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Cryptids of Switzerland
What cryptids are in Switzerland? The best-known is Tatzelwurm.
Switzerland’s mountains have always been full of dragons. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Swiss scholars took reports of mountain dragons seriously: the physician Johann Jakob Wagner recorded encounters in 1680, and the naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer illustrated them with vivid engravings in 1723, including a cat-headed serpent and a bristle-backed beast that reared up as tall as a man on Mt. Wangersberg in 1660.
Cryptids reported in Switzerland
The legends of Switzerland
From these and countless herders’ tales grew the Stollenwurm – known in Bavaria and Austria as the Tatzelwurm – a stubby, cat-faced lizard with short legs, a hiss and poisonous breath, said to lurk in crevices and old mine tunnels and to suck milk from grazing cows. In the early 1800s the Bernese folklorist Samuel Studer collected fresh eyewitness reports and offered a reward in gold for a real specimen. The creature’s great media moment came in 1934, when a photographer published a picture from the Aare Gorge near Meiringen in a Berlin magazine; it sparked expeditions and a reward of 1,000 Reichsmark, though the Swiss press suspected a clever tourism stunt.
Today the Tatzelwurm is a friendly Alpine mascot. Carved wooden figures hide along the walkways of the Aare Gorge, and the Haslital sells Tatzelwurm toys and sweets. The Bernese Oberland, with its gorges, high pastures and old mining country, is the place to look – keeping an eye on the rocks after a hot, humid day, when the Stollenwurm is said to appear.
Hotspots
The narrow gorge where the famous 1934 Tatzelwurm photograph was supposedly taken; wooden Tatzelwurms hide along the path.
Alpine valleys where 19th-century collectors such as Samuel Studer gathered Stollenwurm reports, including from Guttannen.
Eastern Swiss mountains where Andreas Roduner reported his cat-faced mountain dragon in 1660.
Sightings timeline
- 1660Andreas Roduner’s mountain dragon Tatzelwurm
Roduner described a four-legged, cat-faced creature that reared up as tall as a man, with bristles along its back. His story was recorded by Johann Jakob Wagner in 1680 and later illustrated by Scheuchzer.
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