Mongolian death worm
A deadly worm of the Gobi Desert in Mongolian belief, recorded by the American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews in the 1920s as the allergorhai-horhai.
Meaning
Andrews wrote that Mongolia's Premier asked him to capture one for the government. No one at the meeting had seen it, but all firmly believed in it and described it in detail: shaped like a sausage about two feet long, with no head or legs, and so poisonous that merely touching it meant instant death (On the Trail of Ancient Man, 1926).
Origin and history
Andrews promised to bring one back if the expedition crossed its path, seized with long steel collecting forceps, and to wear dark glasses so that even looking at it would do no harm. In 1932 he called it probably an entirely mythical animal, but one that might have some basis in fact, since every northern Mongol believed in it and gave essentially the same description.
Did Andrews find one?
No. He reported it, he wrote, "with the hope that future explorers of the Gobi may have better success than we had in running to earth the Allergorhai horhai" (The New Conquest of Central Asia, 1932).
How the worm reached the West
Its Mongolian name, olgoi-khorkhoi, translates as intestine worm. Brian Dunning, in a 2013 episode of Skeptoid, traced its modern fame to Ivan Mackerle, a Czech writer who searched the Gobi for it in 1990 and 1992 and published his accounts in Czech magazines from 1991 and in English in 1992 and 1994. Mackerle had been inspired by the Soviet palaeontologist Ivan Efremov, whose 1954 short story Olgoi-Khorkhoi has a party of geologists terrorised by the worms. Dunning found that books on cryptids published since then drew on Mackerle and the few accounts he unearthed, and that no worm has ever been captured, photographed or reliably documented.
Read next
- Next in Cryptids and folklore creaturesChupacabraA blood-drinking creature first reported in Puerto Rico in 1995, blamed for livestock found dead with puncture wounds.
- The same shape in Occult and alchemical symbolsOuroborosA serpent curled into a circle with its tail in its mouth. The oldest known example is on a gilded shrine of Tutankhamun; Greek alchemists in Egypt later drew it around the words “the all is one”, and since the Renaissance it has usually been read as eternity.
See also
Kraken, Sea serpent, Loch Ness Monster, Champ (Lake Champlain monster), Bigfoot (Sasquatch), Yeti (Abominable Snowman).
Sources
- On the Trail of Ancient Man (Roy Chapman Andrews, 1926), Roy Chapman Andrews, On the Trail of Ancient Man (New York, 1926), Internet Archive, pp. 102–103; p. 103
- The New Conquest of Central Asia (Roy Chapman Andrews, 1932), Roy Chapman Andrews and others, The New Conquest of Central Asia (New York, 1932), Internet Archive, "The Allergorhai Horhai"; "The Allergorhai Horhai" (continued)
- Olgoi-Khorkhoi: The Mongolian Death Worm (Skeptoid #344), Brian Dunning, 8 January 2013, Skeptoid Media
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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