Lyall Lupin

Father of Remus Lupin, expert on Non-Human Spiritous Apparitions such as poltergeists and boggarts, later employed by the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures in the 1960s (Pm).

Born in the 1920s, he met his beautiful Muggle wife in the late 1950s. Hope Howell lived in Cardiff, Wales, and one day while walking in the forest she felt menaced by a large hulking man, which was actually a boggart. When she screamed, Lyall came to her rescue and turned the boggart into a mushroom. After they fell in love, he admitted she was never in actual danger (Pm). Their only son, Remus, was born a year later, and by the time he was four years old, Lyall took a job with the Ministry working to regulate dangerous creatures such as werewolves who were being recruited to join forces with Lord Voldemort. That is where the Lupin family first crossed paths with a werewolf known as Fenrir Greyback.

Greyback had been brought in to Control of Magical Creatures department after two Muggle children had been killed. Greyback denied killing them, and swore he was merely a Muggle tramp and not a wizard. His name was not on the Werewolf Register and he had no wand, but Lyall Lupin thought there were signs in his appearance that he was a werewolf, and told others in the department that they should lock him up for 24 hours until the full moon. Lupin was overruled and others laughed at his suspicians, which caused Mr. Lupin to lose his temper and exclaim that all werewolves were “soulless, evil, deserving nothing but death” (Pm). Greyback overheard this, but before a memory charm could be placed on him, he escaped with the help of two other werewolves. He wasted no time telling others in his “pack” that Lyall Lupin had insulted their kind, and in revenge, Greyback attacked five-year-old Remus as he slept during a full moon, turning him incurably into a werewolf (Pm).

Of course having his only son turned into a werewolf at such a young age made Lyall realize he had been wrong to discriminate, and he felt guilty that his short-sighted prejudice had literally come back to bite someone he loved. For years he kept the story of  his remark and Greyback’s revenge a secret, for fear his son Remus would hate him. (Pm)

After his son was bitten, the Lupins led a lonely nomadic existence, moving from town to town and not allowing Remus to play with other children. They tried many cures, but nothing worked (PA18). During the full moon, Lyall had to lock up their son and use silencing spells on the room, yet their neighbors knew something was strange about the Lupin boy. Just before his eleventh birthday, Albus Dumbledore tracked the family down, saying that Fenrir had bragged about what he had done to Remus, and that he wanted to help by allowing him to go to school at Hogwarts (Pm).  He explained that there would be a safe house in Hogsmeade where their son could spend full-moon nights – the Shrieking Shack – and the tunnel leading there from the school would be protected by the Whomping Willow (Pm, PA18). For the first time in his life, Remus would get an education and have real friends, which meant everything to him.

Sadly, just a few years after Remus left Hogwarts, he lost many of those same friends. James and Lily Potter were killed, and Sirius Black was locked up in Azkaban for the murder of 12 Muggles plus Peter Pettigrew, another friend (who had faked his death). By then Hope Lupin had died, but Remus decided it would be too disruptive for him to live with Lyall, and began to travel from place to place looking for work. Eventually he would be hired by Dumbledore as a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, a job which only lasted one year. However, Voldemort was rising again and Remus became a spy among the werewolves, and also lived with his old friend Sirius, who had by then escaped from Azkaban. It was during this time he met his future-wife Nymphadora Tonks, an Auror, and they married against great odds in 1997, later having a son, Teddy Lupin (Pm, DH25).