🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº6501 ACTIVE

Wolpertinger

Wolpertinger is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Bavaria, DE. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.

Where and when was Wolpertinger sighted?

Location: Bavaria, DE
Date sighted: Unknown
Coordinates: 48.138, 11.572
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is Wolpertinger?

The Wolpertinger is Bavaria's horned hare: a taxidermy chimera of hare, antlers, wings and fangs, sold in inns and souvenir shops and displayed in a case at Munich's German Hunting and Fishing Museum. Two things get sold as one here. The horned hare itself is a genuine European natural-history error, argued over in German print since at least 1719 and exposed by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who examined the famous specimen supposedly shot in 1621 and reported that its head was made of wood. The Bavarian name is another matter. It is absent from Grimm's dictionary, absent from the Deutsches Textarchiv corpus, and absent from the German National Library catalogue before 1968, where the oldest entry is a joke hunting book. Nobody claims the animal is real. What it is, is an errand: a hoax hunt in which the newcomer is sent into the woods after dark with a sack and a light while everyone else goes to the pub — the Bavarian cousin of the American snipe hunt, and, on the evidence, a good deal younger than it looks.

Wolpertinger — illustration — Not a photograph of a specimen: a 2005 digital montage by Rainer Zenz over Albrecht Dürer's watercolour Young Hare (1502), with antlers, a wing and fangs added. Dürer's date, 1502, is still legible at the foot of the image, and Wikimedia Commons files it among parodies of the Young Hare. Image: Rainer Zenz · CC BY-SA 3.0

What is the history of Wolpertinger?

Two different animals are sold as one, and separating them is the whole story. The first is the horned hare, and it is genuinely old. The second is the word Wolpertinger, and its paper trail is startlingly recent. Begin with the hare, because the German printed record on it is unusually good and almost none of it is Bavarian. In 1719 the Saxon hunting writer Hans Friedrich von Fleming devoted a passage of Der Vollkommene Teutsche Jäger to a hare's skull he had split open: the nasal cavities curved back towards the throat, and above them the braincase was, he wrote, barely the thickness of a knife-back — from which he concluded that it was "unmöglich, und wider die Natur, daß es gehörnte Hasen geben könne", impossible and against nature that horned hares could exist. Two years later Nicolas Lémery's Vollständiges Materialien-Lexicon (Leipzig, 1721) told German readers the opposite in one line: horned hares are found now and then, though very rarely. In his own second volume, in 1724, Fleming passed on Jenisius's report that horned hares had been caught more than once around Annaberg, in Saxony. The naturalist who took the thing seriously and then took it apart was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and because every edition of his textbooks is digitised the retreat can be read year by year. In the first volume of the Handbuch der Naturgeschichte (Göttingen, 1779) the horned hares are "ein ungemein merkwürdiges Phänomen, was alle Aufmerksamkeit der Naturforscher und Physiologen verdient" — a most remarkable phenomenon deserving the full attention of naturalists and physiologists. He sends the reader to Gesner's Icones ... quadrupedum in the 1560 edition, to Gassendi's life of Peiresc, to Bartholin's medical letters and to the Museum Besleranum, and notes that Martin Elias Ridinger had engraved two horned hares after his father's drawing "nach dem Leben", from life. From the fifth edition of 1797 the tone changes. Blumenbach explains that the reason he still writes about them doubtfully is that, for all his years of asking, nobody has ever shown him a reliable specimen — one in which, and he marks the point with an emphatic NB, the little horns were still attached to the hare's own skull. From the 1814 edition onwards the horned hare has become "die wundersame, von so vielen braven Naturforschern für wahr angenommene Sage", the marvellous tale that so many worthy naturalists took for true. And in the comparative anatomy — second edition 1815, third edition 1824 — he says what he found when he finally got at the famous specimen said to have been shot in 1621: the head is wooden, and the antlers on it are nothing but small roe-deer tines. (He locates that specimen in the "akademischen Museum" in 1815 and in the "Cassler Museum" in 1824; the wording changed between editions.) That is the date that matters for anyone tracing the Bavarian craft. A German professor had picked up a manufactured horned hare, examined it and published the fraud by 1815 at the latest, a full century before we are usually told the joke began. The popular press carried on regardless: Das Heller-Blatt, a penny weekly in Breslau, ran a picture on 19 April 1834 under the headline "Der gehörnte Hase" and told readers that such hares are found occasionally, though never as a species of their own, only as individuals. Now the word. It appears in none of that. Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch has no entry for Wolpertinger or Wolperdinger, while it does have entries for Hase and Wilderer. The Deutsches Textarchiv, whose extended corpus runs from the fifteenth century into the twentieth, returns not one genuine occurrence — its single hit is a lemmatiser error on the peasant surname Walpertinger in a 1907 schoolbook from Kempten — where Hase returns 46,208 and Wilderer 1,328. The German National Library catalogue holds no publication of any kind containing the word before 1968, against 250 titles containing Hase and 94 containing Wilderer in the same pre-1968 window. In the German Google Books corpus the word registers in 52 of the 320 years between 1700 and 2019, the earliest of them 1957; Hase registers in 315 of those years and Wilderer in 254. What the national catalogue does show is where the Wolpertinger comes from as a commercial object. Its oldest record is Der Wolpertinger lebt: (Warum die Bayern mehr Haare haben.) Ein Beitrag zur Jagdkunde, by Peter Kirein with drawings by Fritz Köhler, Munich: Lipp, 1968, 88 pages, 5.80 marks, filed under belles-lettres. Then a dance band called Wolpertinger Tanzlmusi in 1975; Hannes Burger's reportage Bayern braucht Wolpertinger, reprinted every year from 1977 to 1983; and from 1982 a steady output by Alfons Schweiggert, who has done more than anyone else to keep the animal in print. As a thing you can buy, the Bavarian mythical beast is a product of the tourism boom of the late 1960s and the 1970s.

Timeline: the documented record of Wolpertinger

1719 Hans Friedrich von Fleming, in Der Vollkommene Teutsche Jäger, describes splitting a hare's skull and concludes that it is "impossible, and against nature, that horned hares could exist". The German debunking is older than the Bavarian legend it is usually said to explain.
1721 Nicolas Lémery's Vollständiges Materialien-Lexicon (Leipzig) tells German readers the opposite in a single line: horned hares are found now and then, though very rarely.
1779 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's Handbuch der Naturgeschichte calls the horned hares "a most remarkable phenomenon deserving the full attention of naturalists and physiologists", and cites Gesner's Icones in the 1560 edition, Gassendi, Bartholin and the Museum Besleranum as sources of pictures.
1797–1807 Across three editions Blumenbach explains that he still writes doubtfully because, after years of asking, nobody has shown him a specimen in which the horns were still attached to the hare's own skull.
1815, repeated 1824 In the comparative anatomy Blumenbach reports that the celebrated horned hare said to have been shot in 1621 has a wooden head with small roe-deer tines fixed to it. A manufactured Wolpertinger had been examined and exposed in print a century before the craft is usually dated.
19 April 1834 Das Heller-Blatt, a penny weekly in Breslau, prints a picture of a horned hare and assures readers that such animals are found occasionally, though never as a species of their own.
31 October 1933 Richard E. Shope and E. Weston Hurst publish "Infectious Papillomatosis of Rabbits" in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The disease belongs to the American cottontail, not the European brown hare, and it arrives four centuries after the European motif it is often said to explain.
16 October 1938 The Deutsches Jagdmuseum opens in the north wing of Nymphenburg Palace, four years after being founded by a circle of National Socialist officials around Christian Weber. It moves to the former Augustinian church on Neuhauser Straße on 3 November 1966, where the Wolpertinger collection is displayed today.
1957 The first year in which the German Google Books corpus registers the word Wolpertinger at all. It appears in 52 of the 320 years covered between 1700 and 2019; Hase appears in 315 of them and Wilderer in 254.
1968 Der Wolpertinger lebt, by Peter Kirein with drawings by Fritz Köhler (Munich: Lipp, 88 pages, 5.80 marks), is the oldest item containing the word in the German National Library catalogue, which holds nothing at all with it before that year.
1983 Peter Sloterdijk, in Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, describes the Wolpertinger as the Bavarian hare with roe antlers that local jokers used to hunt "when the summer visitors from Prussia had grown a shade too clever and deserved a lesson" — the earliest dated description of the hoax hunt located for this file.
1999 The Duden Großes Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache defines the Wolpertinger as a Bavarian fabulous beast with supposedly very valuable fur, to catch which the credulous are sent out with a sack and a burning candle. Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch has no entry for it at all.
2005 Rainer Zenz uploads to Wikipedia a digital montage of Albrecht Dürer's Young Hare of 1502 with antlers, a wing and fangs added. It becomes the most reproduced image of the Wolpertinger, including on this page, and it is not a photograph of anything.
October 2008 Last archived capture with content of the Wolpertinger-Museum in Mittenwald, a museum and tavern in a brewery ice cellar. By December 2010 its domain served an empty directory; the museum is now listed as permanently closed.

Is there a rational explanation for Wolpertinger?

There is no creature to debunk here. Nobody in Bavaria claims a Wolpertinger walks the woods, and the museum that owns the best collection files it, in its own words, among the "neuzeitlichen Geschöpfen" — the modern-era creatures — as against the pre-Christian nature goddesses and the Christian legendary figures shown alongside it. What deserves scepticism is the age we lend it. That claim of age is what the earlier version of this file made, and nothing supports it. It said the legend "took shape in the early 1800s", building on older seventeenth-century woodcuts of horned hares. The pictures are real and older still — Blumenbach was pointing at a 1560 edition — but they are neither Bavarian nor Wolpertingers, and the bridge between them was asserted, not shown. The evidence set out above runs the other way: the horned hare is a pan-European natural-history error with a German literature from at least 1719, and the Bavarian brand name has no printed trace at all until the middle of the twentieth century. The Shope claim needs the same arithmetic. Richard E. Shope and E. Weston Hurst published "Infectious Papillomatosis of Rabbits" in the Journal of Experimental Medicine on 31 October 1933; the virus produces hard keratinised growths that at a distance pass convincingly for horns. It is a good explanation of something, but it cannot be the origin of a European motif already illustrated by 1560 and already exposed as a wooden fake by 1815. Nor is it even the right animal. The papillomatosis Shope described is a disease of Sylvilagus, the American cottontail. A PubMed search for papillomavirus together with Lepus europaeus — the brown hare a Bavarian mount is actually built from — returns nothing; run twice, against a control of seven results for papillomavirus with Sylvilagus and eight for myxomatosis with Lepus europaeus in the same index. Shope explains American horned rabbits. He did not inspire the Wolpertinger, and the chronology forbids it. What the Wolpertinger really is, is a hoax hunt. The Duden's Großes Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache defines it in 1999 as a Bavarian fabulous beast with supposedly very valuable fur, to catch which the credulous are sent out with a sack and a burning candle. Peter Sloterdijk, writing in 1983, gives its social use precisely: the Wolpertinger, he says, is the hare with roe antlers that lives in Bavaria and that Bavarian jokers used to hunt "wenn die Sommerfrischler aus Preußen gar zu gescheit geworden waren und eine Lektion verdienten" — when the summer visitors from Prussia had grown a shade too clever and deserved a lesson. It is the same errand as the American snipe hunt, and it is aimed at the same person: the outsider who has just arrived. Three details the earlier version carried have been dropped, because nothing consulted for this file supports them: salt as bait, whistling to call the animal, and using a young woman as a lure. The sack and the light are in the dictionary. Those three are attached to no place, no date and no name that could be found. One last piece of scepticism, and it is about our own page. The picture that illustrates the Wolpertinger almost everywhere online, including here, is not a museum specimen. It is a digital montage made in 2005 by the Wikipedia contributor Rainer Zenz, who took Albrecht Dürer's watercolour Young Hare of 1502 and added antlers, a wing and fangs; Dürer's date is still legible at the foot of the image, and Wikimedia Commons files it under "Parodies of Albrecht Dürer's Young Hare". The most reproduced image of the Bavarian horned hare is twenty-one years old and was made with GIMP.

Can you visit Wolpertinger?

The collection worth travelling for is in Munich, at the Deutsches Jagd- und Fischereimuseum, Neuhauser Straße 2, 80331 München, on the pedestrian street between Karlsplatz and Marienplatz. The building is the former Augustinian church, secularised in 1803; the museum has occupied it since 3 November 1966, when it was inaugurated by mayor Hans-Jochen Vogel, and by its own account it now shows close to a thousand mounted animals across some 3,000 m². The Wolpertingers are part of the permanent display, not a passing special exhibition: the museum describes its own Dauerausstellung as presenting "unterschiedliche Wolpertinger" alongside formerly sacred animals such as chamois and ibex. The institution has an uncomfortable history and does not hide it. The Verein Deutsches Jagdmuseum was founded in Munich in 1934 by a circle of National Socialist officials around Christian Weber, in competition with Hermann Göring's rival plans; the Arco antler collection bought that same year became its nucleus, and the museum opened on 16 October 1938 in the north wing of Nymphenburg Palace, three weeks before the November pogroms. It was refounded in 1949 on the initiative of the Social Democrat mayor Thomas Wimmer and turned into a foundation in 1960. The museum has published two studies of its own origins and has belonged since 2013 to the Munich initiative "Kunst und Kultur für Respekt". Practical details, taken from the museum's own pages: open daily 09:30 to 17:00, last admission 16:15. Adults €7, reduced €5, children aged 3 to 16 €3.50, family ticket (two adults and up to three children) €14, groups of nine or more €3.50 per head, flat €12 for groups with under-threes; annual passes on request. Two things to plan around: payment is cash only, and the museum states plainly that it is not step-free — the departments are reachable only by several flights of stairs. Dogs are welcome. Do not travel to the other one. The Wolpertinger-Museum at Innsbrucker Straße 40 in Mittenwald — a museum-cum-tavern in the former ice cellar of the local brewery, run by "Christian und Traudi" — is listed as permanently closed. Its own site, archived in October 2008, promised "a fabulous exhibition of unique specimens of these extremely shy and legendary old-Bavarian creatures", opened Tuesday to Friday 14:00 to 01:00 and weekends from 11:00 to 01:00, and offered to post Wolpertingers and T-shirts anywhere on request — opening hours that tell you what kind of establishment it was. By December 2010 the domain served an empty directory listing and by December 2013 a parking page; the local tourist board's list of area museums no longer mentions it. Everywhere else what you will meet is merchandise rather than collection: mounted Wolpertingers in glass cases in inns and hunting lodges across Upper Bavaria and the Allgäu, and soft toys and printed shirts in the souvenir shops. Bavaria's own tourist board calls the taverns of hunting lodges and country inns the animal's present-day habitat, which is an honest way of putting it.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-14 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

Wolpertinger

Where and when was Wolpertinger sighted?

What is Wolpertinger?

What is the history of Wolpertinger?

Timeline: the documented record of Wolpertinger

Is there a rational explanation for Wolpertinger?

Can you visit Wolpertinger?

Sources consulted

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Wolpertinger

Where and when was Wolpertinger sighted?

What is Wolpertinger?

What is the history of Wolpertinger?

Timeline: the documented record of Wolpertinger

Is there a rational explanation for Wolpertinger?

Can you visit Wolpertinger?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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