On December 21, 1890, People published Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's short story, "A Pastoral Horror." Taking place in the village of Laden in Bavaria, the story is about a masked man who commits a series of murders with a pickaxe. The identity of the killer is revealed to be the village's parish priest, Father Verhagen, who is committed to an asylum. Doyle's story is a rare example of nineteenth-century werewolf fiction that does not include supernatural elements. Verhagen does not transform into a wolf, as Clemence Housman's White Fell does in the The Were-Wolf. Instead, he remains human, but is driven to wolf-like madness by a disease (Doyle, "A Pastoral Horror;" Pugh, The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle).