Romasanta

This research is pending publication. All documents, notes, field notebook and photographs have been made available to the public for the edition of a book. This is what our researcher Ivort Macsaw planned in his inheritance before his death.

In Galiza, tradition says that the child who is the seventh in a row of male descendants, is predestined to become a werewolf.

Manuel Blanco Romasanta (better known as Lobishome de Allariz, O do Unto, Home do Unto, Sacamanteigas or Sacauntos) was the only case of lycanthropy registered in Spanish justice and the first serial killer of which there is documentary evidence. Today its history is still alive through the oral tradition that has been passed down from generation to generation making it a legend, and what has been a reality is mixed with fantastic myths and stories.

Romasanta was born into a humble family formed by Miguel Blanco and María Romasanta and several brothers in rural Ourense on November 18, 1809. He was the seventh child. Although called Manuel, the birth certificate recorded the name Manuela and was raised as a girl until the age of six, at which time a doctor certifies his gender according to the virilization of his body that until then, his genitals intersex, defined as woman.

The transcripts of the witnesses of the time showed that he was a man of “feminine forms”, and certain skills in the work of women of the time such as sewing, cooking and even his exaggerated devotion to the Catholic faith and understanding with the abbots. He also knew how to read and write, something very rare at the time, which gave him a position of power in front of most people with whom he interacted.

He dedicated himself to street vending in the Galician mountains. He was also known for being a travel guide, which led to the lands of Castile, Asturias and Cantabria, which offered him opportunities to trade. Rumors began to spread that he was selling grease of human fat and that he was therefore a criminal. He was accused of the murder of a sheriff in Ponferrada. Judged and convicted, he managed to escape, and was hidden for months. At that time there were a series of murders in the villages where he had been (Rebordechao, Montederramo, Esgos…) which, although different in technique, bore similarities with each other.

He was captured in September 1852 in Nombela (Toledo) and tried in Allariz (Ourense). During the trial, for which he was charged with 17 murders (all of them women and some of his children), he admitted that he had killed nine. He confessed to the judge, and so it was recorded in the minutes of the trial that are still preserved in the Archive of the Historical Kingdom of Galiza (A Coruña), which used his hands and teeth to kill the victims, and ate the remains. In fact, the typology of the wounds inflicted on the victims (locked with deep tooth marks) made them consider him a werewolf. He himself confessed that he had been the victim of a curse when he was young and that he had hallucinations in which he was surrounded by wolves after his murders.

The trial against the werewolf lasted about a year, and on April 6, 1853 the judge of Allariz issued a death sentence condemning him to a stick and to compensation of 1,000 reais per victim. Shortly after the sentence was signed, a French hypnologist who knew the case asked the Minister of Grace and Justice to postpone the application of the sentence and allow him to deal with the case. The hypnologist argued that Manuel Blanco was suffering from a monomaniacal mental illness called lycanthropy, and wanted to study it. In parallel, the defense lawyers managed to get Queen Isabel II to commute her sentence to life imprisonment claiming that there was no more evidence than her own confession.

Although his death is a mystery, recent investigations say he died shortly after in Ceuta prison. But legend has it that he returned to the mountain and continues to wander the Serra de San Mamede.

Ivort Macsaw

Ivort Macsaw was named Honorary President of the Lycan Foundation in 2016, a year after his hasty death.

He was one of the most prominent researchers at the Lycan Foundation. A philosopher by training, he eventually earned a doctorate in anthropology from Michigan State University. With years of experience in the field of research, in 2006 he was appointed Head of the Documentation Department of the Lycan Foundation, where he began a campaign for the internationalization of the foundation with projects in collaboration with institutions around the world.

In 2000 he arrived in Galicia to study the case of Romasanta in situ, after having done extensive research work with which he discovers that, despite being a case of what has been written a lot and which are preserved even official documents of medical inspections and until of the trials, the story presented certain shadows difficult to resolve from Michigan.

There were two trips to Galicia in 2000 and 2009, with stays of 11 and 9 months, with the aim of uniting the pieces of history that were yet to be discovered. To do this, he embarks on a journey mapping all the places where Manuel Blanco Romasanta passed in life: villages in which he lived, in which he hid, paths between villages and mountain carts that formed the backbone of the villages through which Romasanta walked as a hardware store almost 200 years before in looking for some vestige or witness, but being aware of the mythification his figure had experienced in these years.

Macsaw, in that obsession that characterizes him to gain visibility for the projects and campaigns of the Lycan Foundation, created a blog in which he was publishing his adventures in Galicia and new data on Romasanta in daily texts accompanied, as it could not be otherwise, by photos, lover of photography as it is.

Thanks to this blog we can locate all the places he visited and even know what sources led him to the findings. Thus, for example, we can read how chance leads him to discover in Ponferrada (town through which Romasanta passed several times) that around Chaves with his donkey loaded with trinkets to sell, the werewolf spent the night in the vicinity of the waters of Caldeliñas, in Verín. Ivort, after visiting the ruins of the spa approaches an antique dealer in the center of the village to acquire an old chamber. The antiquarian would give him the definitive clue to close the story that had been 2 centuries unconfirmed: the corpses of the victims of Romasanta existed.