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The Child-Eating Wolves of Turku
A horrifying series of fatal wolf attacks on children between 1880–1881 in rural southwest Finland
A lot of things could kill you in 19th Century Finland but perhaps one of the nastiest ways to go was to be attacked by a wolf. The grey wolf (canis lupus) is most active by night and usually hunts in packs to predate on ungulates like deer and moose. Wolves can also hunt in pairs or alone. Wolves have exceptional endurance and can travel far and fast.
Wolves by their nature avoid people and, according to one study, there have been fewer than 3,000 people killed by wolves worldwide in the past 300 years.
In Finland in the years 1710–1881, however, between 175 and 265 adults and children were killed by wolves; an average of between one person per year to three people every two years.
Whilst most deaths-by-wolf were isolated incidents, the decades after 1820 also saw a series of clusters of lone wolf or wolf pack attacks which claimed the lives of multiple young children.
These geographically and temporally clustered attacks indicate that killing humans was not normal wolf behaviour, but was a specialised, adaptive behaviour that single wolves or packs developed and maintained until they were killed or driven off.
In the years 1880–1881, at least 22 children lost their lives in wolf attacks in the rural area north of the city of Turku, southwest Finland.
January 15, 1880, Vellua village, Kalanti parish (60 km /37 miles from Turku):
Two brothers, Kalle and Ville Hörnberg, are outside their sauna at night when a wolf charges out of the forest, across their potato field, over their fence and snatches up eight-year-old Kalle. Ville runs to tell his mother.
Ville’s daughter recalled (in 1979 when she was 82) that she had been told the story of how the boys’ mother set out with local men to track the wolf:
“Traces of blood in the snow showed the path of the wolf…the tracks were easy to follow. Half a kilometre away…
