Somewhere in the farthest reaches of the Gobi Desert lives a creature so terrifying the
very mention of its name can turn the scarlet cheeks of a Mongolian nomad, white.
This giant of the underground lives deep under the sand, only to emerge now and again to
spray its human victims with a deadly poison.
Its venom is so powerful it corrodes metal.
Its skin is so toxic if it brushes up against a human you first hear a howl, followed by
a deathly silence.
As a Mongolian Prime Minister once warned, death is instant, and there’s nothing anyone
can do to help.
This is the story of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a nightmarish tale you
can hear being told from one end of the Gobi Desert to the other.
The Mongolian death worm, aka, “olgoi-khorkhoi”, is something to be feared and respected.
When those wandering nomads see waves of sand created by the worm, there is only one thing
to do: get away, fast.
Still today western men on expeditions can be found in the yurts of nomads sitting around
the fire, telling them stories about those unlucky people that came upon this worm and
didn’t get away.
The death worm is a terrifying thing, make no mistake.
By all accounts, it doesn’t come up often.
It kills seemingly only when threatened, but sightings of it are numerous.
For that reason, those western-led expeditions have tried on a few occasions to unearth the
truth about this monster of mystery.
The last one wasn’t even that long ago.
We’ll get around to that later.
The first mention of the death worm was after an American paleontologist named Roy Chapman
Andrews went over to that desolate part of the world in the 1920s.
Back home he wrote the book, “On the Trail of Ancient Man”, and that’s where we first
heard of the deadly worm.
In the book, Andrews writes that he never saw one himself, but in certain areas of that
hostile desert locals and officials would regularly talk about a terrible thing that
lives under the sand and occasionally kills animals and their owners.
This naturally caused quite a stir in the West.
People were fascinated by the possibility that some freak animal might exist that had
heretofore never been mentioned in any science books.
In a second book called, “The New Conquest of Central Asia”, Andrews mentioned the
beast again, saying, “It is reported to live in the most arid, sandy regions of the
western Gobi.”
What really piqued the interest of western scientists and the public alike was the fact
the Mongolian Prime Minister at the time, Jalkhanz Khutagt Sodnomyn Damdinbazar, said
it existed.
With a name like that he deserves to be heard.
This is what he said about the death worm.
“It is shaped like a sausage about two feet long, has no head nor leg and it is so poisonous
that merely to touch it means instant death.
It lives in the most desolate parts of the Gobi Desert.”
This was another thing that fascinated foreigners: the desert itself.
At the time, parts of the Gobi were new territory for westerners.
It was a hostile place and some of the locals could also be hostile.
In the early 20th century, it was a part of the Earth that conjured up monsters in the
minds of westerners.
The desert itself is a giant, covering 500,000 square miles (1,295,000 km2) and spanning
much of China and Mongolia.
It was the great unknown, an enigma, especially at its wildest west where the huge sand deserts
can be found.
That’s the area where the death worm lived.
Hardly anything was written about this place in a European language in the early 20th century.
The only people besides the nomadic peoples that had been there were a handful of intrepid
travelers.
They talked about their journeys, but they were far from large-scale mapping expeditions.
Then in 1923 something amazing happened when a crew from the American Museum of Natural
History arrived in the Gobi Desert.
They discovered the first dinosaur eggs, or at least they were the first team to find
dinosaur eggs and have them recognized as that by the scientific community.
So, when three years later a man said that a giant death worm reportedly lives in the
sand, for some people it wasn’t hard to believe.
We should say the American writer that reported this was not sold on the existence of the
worm, but that didn’t stop more westerners arriving looking for the thing in the decades
to come.
As you’ll see, there have been quite a few western-led investigations since Andrew’s
feet grazed the Mongolian sands.
The name olgoi-khorkhoi can be translated as, “large intestine worm.”
That might sound like something you flush down the toilet bowl, but if you saw the thing
in your bathroom, you’d be the one trying to get down the bowl.
It looks rather like the worm that appeared in the Dune novels, but the Mongolian death
worm doesn’t have many of those worms’ characteristics.
According to the Mongolians that talk about the worm, it is not only deadly to touch,
but it can kill from a distance by spitting venom at a person.
If that isn’t bad enough, it also has the uncanny ability to electrocute things.
The good news is that it hibernates most of the year and can be seen mostly in the months
of June and July, especially during rainfall.
When it eats, it often chooses a wild plant known as “goyo.
The worm might also chow down on a camel and if it does it may well lay eggs in its intestines.
If there are no camels nearby, a rodent or even a human will do.
Ok, so now let’s dig a little deeper and see what happened on those other expeditions
to find the worm.
First, you have to know the word, “cryptid.”
A cryptid is an animal that science hasn’t yet said is real.
Cryptozoologists are the people that go looking for such animals.
These mysterious entities can be found in just about every culture.
In the U.S. you’ve got Big Foot and myriad other cryptids from state to state.
In Scotland, they have the Loch Ness Monster, and in Australia, they have the man-eating
Yowie.
One of the reasons such frightening entities came into existence was not some troll from
history just making things up.
Most of the time it was down to people or animals going missing.
On some occasions, the dead person would have been ripped apart as if by an incredibly strong
wild beast.
The first mention of a monster near Loch Ness dates back to the sixth century AD, when some
unfortunate guy went swimming and seemed to have been eaten by a beastie in the water.
When something can’t easily be explained, humans throughout history have been known
to make things up.
For example, there are cases in Europe when serial killers were convicted of being werewolves.
We don’t need to tell you that they weren’t, but because authorities back then didn’t
understand the psychopathology of serial killing, especially when it involved eating flesh,
some people were found guilty of “crimes of lycanthropy.”
It’s the same with monsters.
Sometimes they were blamed for the mass killing of sheep, or stealing children out of the
fog, or mutilating camels in the Gobi Desert.
The question is, is the death worm something else in disguise?
Let us now introduce a man named Ivan Mackerle.
He was a Czech cryptozoologist who went around the world looking for mysterious monsters.
He once visited Scotland and spent some time looking for Nessie, and another time he went
to Madagascar in search of the elephant bird.
The thing he was really interested in, though, what you could call an obsession of his, was
the Mongolian death worm.
Twice in the 90s and once in the early 2000s he took a team out to the Gobi to search for
the thing.
He had a few theories about the worm.
For one thing, he said it was only about as thick as a man’s arm and only around half
a meter long.
He said it was blood-red in color, had no eyes, no mouth, and no nostrils.
He also believed the worm could deliver an electric shock, and he said it was indeed
venomous, but that was because it often fed on the poisonous varieties of the goyo plant.
Did he find it, though?
Well, he came up empty-handed after his first two trips, and then on his third and last
trip, he was told by a Buddhist monk to go home or else his life was at risk.
That night he had a crazy dream about the death worm and when he woke up his back was
covered with large boils filled with blood.
Still, he never found the worm.
It wasn’t through lack of trying, though.
Mackerle’s expeditions involved serious work, including interviewing a lot of people
and even blowing up parts of the desert so they could investigate the depths.
Other times he scanned the desert from a plane using a camera.
He found nothing, but according to his friends, he had a lot of fun trying.
In 2005, the British Centre for Fortean Zoology followed in his footsteps.
Instead of blowing up parts of the desert, they flooded parts and also damned streams,
hoping they could flush the thing out from where it was hiding.
Alas, they also went back home having never seen a death worm.
Richard Freeman, who led the expedition, said he interviewed scores of locals who claimed
they’d seen the worm.
He talked to a park ranger who said he’d seen it no less than three times.
That night the ranger invited Freeman to sleep in his guest Yurt, the place where the ranger’s
wife told him about the time she’d seen the worm just three years prior.
Another guy Freeman talked to claimed he’d killed a death worm in 1972 by throwing a
rock at it.
As the story goes, some Russians took the dead worm back to Russia, and now it’s lost
somewhere in the basement of a Russian museum.
If it is, we wish they’d take it out and for everyone to see.
Freeman went as far as to speak to local governors, who also talked about sightings of the death
worm.
In fact, in the interview we watched, Freeman talked for over an hour about many people
who’d told him they’d seen the death worm, but Freeman himself didn’t get so lucky
to see one for himself.
Does he think the death worm exists?
Not really, or if it does, it’s not quite what the locals describe.
“They’re terrified of it,” said Freeman, but he also explained that as far as human
deaths are concerned it’s always a friend of a friend’s cousin who was killed.
Those who actually claim to have seen it have only ever said they saw the worm killing a
mouse.
So much for a deadly monster...
Then the Americans got in on the act a little later.
In 2007, the TV Show Destination Truth went in search of the worm, and yet again the damn
thing remained elusive.
Still, there are many people in Mongolia that will tell you the thing is real and they’ve
seen it with their own eyes.
After the U.S. TV crew went out there some journalists from New Zealand arrived in the
Gobi Desert.
They didn’t manage to capture the worm on film, but they interviewed locals who swore
on the existence of the worm.
“Because the sightings peaked during the 1950s a lot of these witnesses won't be around
for much longer, so I felt pretty lucky to get to some of them before they are actually
dead,” said the lead journalist on that expedition.
He did say, though, that in the cities people hadn’t even heard of the worm and it was
only when they reached the desert areas that people talked about olgoi-khorkhoi.
Worms couldn’t even survive under the sand.
We can blame the fact it’s called a worm on the English translation.
The Mongolians never said it was a worm, only that it looked like one.
That brings to the question of what exactly have the people of the desert been seeing?
Surely scores of people who saw a worm-like thing weren’t all tripping or trolling.
Well, it’s ever so slightly possible that some strange unheard-of creature does live
under the sand, but what’s more likely is the death worm sightings were either of some
kind of snake or a legless lizard.
Still, the only venomous snakes in Mongolia are a kind of viper and an adder and are both
quite small and look nothing like a worm.
They also wouldn’t live under the sand.
Then there’s the Steppe Ribbon Racer snake and that better fits the description, but
its venom is very mild to humans.
There’s the sand boa, which could possibly be found in the Gobi Desert.
It looks like the death worm that people have described, and although it’s not harmful
at all to humans, folks around the world fear them just because they look so scary.
Perhaps people in the past saw a large snake or heard of someone being bitten by a snake
and over time around the campfire, the story evolved into a giant worm that can generate
electricity.
Our conclusion is not all those people were lying about seeing the worm, but as the story
traveled people’s imaginations got the better of them.
If such a worm exists, one of them would have been captured by now, dead or alive.
Now you need to watch, “Soldiers Encounter Mysterious Monsters in Vietnam War.”
Or for more monster madness, “Scientists Find Best Evidence That The Loch Ness Monster
Actually Exists?”