With its picturesque, gently rolling hills, dark forests, and gothic castles, it's no surprise that Germany has served as the backdrop for some of literature's most iconic fairy tales.

Drawing on the incredibly rich folklore of their native

land, authors like Jacob and Willem Grimm brought to life timeless stories of evil witches,

noble heroes, beautiful princesses, and terrible monsters. Such stories were born out of a time

when man-eating wolves took on public personas as

being the reincarnation of evil men, such as the wolf who terrified the people of Ansbach in

1865, until they captured him, dressed him in a man's clothes, and then hung him like a criminal.

It's no surprise then that in many children's tales,

the malevolent force often comes in the form of a devious wolf. To better aid in its

deceptive ways, the wolf will often mask its evil intentions by adopting a physical disguise,

or most interestingly, shape-shifting, to assume the form of a normal man.

We see this in many German folk tales like the werewolf of Andernach, the werewolf of

Ponquette, and the White Wolf of the Hearts Mountains.

Stories about men being afflicted with lycanthropy because they have been cursed. But fantastic

stories of supernatural beings lurking in European forests are of course only believable when read

to small children. Certainly, such creatures have long been understood to be figments of human

imagination. Why then? do the following stories from

military-aged men serving in various regions of Germany over the last 40 years seem to cast doubt

on that presumption? To the contrary, these men insist they saw something that terrified them out of

their wits. For want of a better word, because the creatures they saw vary in appearance,

we might call them shapeshifters, but the Germans might call them by another name, Alphoker.

In essence, at least according to the Kurpai people of neighboring Poland, a skinwalker.

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