

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Associated with these seizures are what psychiatrists call fixed delusions, such as the recurring nightmare of being a wolf.

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Gilles Gagnier allegedly attacked nine other people before he was captured.

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If so, his behavior could have been the result of a fixed delusion that he was a werewolf.

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Could a temporal lobe seizure have been the culprit?

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Gagnier suffered from severe malnutrition, something as simple as a lack of vitamin B6 in the diet could be the cause of seizures in the temporal lobe.

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Could it have actually been something that Gilles Gagnier ate that turned him into a werewolf?

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We'll learn how a batch of bad bread may have turned one man terribly mad.

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When truth or scare returns.

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Don't go away. Discovery Kids will be right back after these messages.

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Discovery Kids, where it's your world.

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In France, four centuries ago, the case of accused wolf men, Gilles Gagnier, caused a sensation.

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Each day, as more sorted details of his crime became known, outrage turned to obsession.

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We still don't know exactly why Gagnier attacked his fellow villagers.

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One thing we do know is that he was not alone.

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Between 1520 and 1630, the jails housed a constant flow of accused werewolves.

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Over 30,000 were tried in France alone.

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Most were poor pitiful rejects of society.

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They denied they were werewolves, but judges used torture if necessary to obtain a confession.

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Gagnier and others gave in after their bodies were battered and their wills were broken.

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Once the verdict was in, mercy was granted in the form of an execution.

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The law required that they be publicly burned alive at the stake.

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For a fleeting moment in the 16th century, it seemed the devil had been let loose and the world had gone mad.

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Mary Matossian of the University of Maryland thinks it may be as simple as a case of spoiled bread.

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An expert on the witch hunts that plagued colonial America in the late 1600s,

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she noticed a startling similarity to the epidemic of werewolf trials in Europe.

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Eventually, a pattern began to emerge.

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Werewolf trials seemed to occur during or after extreme cold spells in regions seen here in blue,

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where rye was a staple of the diet.

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We compare areas where rye was grown with places where witchcraft trials and werewolf trials were common.

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We can see that they overlap to an amazing degree.

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Matossian came upon a reference to a fungus called ergot, a medial of folk medicine used in childbirth to speed up contractions.

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Ergot infects ears of rye when winter is extremely cold.

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Ergot seemed harmless enough.

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Still, she decided to consult George Bean, a colleague at the University of Maryland, and an expert on fungus.

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Matossian was in for a big surprise.

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Bean revealed that ergot is a powerful hallucinogen.

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The symptoms of ergot poisoning read like a horror story, muscle spasms.

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Uncontrollable filts and hallucinations of being bitten or pecked by some sharp invisible force.

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Those are the kind of symptoms that people who seem to be bewitched

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and people who are believed to be werewolves or think they are werewolves tend to display as well.

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The symptoms of ergot poisoning read like a horror story, muscle spasms.

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Matossian believes that if ergot can induce the hallucination of being a werewolf,

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it could also cause a whole village to believe they'd seen a werewolf.

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The evidence is compelling.

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In the 16th century, the scene was set for the appearance of werewolves.

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In the 16th century, the scene was set for the appearance of werewolves.

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In the Jura Mountains in France, winters were harsh and the snow was deep.

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As it melted, it flowed into the valleys, flooding the lowlands and destroying the sensitive wheat crop.

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But the rye, which is hardier, survived.

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If the summers were hot, conditions were perfect for ergot.

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Most accused werewolves and their accusers were the poor and downtrodden.

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As a result, for more than a century, generation after generation of unsuspecting peasants

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were consuming rye bread and suffering convulsions and delusions caused by ergot poisoning.

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The hallucinations of werewolves produced by ergot were stark and vivid.

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People clung to the only explanation that made sense to them.

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Demons were afoot and those who consorted with them deserved to die.

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Ergot poisoning vanished in the modern age with the introduction of official grain inspections in the United States and Europe.

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For Gilles Gagnet, Matossian's astonishing testimony that food could kill would come 400 years too late to save him.

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The people of France are still haunted by the ghosts of werewolves.

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Real wolves were exterminated in Europe centuries ago.

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But the primal fear of the wolf man still lingers as it did 400 years ago when Gilles Gagnet was led to the stake.

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Consumed by mass hysteria, the villagers looked on as the charges were read against him.

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Beyond a reasonable doubt, Gagnet was a werewolf who had committed a vile and brutal murder.

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DOOMED by the power of myth, he was sentenced to death.

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Today, the life of Gagnet and thousands like him would have been saved by the expert testimony of modern science.

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He could have been poisoned.

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Or he could have been mentally ill from malnutrition.

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Even bread tainted with a tiny fungus could have been to blame.

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Once in a blue moon, someone is born who bears an astonishing resemblance to a wolf, but is perfectly healthy.

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We'll never know for certain what made people believe Gilles Gagnet was a werewolf.

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But thanks to modern science, we finally have a few ideas.

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We may never have all of the answers, but the wolf man it seems will always live on in our imaginations.