Frank Hamel

Frank Hamel (1869-1957) was a British author, folklorist, and scholar of the occult and esoteric working in London in the early twentieth century. Despite the name, Hamel was a woman writing under a form of her own name ambiguous enough to pass as male in the publishing world of her day. Her published work ranged widely across history, biography, and the supernatural, including several works of French historical biography - A Woman of the Revolution: Théroigne de Méricourt (1911), An Eighteenth-Century Marquise: Émilie du Châtelet and Her Times, and Famous French Salons - praised in their day for their vivid detail and lively portraits of the era's figures. Her most enduring work, however, is Human Animals (1915), a sweeping survey of the folklore, trial records, and firsthand testimony behind the belief that humans could transform into beasts - from the European werewolf trials to bird-women, familiars, and animal ghosts across cultures - drawing on sources from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas to produce one of the earliest popular treatments of shapeshifting folklore as a subject in its own right.