On a sunny July day in 1922, village friends the shepherd Otto Heinkel and the poacher Hans Müller were hunting in the Hochfilzenalm plateau in southern Austria. And suddenly, quite unexpectedly, they almost collided with a creature of an eerie kind that was closely watching them.
On a hillock, literally a few meters away from the men frozen in horror, who had forgotten about their guns, on a mossy piece of rock lay … a giant worm at least a meter long and as thick as a tin chimney!
The creature, as Mueller put it, "like the very devil," hissed furiously and began to wriggle, as if trying to reach the hunters. Heinkel, coming to his senses, with shaking hands began to remove the gun hanging behind his back over his head.
But at this time, the black-purple "worm" sharply arched in an arc, thrust out its huge cat's paws, wide open its fanged mouth and in one jump flew off the stone, intending to deal with the uninvited guests.
“I lost my head with horror when this wildly hissing beast jumped right at us,” Mueller later recalled. - We rushed away, down the mountain, and Otto threw his gun in panic and forgot about the dog. We rolled head over heels for 5-7 minutes and came to our senses only near a country road … The butt of my Sauer cracked from hitting a stone, Otto lost his gun and dog, our clothes turned into rags, and our bodies were bleeding from bruises. After that, I lay sick for several days, but in the village I did not expand on this topic …"
Only a few days later the hunters told their story to the priest, who wrote it down in detail and, just in case, reported the incident to the police.
Such episodes are links in a rather long chain of evidence from villagers that in the remote corners of Bavaria (Germany), Switzerland and the Austrian Alps, an as yet unknown species of reptiles or amphibians, called Tatzelwurm ("clawed worm") or stollenwurm ("burrowing worm" ").
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The publisher of the British almanac The Unknown, Dr. Karl Shuker, writes: “Judging by the stories of farmers, the attack on herds of pigs in 1924 in the vicinity of Palermo in Sicily was carried out by strange serpentine animals with a cat's head, powerful and sturdy fangs and strong clawed forepaws. Creatures like Tatzelwurm are common in a number of other countries."
In those parts there are many folk legends about a dragon living in the mountains with a cat's head and a sharp crest on its back. Back in 1779, a certain Hans Fuchs saw two huge worms at once, which frightened him so much that the unfortunate man had a heart attack, which led him to the grave.
However, before his death, Fuchs managed to tell his family about the unfortunate meeting, and one of his relatives made a sketch of this monster, resembling a huge lizard, from the words of a witness. German cryptozoologist Ulrich Magin notes: "Among the evidence available in the investigation, this drawing remains the best depiction of mysterious creatures."
It's a shame, but in 1924 science lost the chance to study the mysterious monster. In the thickets of the Muir River valley, travelers accidentally stumbled upon a strange tailed skeleton (presumably a lizard) about 120 centimeters long.
It had a large round head with powerful canines and forelimbs. After much deliberation, a student veterinarian who was in the group suggested that these were the remains of … a roe deer (with four fangs ?!). Unfortunately for science, no one was interested in the find anymore, and they left it in the same thickets.
Descriptions of Tatzelwurm made by Heinkel and Müller, as well as others, coincide with later ones, and there are about two dozen of them in total. The only controversial circumstance is the number of limbs in the monster. Approximately half of the eyewitnesses claim that he has one pair of paws, while the rest state that, probably, paws are missing at all.
In general, the descriptions allow us to talk about a giant worm-like lizard or mutant salamander. According to scientists, both options are possible. By the way, in the world there is a group of skink lizards, of which some have two pairs of paws, while the other manages only one, the front pair.
European zoologists believe that the mysterious Tatzelwurm is a mutant of the American poisonous lizard - the gila monster, which lives in the Mojave Desert, California, USA.
