In 2012, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu released Beyond the Hills, a two-and-a-half-hour film with no musical score, no demon, and no exorcist standing under a streetlamp while the orchestra announces that evil has arrived. What it has instead is mud, cold rooms, black robes, prayer, and two young women named Alina and Voichita. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes and a shared Best Actress prize for its two first-time leads. And almost everything in it happened.

Alina never existed. Not exactly. The young woman she was built from was named Maricica Irina Cornici, and in June of 2005 she died on a hillside in Vaslui County, in the poorest corner of eastern Romania, inside an unfinished religious community called the Holy Trinity monastery.

This episode walks the real case from the beginning. Irina's childhood in a Romanian orphanage after her family came apart. Her work abroad as a nanny. The friend from the orphanage who told her there was room at Tanacu, and the January arrival that put her inside a closed world run by a twenty-nine-year-old priest named Daniel Petru Corogeanu, a former footballer who had never finished his theological training and who had already told his own bishop that canon law was a nineteenth-century invention written by Freemasons.

It covers what changed that spring. The giggling during Mass. The fast she said the Virgin Mary had ordered. The voice she said was the devil's, telling her she was sinful. The two weeks in a psychiatric hospital, the schizophrenia diagnosis, the April twentieth release into the monastery's care with medication and instructions to return in ten days, and the return that never happened.

Then June. The hands and feet bound during the Ascension liturgy. The boards nailed together with arm supports added as an afterthought, a thing that everyone who saw it afterward called a cross. The chains. The towel. Three days in the church with holy water on her lips and nothing else. The moment the priest declared her cured, the bread and tea, the collapse, the ambulance that took an hour to reach a community with no telephone, and the six doses of adrenaline given by a doctor trying to bring her back.

And then the parts most retellings skip. The hospital staff who looked at her wrists and called the police. The autopsy finding of dehydration, exhaustion and a lack of oxygen. The 2007 verdicts in Vaslui, the appeal that cut them in 2008, the Romanian Orthodox Church closing the monastery and defrocking Corogeanu, and his parole in November of 2017. The coroner who took part in exhuming her body years later and said publicly that what killed her was the adrenaline, not the boards. Corogeanu's own claim that his mistake was calling for help at all. Her brother's testimony that he watched Satan enter his sister. And the village where people will still tell you the priest did everything he could.

Finally, the road from a death to a screen. Journalist Tatiana Niculescu Bran, who ran the BBC's Bucharest bureau, went past the headlines into court documents and village conversations and produced two non-fiction novels, Deadly Confession and The Book of Judges. Andrei Serban adapted the first for the stage. Cristian Mungiu saw that play in New York in 2007 while promoting his Palme d'Or winner, and five years later Irina became Alina. Then in 2017 an American production made The Crucifixion from the same case and did the thing Mungiu refused to do. It put the demon on screen, gave it a face, gave it music, and gave the audience the relief of knowing which explanation was correct.

That is the trade this season exists to examine. Hollywood hands you a monster so you do not have to look at the hillside. Before Hollywood, her name was Irina.

Hosted by Jeremy Hanson. Full archive at www.MRHANSoNpodcast.com.

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Bill Ramsey became known around the world as the Southend Werewolf, but his disturbing story raises a much older question: What if the legends of werewolves were never simply legends?

In this episode of MR HANSoN, Jeremy Hanson investigates the strange case of Bill Ramsey of Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England—a carpenter whose unexplained violent episodes, extraordinary strength, animal-like behavior and memory gaps eventually attracted paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren.

One of the most dramatic incidents occurred at Southend police station in July 1987. Sergeant Terry Fisher encountered Ramsey after a frightened woman reported that the man who drove her to the station had somehow “changed.” Ramsey allegedly attacked Fisher with extraordinary strength, and roughly a dozen officers became involved in restraining him.

After Ramsey was placed in a cell, witnesses reported even stranger behavior. His head, shoulder and arm reportedly came through the food hatch in the cell door. Sedatives failed to immediately subdue him, and the fire brigade was eventually called to help officers remove him.

But the Bill Ramsey werewolf case is only the beginning.

This episode travels through the forgotten history of werewolves, lycanthropy and European werewolf trials, when courts and governments treated reports of werewolves not as entertainment, but as a genuine threat.

We examine the 1573 Parlement of Dole werewolf edict, Gilles Garnier, the infamous Peter Stumpp werewolf case of Bedburg, Judge Henri Boguet, Jacques Roulet, and the transformation of the werewolf from a legal and supernatural category into what modern medicine recognizes as clinical lycanthropy.

Then the story returns to Ramsey.

Following earlier unexplained episodes and a 1983 incident at Southend Hospital, Ramsey eventually traveled from England to Connecticut, USA, where Bishop Robert McKenna performed an exorcism attended by Ed and Lorraine Warren, Nina Ramsey, John Zaffis and others.

Was Bill Ramsey suffering from a rare psychological or medical condition?

Was the Southend Werewolf story exaggerated by newspapers and paranormal investigators?

Or do centuries of werewolf folklore preserve fragments of something we stopped allowing ourselves to consider?

The mystery isn't what we can prove Ramsey did.

It's what witnesses believed they saw.

Criminal investigations depend on descriptions. But when witnesses describe something impossible, investigators have little choice but to remove the impossible details.

Animal movement becomes confusion. Impossible strength becomes adrenaline. A distorted face becomes poor lighting. A growl becomes a frightened memory.

Eventually, the description becomes human again.

There hasn't been a box on the form for “werewolf” for centuries.

Maybe there shouldn't be.

But what if that's exactly why we would never find one?

MR HANSoN — Season 3: Before Hollywood

Discover the true stories, historical mysteries, folklore, cryptids, paranormal encounters and unexplained events that existed long before Hollywood transformed them into monsters.

Topics: Bill Ramsey, Southend Werewolf, werewolf true story, werewolf history, lycanthropy, clinical lycanthropy, Ed and Lorraine Warren, Southend-on-Sea, Essex England, Peter Stumpp, Gilles Garnier, Bishop Robert McKenna, exorcism, paranormal investigation, cryptids, supernatural legends, unexplained mysteries, true crime, MR HANSoN Podcast.