Nightmare fuel.
Hikers captured a bone-chilling photo of a mysterious naked “wolf man,” who officials consider has lived within the wild for a minimum of 5 years, as they traveled through Germany’s Harz Mountains on Tuesday.
Gina Weiss and her friend Tobi encountered the unkempt figure who sat on a rock and seemingly carried a spear in the guts of the wildness, telling German newspaper Bild that the figure “wouldn’t take his eyes (off) us.”
Weiss, 31, said the possibility encounter with the unknown mountain man lasted about 10 minutes as she explored the woods near Blankenburg, about 150 miles outside of Berlin.
“Once we reached the sand caves we saw the wolf man,” Weiss told the outlet. “He stood up high on considered one of the caves and held an extended picket stick like a lance in his arm.”
Weiss estimated the person to be in his 40s and said it looked as if he was from the prehistoric era.
“He wouldn’t take his eyes off us, said nothing. He looked dirty like a Stone Age man from a history book,” she revealed.
The Times reported that police in Blankenburg received multiple reports over the past five years of a bizarre figure draped in “wolf fur or in a wolf costume” who roamed freely in its wilderness.
In March, authorities received a call from a distressed hiker demanding help, saying, “There’s a wolf man running around here” within the park — sharing that unexplainable fire bolts were appearing around the world of the figure, the outlet said.
Nonetheless, emergency personnel couldn’t find the “wolf man” once they reached the location for its investigation.
Members of the Blankenburg fire brigade also reported seeing a person roaming the forest, only to scurry away when noticing the crew, the outlet reported from MDR, the regional public broadcaster of Saxony-Anhalt — the state where Blankenburg is positioned.
Emergency personnel explained their concern lies more that a person resides within the woods and will cause a detrimental wildfire than the legend of a “wolf man” stalking hikers out within the wild.
“Someone clearly knows tips on how to live outside and adapt to the changing seasons,” Alexander Beck, the pinnacle of Blankenburg fire brigade, told Bild.
Positioned in northern Germany, the Harz Moutain range stretches 68 miles into the German states Sachsen-Anhalt and Niedersachsen, with its highest peak being The Brocken, towering over the landscape at greater than 3,700 ft, in response to the park’s website.
The region is thought for its labyrinth landscape and dense vegetation, which differs throughout its massive reach.
Eerie legends and myths of strange and otherworldly creatures lurking within the vast mountain ranges and wilderness are nothing recent for German folk tales and fables.
A 3rd of the country is roofed by dense woodland, and the Harz region’s forest is entrenched with lore focused around witches, ancient cults, and frightening devilish beasts prowling within the shadows.
The culture around witches within the wilderness runs deep enough that locals in the world have a good time a festival called “Walpurgis Night” or “Witches’ Night” on April 30 of every year since 870 CE, in response to World History.org.
The centuries-old lore dating back sometime in mid-700 CE, tells the story of witches descending to the best mountain peaks of the Harz region on “May Day’s Eve,” when their powers are legend to be most potent and danced around the hearth while entering an unholy matrimony with the devil.
The event is to pay respect to a ninth-century English missionary named Saint Walpurga, who repelled the witch’s evilness that was wreaking havoc on the nearby towns, in response to the outlet.
The festival is sometimes called “the second Halloween.”
In keeping with the legend, a well-lit fire is supposed to maintain evil spirits away — only further fueling the strangeness of the hearth sites found throughout the National Park as of recent.