Another slice of shared history between Detroit and New Orleans, since we were just there. Last week we talked about Cadillac’s time in the bayou.
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“Madame de Ber says there is no such thing as a loup garou, that a person cannot be a man and a wolf at the same time.”
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit*
“That it was the Loup Garou or wehr-wolf Archange had seen he did not doubt, and he recalled all the traditions of his youth, how the dreaded monster had stolen young children; sometimes a young man would be inveigled away into the forest and never heard of afterwards, and his fate conjectured by some, having seen the wolf dressed in his clothes.”
In Detroit, the loup garou — the fancy French colonial werewolf — haunts our old history books.
In New Orleans, they have a loup garou at THE ZOO. No joke.
What will it take to convince the Detroit Zoo to acquire one of these creepy, rare, French-y creatures?
*We REALLY need to talk about this book, which I just discovered in an attempt to learn more about the loup-garou. Amanda Minnie Douglas wrote a whole series of “Little Girl in the Old City” books – one of the earliest series of historical fiction for young women. Other “Old” cities including Quebec, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Salem, Boston and Washington. Ms. Douglas was also a literary scenestress in Newark, NJ. And she invented things. And I love her.
Thanks to some able eBay searching, I just bought this one and A Little Girl in Old New Orleans. So we should have more to discuss soon.
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I tell my kids lots of stories about the loup garou; I brought them back a book of cajun stories from my recent trip to nola and they call it the rougarou. was the zoo garou a loup or a rou?
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It is certainly a loup garou, but I have read about the rougarou subsequently. I think the terms are more or less interchangeable.
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Funny enough, I live in new Orleans now and grew up in Detroit. Right now I’m trying to do some research and writing on the Loup Garou or Rougarou ….and I’m trying in particular to find a copy or references to variants of the story with the little boy, who is sometimes known as Coco Robicheaux, who being naughty or going too far gets abducted by the Rougaru. ( the legend, not my friend Curtis Arceneaux the louisana hall of fame blues man who reciently passed, who was more well known as Coco Robicheaux ). It made me smile to see other people note the interesting and sometimes strange connections between Detroit and New Orleans. If anyone’s got any good book titles, interesting links to reference material, or memories of the variations of this story being told to them as a kid, let me know.
Hidden History of Detroit
If you like what you’re reading, I’m pretty sure you’ll like this book.
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