Rougarou

The rougarou (a Cajun rendering of the French loup-garou) is a werewolf said to prowl the swamps and cane country of south Louisiana. Descriptions vary — a wolf- or dog-headed man, red-eyed, haunting the wetlands at night — but the core is a human under a curse, roaming until it can be passed to someone else.

The figure descends directly from the loup-garou of France and French Canada, brought south by Acadian exiles and folded into the Catholic and Creole culture of the bayou. It carried real social force: elders warned that breaking the rules of Lent for seven years could turn a person into a rougarou, and the story was used to keep children out of the marsh after dark and to keep the community observant.

Like its French parent, the rougarou lives almost entirely in oral telling, varying house to house and town to town, and it remains a point of regional pride and festival in Cajun Louisiana today — folklore doing the double work of scaring and belonging.