Rat King

In a nest somewhere in Wisconsin, five juvenile squirrels grew up literally tied to one another’s fate. Their tails were “hopelessly entangled,” their fur matted with grass and plastic so tightly that the animals had become a single, struggling mass. ^[1]

They were siblings, and they arrived at the local Humane Society’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Milwaukee as one problem: a living knot of tails. ^[1] Staff later said that at first it was impossible to tell where one tail began and another ended. ^[1]

To work safely, the team anesthetized all five animals, keeping them still as they tried to understand the tangle in front of them. ^[1] Over about 20 minutes, they “snipped away at the grass-and-plastic knot with scissors,” comparing the mess to a Gordian Knot and emphasizing how careful they were not to cut any tails. ^[1]

By the time the last strand of nesting material was freed, another danger had become clear. The center warned that each squirrel’s tail showed some level of tissue damage linked to impaired blood circulation—a sign of how long the animals had lived bound together. ^[1]

Another Knot on the Plains

The Wisconsin case was not the only recent report of squirrels joined at the tail.

In May, Gizmodo reported from Elkhorn, Nebraska, where six baby squirrels were found with their tails matted together. ^[1] The finder, Craig Luttman, called the Nebraska Humane Society when he realized what he was looking at. ^[1]

He later described the scene: the animals weren’t moving in unison, each trying to go in a different direction, but unable to separate. ^[1] To him they looked tired and stressed, and he thought the whole group might die. ^[1]

Rehabilitator Laura Stastny of Nebraska Wildlife Rehab took on the delicate task of separation. It took about an hour of careful pruning to free all six squirrels without losing any tails. ^[1]

Newsweek noted that such “squirrel kings”—multiple animals literally bound together by their tails—have been reported before. ^[1] They are disturbing to look at, but conceptually familiar. For centuries, stories have circulated about something far stranger and more infamous: rats locked together for life.

The Legend of the Rat King

The basic idea, drawn from documented specimens, is that in cramped spaces where rats crowd together—nests in attics, cellars, or barns—their tails may come into repeated contact. ^[2][3] Sticky substances such as excrement or urine mixed with clay, hay, or straw could reinforce that first accidental linkage. ^[2][3] If one animal suddenly bolts, the shared tangle can cinch tight, turning a transient snarl into a permanent knot. ^[3]

Most rat kings described in the literature consist of five to twelve fairly young rats. ^[2] A few reported cases reach extremes: twenty‑eight animals in one, and thirty‑two in another. ^[2] The rats are usually found alive and not severely emaciated, suggesting the group can, for a time, feed and be fed where it is stuck. ^[2]

It is one thing to describe this in theory. It is another to walk into a building, break down a wall, and find the largest rat king on record.

The Altenburg Rat King: A Mummified Mass in a Glass Box

In May 1828, a miller named Müller Steinbrück ordered the demolition of the walls of his home chimney in Buchheim near Eisenberg, in what is now Thuringia. ^[3] Under the rubble, he found something that should not exist: a mummified rat king. ^[3]

On 26 May 1828, Steinbrück donated the find to the Naturforschende Gesellschaft des Osterlandes, a scientific society in Altenburg. ^[3] The society received no detailed account of the circumstances of the discovery beyond his description. ^[3]

The specimen was placed in a glued glass case, preserved and presented to the public as part of the local natural history collections. ^[3] In 1908, a dedicated museum building for these collections was erected in Altenburg’s castle park, later named the Mauritianum after Prince Moritz, the society’s patron and honorary president. ^[3] The rat king is still on display there today, in a showcase. ^[3]

The Altenburg rat king is considered the largest such specimen in the world and the only one preserved as a mummy rather than in liquid. ^[3] It consists of thirty‑two rats whose tails are knotted together, with some animals’ hind feet also caught in the tail mass. ^[3]

The rats are all soot-blackened and bare of fur, their bodies scorched or weathered to a dark uniform tone. ^[3] Their foot claws are extremely sharp and show no signs of wear, leading researchers to conclude that the animals must have been immobilized in their knot for an extended period and were not moving around. ^[3] Based on skull characteristics, the rats have been identified as house rats. ^[3]

For more than a century, no one agreed exactly how many animals the Altenburg king contained. In 1854, Melchior Schlenzig wrote of a rat king made of twenty‑seven fully grown rats. ^[3] A 1952 article in the scientific journal ORION increased the number to thirty. ^[3] These shifting counts reflect what could be seen through the glass and what individual observers thought they were looking at. ^[3]

In 1963, the glass case was opened and the specimen removed so a precise count and numbering could be performed. ^[3] That reexamination settled on thirty‑two rats in total: twenty‑seven clearly visible, with five either obscured or no longer completely preserved. ^[3]

The Rat King in Formalin: Rucphen, 1963

How Do Bodies Become Knots?

From centuries of anecdotes and the handful of preserved specimens, a picture emerges of how a rat king might form—though crucially, no one has ever watched it happen.

Rats crowd together in tight spaces, especially in nests or when they huddle for warmth in winter. ^[2][3] In these situations, they can move quickly over and under each other, jumping and scrambling in close contact. ^[2] If their long, thin, flexible tails—equipped with a gripping reflex when a fall is threatened—become smeared with sticky substances and catch on one another, they may start to twist and loop. ^[2][3]

Some researchers suggest that when many animals are too close together and behave wildly, their tails can become entangled, and a single strong movement by one rat can tighten the knot into something no individual can undo. ^[2][3] This hypothetical process echoes what rescuers saw with the squirrels: nesting material and movement combining to turn tails into a single structure. ^[1]

But all of this remains hypothetical. As one Dutch account notes, no one has ever been a direct witness to the formation of a rat king. ^[2] Another source flatly states that experimental attempts to create a rat king in controlled conditions have never really succeeded. ^[2] The phenomenon has therefore never been empirically replicated in a lab setting. ^[2]

The ambiguity extends beyond mechanism to authenticity. Newsweek reported that it is hard to determine whether the rat kings in museums became tangled solely through the rodents’ own actions, or whether human intervention played some part—by tying, preserving, or re‑arranging the animals. ^[1] That uncertainty, along with the grotesque appearance of the specimens and the absence of any observed formation, keeps rat kings balanced uneasily between biology and legend.

When Folklore Crawls Out of the Wall