François Bertrand - The Vampire of Montparnasse (1823 - 1878)

François Bertrand, also known as the Ghoul of Paris, was a sergeant in the French army and part-time defiler of graves. He would go about the graveyards of Paris at night, apparently never having outgrown his goth phase, and at this point purportedly be 'overcome by gloomy thoughts'. Most people might simply put on a brave face and shake this off or return home and sob quietly into a pillow, but oh no, François Bertrand was not most people. His gloomy thoughts compelled him to dig up bodies with his bare hands and, quite literally, tear them apart before leaving the fragmented remains lying around the tombs.

François Bertrand, overcome by gloomy thoughts.

Having begun his spree of misdeeds in 1848, Bertrand proceeded to spend the rest of the year defiling graves in ever more repugnant ways, never returning to the same cemetery twice so as to avoid detection (Paris apparently having no shortage of cemeteries). The true nature of his crimes were never described in full, having been deemed 'too revolting for reproduction', though it is worth noting that it was Bertrand's case that prompted physician and psychiatrist, Joseph Guislain, to coin the term 'necrophilia'.

Of course Bertrand, pusher of boundaries, was not content with the simple acts of exhumation, fornication and dismemberment - this trifecta of misdeeds just wouldn't be complete without having a go at eating the dead. What remained of the corpses was often found to have been gnawed upon, to the extent that at first the citizens of Paris assumed that the perpetrator had been some kind of wild beast (so much so that he actually ended up having a huge influence on the portrayal of werewolves in popular culture). One particularly grizzly account of his behaviour describes how 'he tore the mouth open and rent the face back to the ears, he opened the stomachs, and pulled off the limbs'.

It wasn't until 1849 that Bertrand was eventually captured, having fallen for a spring gun trap that had been set up in the cemetery of South Parnasse. He managed to escape by leaping the wall, but not without leaving traces of blood from the gun-shot wound. Bertrand was later discovered by the police after having been treated in a nearby hospital and was subsequently tried and sentenced for the maximum penalty for 'violation of graves'. A whopping 1 year of jail time. 19th century France didn't really have their shit together.

After having been released from his astonishingly modest stay in prison, Bertrand went on to spend the rest of his life working at various points as a clerk, a mailman and a lighthouse keeper. Can any of us ever look at our mailman the same way again?