Rougarou: Louisiana’s Swamp Werewolf

There’s something that happens to you when you’ve spent enough evenings on the bayou. The cypress knees cast long shadows across the bayou as the sun sets, and that’s when the old stories start to surface in your mind – none more than the legend of the Rougarou.

Growing up fishing and hunting in Southeast LA, I learned about the Rougarou at the same time I learned how to bait a hook. It was originally called the “loup-garou,” which means werewolf, but over time, the name morphed into what it is known today as the Rougarou.

The original French legend served practical purposes. Catholic communities would warn that breaking Lenten obligations for seven consecutive years would transform a person into a loup-garou. Parents found the creature particularly useful for encouraging proper behavior in children—much like how my father would point to rustling cypress branches on frogging trips and whisper, “Hear that? That’s the Rougarou coming for you.”

Physical Description and Alleged Behavior

The creature is said to stand impressively tall, with most accounts putting it at seven-plus feet. Stories from the Atchafalaya Basin describe it as a shadowlike creature with a disproportionately small head.

The Rougarou’s coat runs dark – typically black as fresh-poured coffee or sometimes a deep rusty color like oxidized marsh mud. Its eyes hold a particular terror – glowing yellow or blood red in the darkness, reflecting back your boat light from impossible distances across the water.

Habitat

If you’re looking to encounter the Rougarou (though I can’t recommend seeking one out), you’ll need to venture into Louisiana’s more isolated swamps. I would advise taking a look at Google Earth to map out sections of the swamp that are secluded with no roads or houses nearby. The creature seems most at home in the deeper reaches of our swamplands, particularly where ancient cypress trees create those eerie cathedral-like spaces.

The most consistent sightings come from Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes, especially in the remote sections of Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge, where the channels narrow and the Spanish moss hangs so thick it can block your running lights.

Honey Island Swamp along the Mississippi-Louisiana border carries perhaps the most famous association with the beast. Since the 1960s, hunters working the eastern edges of the swamp have reported encounters that they describe as strange eyes reflecting back from impossible heights in the trees.

Hunting the Rougarou

Having spent enough pre-dawn hours in duck blinds when something unexplainable moved through distant palmetto bushes, I’ve given this question serious consideration.

When hunting the Rougarou, you need a reliable handgun with substantial stopping power – something like a .44 Magnum revolver or a 10mm auto-loader. The creature’s reported speed and size demand immediate incapacitation.

My Cousin Jimmy, who claims a close encounter near Laffitte Swamp back in ’88, swears by his stainless Ruger Redhawk loaded with heavy hollow points. But remember, this isn’t like deer hunting. It’s more comparable to hunting a velociraptor.

How Would I Prepare It?

One lesson that has been handed down for centuries in Louisiana is the old saying, “If you kill it, you eat it.” And this goes for Rougarou as well. The few sightings that have been recorded suggest that the meat would be dark, with a purple tinge and an unusual metallic undertone – not unlike the taste that lingers when you’ve cut your lip.

Preparation involves a three-day brining in heavily salted water followed by a slow simmer with triple the usual cayenne pepper – the heat supposedly necessary to “burn out the curse.”

So, while I could theoretically tell you about a black iron pot preparation with andouille, trinity, and filé powder, my recommendation is to let the Rougarou keep to the deep swamp, and keep to more traditional proteins.

Recent Sightings 

The most compelling Rougarou encounter I’ve heard recently came from a crabber who runs traps in Barataria Bay.

He had been running his traps at dusk. The fog rolled in thick. He was pulling his final trap when he noticed something unnatural about the shoreline silhouette. “At first I thought it was just a big bull gator,” he said. “But gators don’t stand upright on their back legs. And they sure don’t have eyes that catch your Q-beam like two burning cigarettes.”

The creature reportedly watched him for nearly twenty minutes, tracking along the shoreline as the fisherman struggled with his outboard motor. Then it howled.  the crabber said “it was like someone trying to yell underwater.” The petrified man abandoned his final trap and didn’t return until broad daylight the following morning.

Myth or Monster?

I’ve spent more mornings than I can count watching the mist rise off the bayou. In all those years, I’ve never laid eyes on the Rougarou.

The rational part of me has to conclude that the Rougarou likely exists more in our collective imagination than in the physical world. Like the perfect fishing hole, it seems to appear in stories more often than in documented reality.

So, while I can’t in good conscience tell you the Rougarou prowls the swampland, I also won’t be the one to venture alone into certain remote stretches after sunset. Some things don’t need to be tested.