The Mysterious Hellhound of World War I

I'm not sure which forum this should go in, so I'm posting it here in the gray area. MODs can move it, if need be.

The tale of The Hound of Mons was originally published in 1919 by a Canadian war veteran by the name of F.J. Newhouse.
According to Newhouse, the incident started when a Capt. Yeskes and four men of the London Fusiliers were carrying out an order to venture into no man’s land to patrol the area.

They never returned.

Of course, with a war going on this was not strange, but when the bodies of the men were found several days later, something had ripped their throats out and left gaping teeth marks on their bodies!

A few nights later, soldiers from both sides heard an ear piercing, monstrous howl coming from the darkness of no man’s land.

The bloodcurdling shriek was allegedly so terrifying that some soldiers who had braved battle day after day considered retreating at once.
During the ensuing days more patrols would set out into no man’s land only to be found later in a similar mauled state, throats ravaged by some huge beast. The occasional anguished cries of terror from German soldiers seemed to indicate that they were suffering similar attacks. The eerie nighttime roars also increased in frequency and it was around this time that some of the soldiers on sentry duty along the edges of no man’s land reported seeing an enormous, gray hound skulking about out in the shadows of the war torn chasm between the two enemies. For two years the hound prowled the battlefield of Mons, gaining an ever growing list of victims and instilling horror in the troops. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared the hound was gone and the attacks ceased.

The Hound of Mons was very real. It was actually the result of German military experiments trying to make biological weapons. According to Newhouse, a German scientist by the name of Dr. Gottlieb Hochmuller had done an experiment by inserting the mind of a deranged maniac into a hound!

The death of Dr. Gottlieb Hochmuller in the recent Spartacan riots in Berlin has brought to light facts concerning the fiendish application of this German scientist’s skill that have astounded Europe. For the hound of Mons was not an accident, a phantom, or an hallucination–it was the deliberate result of one of the strangest and most repulsive scientific experiments the world has ever known.”

Newhouse’s account alleges that Hochmuller had searched mental asylums far and wide for a suitable subject who had gone insane from his hatred of England. The report claims that upon finding the perfect candidate, the German doctor then had his brain removed and surgically implanted into the body of a large Siberian wolfhound. The giant beast with the brain of a madman was trained and then taken to the battlefield and released into no man’s land to do its violent work. Accounts have variously claimed that the hound had been altered to be larger than before, that its capacity for hatred had been chemically enhanced, or that its hide had been made to be impervious to bullets. Newhouse claimed that papers had been found upon Dr. Hochmuller’s death that fully outlined the whole experiment as well as the doctor’s wishes to unleash the beast on allied troops, and fully proved that the experiments were real. It is not explained whether the doctor had anticipated the maniacal hound turning against its own side or why the walking weapon might have suddenly stopped its rampage.

There are some questions as to how this could have occurred, being as the medical field is not even capable of implanting brains in different species today, and this was in the early 1900's.
Could this have been true, or was this story twisted around to spread propaganda against Germany?

Perhaps the Hound of Mons was one such entity; a menacing apparition prowling through that twilight land between reality and the nightmare world that lies embedded deep within the human psyche. It is quite possible we will never know for sure.

mysteriousuniverse.org...

There's no way its true.
There have been experiments done where brains have been transplanted, but though the brain is alive, the subject is quite paralyzed for the rest their life. There is no way to reattach all the links to the nervous system, and all the systems that control all your bodily functions.

a reply to: sled735

dogs have been used in wartime in ancient times, why couldnt it have just been a trained dog?

Interesting for sure, I heard a lot of stories about horrifying hounds haunting the woods. I guess these tales are as common as the Bigfoot ones. Also there were a lot of strange experiments in Germany, but that sounds a lot like a campfire tale for soldiers in war. My first thought was it could be a grown a$$ wolf but who knows...

My opinion is, it's propaganda and a big aggrassive wolf.

Thanks for sharing!

Also: Thread => Cryptozoology

originally posted by: defcon5
There's no way its true.
There have been experiments done where brains have been transplanted, but though the brain is alive, the subject is quite paralyzed for the rest their life. There is no way to reattach all the links to the nervous system, and all the systems that control all your bodily functions.

I agree, but it is an interesting story.

Or maybe the guys were killed on the battlefield and then a stray dog looking for food found the bodies hence the teeth marks, interesting story though.

Yes. Yes go on...I'll get some popcorn this should be good.

a reply to: sled735

It is perfectly possible that a dog, or wolf, or hybrid of the same, was bred, trained, and released in war. In 1902, the Arthur Conan Doyle fiction, The Hound of the Baskervilles, was published.

*Spoiler alert: if you have not yet read the work, which I would recommend, since it is such a bloody good read, then do not read the rest of this post*

In the story, Holmes and Watson are confronted with reports of, and a face to face encounter with, some sort of devil dog, which in the end turns out to be a unique breed of mastiff and bloodhound crossed together, made supernatural in aspect by application of "a cunning preparation" of Phosphorus and trained for doing evil to whomsoever stood between its master and a large inheritance.

Now, although, yes, this was surely a work of fiction, as we know from the way that modern science and battlefield apparatus has evolved, even in our own lifetimes, life is more than capable of imitating art. Add to that fact, that battlefields have long courted the presence of war dogs, some of which are bred for massive size, stamina, and strength, and you soon realise that it would not have been at all impossible for a large dog to have been bred, and trained for extreme violence. It may even have undergone some sort of chemical augmentation (as did some soldiers during that period) involving psychotropic intoxicants. In fact, if the person allegedly responsible for this creature was indeed a doctor, it is perfectly possible that they might have come up with some combination of the available stimulants and mood altering chemicals available, to optimise the fury with which the animal behaved toward those it savaged.

The rest, the suggestion of the implantation of this animal, with the brain of a human murderer is frankly absurd even now, in a time when neuroscience has been coming on leaps and bounds, largely as a result of better imaging methods and understanding of the electrochemical processes of the brain as an object. Despite our increased understanding of the function of the human brain, we are still at a loss to fully transplant a brain from one person to another, let alone between species! God only knows the sort of tissue rejection problems that such an attempt would bring about! The implantation aspect to this story is clearly bunk, but the existence of the beast, and the description of its savagery, its hellish aspect, these things are not beyond the bounds of imagination at all! I would wager that any large predatory animal, set loose upon such a God forsaken, cratered, blood soaked, corpse strewn, mist streaked landscape, as that of the no-mans land during a first world war trench battle, would take on a totemic, supernatural mantle, and men in those trenches were under extreme mental duress.

Those who heard its terrible voice, and the terror of those who encountered the beast at their last, would have been some of them suffering PTSD to varying degrees, others full of stimulants, drink to calm the nerves... While I would never suggest that these men were giving false testimony, what they saw, and what they perceived are probably very different things, although similar in shape.

I would say that these tales probably stem back to a normal, if large, purpose bred war dog, being fed stimulants and mood amplifiers, and trained for carnage, and released to do its grisly work to set teeth to chattering in the skulls of allied troops.

Someone has been playing "Wolfenstein: The New Order" and thinks it is a documentary!

well it could have been Frankenstein's dog and it was pissed off and hungry...

does make an interesting story...i would imagine soldiers on a battlefield like that would have many nightmares and insecurities

I would suggest a wolf or a wolf pack. The war probably destroyed their habitat and they found the dead the dying and the frightened. At night, a wolf would be very hard to see and they are canny hunters.

With little to no cover during the day, a disused trench would have made a good den.

Perhaps too many soldiers were reading about Frankenstein.

Realistically, it could also have been trained attack dogs.

P

Interesting read whether it's true or not I don't know. I had a thought though were there any zoo's or enclosures on those areas during war time that may of kept wild animals that may of escaped during the war. With the amounts of dead laying about may of attracted stray wild animals

During WW-I the trenches and battlefields were at times piled high with dead rotting corpses.

Tales of Rats being routinely killed that were larger than most house cats or small dogs were not uncommon, they having grown to such sizes were the direct result of them gorging themselves on the dead or dying.

If true.

One could conceive of a wild/escaped canine doing the same and resulting in a larger than normal size and with possibly increased aggressiveness due to the hellish environment they inhabited.

What a cool story. Thank you sled for bringing yet another interesting story I had not yet heard of. Whether its true or not, I think we all know that its been tried before at some point... I wonder how many things have been tried that we never knew about. Especially back in the WWI/WWII era... when people were desperate to find some sort of advantage against the other side.

a reply to: SLAYER69

Yes, and plus they had the taste of human blood, which ive heard can cause them to lust for more. Back then the human blood would not be so tainted with chemicals, pharmaceuticals, gmos, flouride and other crap thats in our food and water... But yeah arent some animals put down or wild animals hunted down after they have tasted human blood out of fear that, after tasting it once, they will become some sort of man eater forever after?

Well, dogs did see and participate in the fighting of WWI and although I can't add much which is very on topic or clarify any speculation a specific dog nicknamed sergeant stubby served in the US army in WWI alerting troops of gas and artillery, alerting his comrades of wounded soldiers in no-mans land, raising morale and even finding a German spy!

en.wikipedia.org...

He doesn't look like much of a hell-hound though does he .

There were in-fact tens of 1000s of dogs employed in the first world war by almost all parties to the conflict, they saw use as messengers, were used to locate enemies by scent in scouting parties, aided wounded soldiers by running to them with medical supplies, raised morale as mascots and of course saw service as sentry dogs. Whether any of these animals could have become crazy and actually attacked soldiers is a possibility.
More can be read here:
www.historylearningsite.co.uk...

a reply to: DodgyDawg

oh, my, god.... sergeant stubby! hahahaha! holy sh!t. that dog is AWESOME! That's the most bad-ass Boston Terrier I've ever seen in my life. Which is odd because usually the boston terrier breed can get scared really easily. Sergeant Stubby must have really had a pair. lol.

And Sled nice OP, love stories like this. Never heard this one before, but it has all of those perfect little elements to make it a perfect campfire horror story.

Killer dog, mad scientist, maniac brains, brain transplant. sweeet.

who knows what it actually was, but the background story true or not is awesome.

good stuff.

a reply to: CallmeRaskolnikov

Um...

It would not have been a mad Nazi scientist. This was World War One we are talking about, not World War Two. The Nazi party only formed in 1920, so the events described in the OP would have been previous to that by some considerable time.

That is not to say that the doctor involved was not some sort of eugenicist, but he would not have been a Nazi, because they did not exist as an organisation at the time.

Feral dogs driven mad by the strange sounds of warfare.

a reply to: TrueBrit

ummmm, aren't all germans nazis? just kidding.

my mistake. that's what i get for skimming too fast!

you are correct sir