3 different accounts, from the late 18th century in North Wales, of a 'werewolf' that apparently killed and mutilated several people and animals.

I recently found the following historical accounts from North Wales:

1798 - Two men walking across the Bickerton Hills in Cheshire saw something that sent them running for their lives. The full moon had just risen, and as it peeped over the hilltop, the travellers saw the silhouette of an enormous unidentified animal against the lunar disk. The animal lifted its head and let out a bloodcurdling howl which echoed through the Cheshire hills. The two men rushed into an inn and refused to continue their journey until morning.

At dawn on the following day, the mutilated bodies of two vagrants were found in a wood just five miles from the inn. It didn't seem to be murder, because their bodies had been literally slashed to ribbons by something which had claws like knives. One of the victims had tried to cross a stream as he had fled the scene of the slaying and had been pounced upon in the waters. His head was never found, and seemed to have been torn off. The head of the other victim was found stripped of its face and ears in another part of the wood. The jaws of the animal that killed the man must have been powerful because the victim's skull had been cracked and splintered during the gruesome.

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In the winter of 1791, a farmer went into his snow-covered field just seven miles east of Gresford, and he saw enormous tracks that looked like those belonging to an overgrown wolf. He followed the tracks with a blacksmith for two miles, and they led to a scene of mutilation which made the villagers in the area quake with fear that night. The tracks led into a farmstead where every single animal had either been literally torn to shreds or mortally wounded. One snow-covered field was just a lake of blood dotted with carcasses of sheep, cattle, and even the farmer's dog. The farmer was found locked up in his house in a terrible state. He wasn't harmed physically, but he was terrified. He had barricaded himself in after witnessing an enormous black animal that resembled a wolf ripping the throat out of his sheepdog. The animal had then gone for the farmer, but he had just managed to run in the farmhouse in time. He had bolted the heavy oaken door and hid under a table in the kitchen armed only with a pitchfork. The farmer said the wolf pounded on the heavy oak door, almost knocking it off its hinges. The weird-looking animal then stood up on its hind legs like a human and looked in through the windows of the farmhouse. Its eyes were blue and seemed intelligent and almost human-like. The beast foamed at the mouth as it peered in, then bolted from the window to commit wholesale carnage on the farm. Each of the sheep were left as pelts of wool with a head attached, lying flat on the snow like a woolen mat. The animal had even eaten sections of the animal's spines, and no one had ever seen a predator do something like that before.

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Records of an enormous wolf-like animal in north Wales date back to 1790, when a stagecoach travelling between Denbigh and Wrexham was allegedly attacked and overturned by an enormous black beast almost as long as the coach horses. The terrifying animal tore into one of the horses and killed it, while the other horse broke free from its harness and galloped off into the night whining in terror. The attack took place just after dusk, with a full moon on the horizon. The moon that month seemed blood red, probably because of dust in the stratosphere from a recent forest fire in the Hatchmere area. The locals in north Wales and Cheshire thought the moon's rubrical colour was a sign that something evil was at large and the superstitious phrase, 'bad moon on the rise' was whispered in traveller's inns across the region.

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