The Rat King is a series of rats whose tails were entangled during childhood. With age, the limbs grow together, uniting the entire group into a single creature, whose appearance is capable of scaring Stephen King. The famous biologist Alfred Brehm in his book "The Life of Animals" describes the Rat King very carefully, mentioning both the real and the fantastic background of the phenomenon - in fact, scientists still cannot figure out who these frightening creatures really were.
Myth-making
In the Middle Ages, the discovered "Rat Kings" could cause panic among the population of a small town. Strange, like a nightmare of a priest, the creatures suggested thoughts of corruption, witches and sorcerers. It was believed that the Rat King rules over all the rats in the city and can order them to attack people. By the way, the period of the Black Death was also blamed on the Rat Kings by uneducated peasants.
Rats living in the wild are subject to a very special disease: several of them grow together with their tails and form the so-called rat king, about which in the old days they had, of course, a different concept than now, when he can be seen in almost every museum. Previously, they thought that the rat king in a golden crown sits on a throne of several subjects who have grown together among themselves and from here decides the fate of the entire rat kingdom! In any case, it is true that sometimes quite a large number of rats are caught, tightly entwined with tails, they can hardly move and compassionate rats out of pity bring them food. Until now, they do not yet know the real reason for this phenomenon. It is thought that some particular sweat on the tails of rats causes them to stick together, but no one can say anything positive. - Alfred Brehm.
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King of thirty heads
The museum in the small town of Altenburg houses an amazing exhibit representing the largest known Rat Kings. The remains of a strange creature formed by a group of 32 rats were found back in 1828 - then, by the way, they were considered the very same Pied Piper of Gammeln, who took his true form.
Tenacious creatures
Until the middle of the last century, the scientific community assumed a relatively short lifespan of the Rat Kings. However, in 1963, a Dutch farmer found the remains of a king consisting of 7 rats in his field. X-rays showed that the ratpot lived in this state until the old rat age.
Hoax
There is also a quite reasonable version about the origin of the Rat Kings. Many cryptozoologists consider them nothing more than a hoax: there is not a single confirmed report on living creatures, but the remains may well belong to dead rats.