The Rat King

The nightmare vision of black rats tangled by the tail continues to intrigue and revolt us, but what is its origin? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe venture into the sewers of history to seek answers. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And on today's episode
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we are going to
be talking about the Wonderful, the Glorious rat King, which,
believe it or not, this is a Christmas episode, isn't it, Rob?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
That's right? This is one of a pair of Christmas
Core episodes we're busting out this week. You can probably
guess what the next one's going to be. But yeah,
I mean, the Holidays bring on an abundance of traditions, right,
I mean we have the Christian Nativity, we have Santa Claus,
we have other things like Crampus, we have Marley's Ghost,
we have the nineteen ninety sci fi action film I

(00:50):
Come in Peace, and of course we have The Nutcracker.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Ah Okay, here's the tie in.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
So most of you are probably familiar with Tchaikovsky's ballet
The Nutcracker. If you haven't seen it, if you haven't
seen it many many times, This basically this is how
it plays out. The first half is a rather imaginative
tale of a Nutcracker prints coming to life and with

(01:17):
the help of a little girl, waging a battle against
an evil mouse king, culminating in a cool sword fight.
And then the rest of the ballet, which feels about
usually about like three or four hours long. It is
just a victory lap of dancing, just one dance after
the other, no more steaks, no more conflict, just dancing.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
What do I remember about the Nutcracker. I remember like
a grandfather clock and like a sort of creepy, mysterious
grandfather figure. I remember a lady with a giant dress
that a bunch of children come out of. And I remember, yeah,
I guess the rat king.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah, yeah, or I guess it's specifically it's a mouse king,
but it's very closely tied. No pun intended with the
concept of the rat king now. The ballet was based
upon German romantic author Eta Hoffmann's eighteen sixteen short story
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, in which the titular

(02:17):
mouse king is described as follows is. This is from
the LRC translation. Marie was not afraid of mice, and
she could not help being amused by this sight. She
stood watching the mice come from all directions. When suddenly
there came a sharp and terrible piping noise, and seven
mouseheads with seven shining crowns upon them, rose through the floor,

(02:41):
and behind them wriggled a mouse's body, on which the
seven heads had all grown. Then the whole army of
mice shouted in full chorus and went trot, trot, right
up to the cupboard. In fact, to Marie, who was
standing beside.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
It, wait a minute, I don't remember that this is
a single old mouse's body, but it's got seven mouse heads.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yes, this is commonly not depicted in performances of the ballet, okay,
though though sometimes it is. Sometimes ballets will decide to
get creative, get a little dark, and dive back into
these roots. But I have more passages to read here.
There's more of this. It's great, okay. Later on in
the text, Hoffman writes, But that moment two enemy marksmen

(03:26):
took hold of nutcrackers wooden cloak and held him fast,
squeaking in triumph from seven throats, the mouse king sprang
forward to take his kill. Whoa, oh, and get this one,
this one may be the best. She could only watch
as the mouse king squeezed himself out through a hole
in the wall. His fourteen eyes and seven crowns glistened

(03:48):
as he bounded through the room and made a huge
leap up to the top of Marie's nightstand.

Speaker 3 (03:54):
Yikes, I'm getting flashes of Stephen King's cat's eye.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean this is a creature of horror.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah, less cute than I recall from the ballet. So
this is a monster creature that is a mouse with
seven heads on a single body.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
That's right. And there are other descriptions in the text
that emphasize the horror of multiplicity into a mouse. Cumig
Now Hoffman, who of seventeen seventy six through eighteen twenty two,
was a dark romantic. One of his early novels, eighteen
fifteen's The Devil's Elixirs, concerns a doppelganger. He didn't originate
the term or the concept, but his work may have

(04:33):
helped popularize the concept. He is also well known for
his eighteen seventeen story The Sandman, which references a folkloric
entity and kind of a horror spin, and it also
features a female automaton. He's apparently noted for often employing
optical motifs, which include not only the doubling of one's

(04:53):
identity as with the Doppelganger, but also the multitude of
heads on the Mouse King. And I think he makes
use of other, like more uses of optical technology in
places as well, like telescopes and so forth.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
You're saying optical motifs because like the doubling might be
like a kind of multiplicity of images you would see
through like a prism or some kind of thing a
lens or thing like that.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah. Yeah, Like, for instance, in these passages from the
Nutcracker in the Mouse King, you get a sense of
like almost like that of a kaleidoscope. You know, there's
something just optically out of line with this thing that
is moving towards you the reader, or towards Marie, the
character I understand now. Of course, Hoffman would have been
acquainted with folklore, which we also see in is referencing

(05:40):
of the sandman. The sandman, of course, typically sprinkle sand
or dust upon a sleeper's eyes. I think we all
know that basic idea, but in Hoffman's work, the sandman
is said to steal the eyes of children who refuse
to go to bed. The sand he puts on their eyes,
causes their eyeballs to fall out, and then he collects
set eyeballs and takes them to the moon to feed

(06:00):
his children.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, And of course Hoffman would have definitely been familiar
with the concept of the rat king, which seemingly plays
into his invention here as well. Now, I was looking
at a couple of sources, both by an author by
the name of David Blameyer's. One of them is Telling
Tales the Impact of Germany on English Children's Books seventeen
eighty through nineteen eighteen. This is a two thousand and

(06:23):
nine publication, and he points out that Hoffman's description of
the mouse king references both folkloric tales of multi headed
dragons as well as the dragon from the Book of Revelation.
Though to be clear, the author doesn't make any mention
of rat kings, as we'll be discussing them later as
an inspiration here.

Speaker 3 (06:43):
Right, Okay, but you can clearly see how knowledge of
the biological or alleged biological entity the rat king would
would have or could have inspired the idea of a
mouse with seven heads.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah. Yeah, Now there's another example. This is sort of
folk little bit more, I guess specifically literature. There's another
work by the same author, the Folklore Tradition in Germany,
where he mentions a rat king by the name of
Berlibby that pops up in what long Reads author Adrian
Dobb describes as a kunsmachen quote an art fairy tale,

(07:20):
a narrative that a writer fashions to resemble something you
might hear from a farm hand at your father's estate. Okay, so,
according to Dobb, here again this excellent piece on Longreads,
I recommend it if you want some more rat king action.
Here he points out that the rat king in this
work is described as as a king of all rodents.

(07:42):
He's like a literal ruler of the rodent world, but
is singular in body and in head, though it is
implied that his tale is nodded with that of his wife,
the rat queen. Aw that's sweet, I guess kind of sweet.
It was this particular work. In this particular creation, Berlibby

(08:03):
was the creation of Ernst mounts Aren't, who lives seventeen
sixty nine through eighteen sixty a German nationalist, historian, writer
and poet who, in this tale seems to have been
largely commenting on the Rise of Napoleon, critiquing the idea
that some might want to rise above their station within
their own nation via the interference of a foreign power.

(08:26):
And this, according to dob was two years after Hoffman's tale.
I don't know that there's any indication that like Hoffman's
tale inspired this one. I think it's more probably the
idea that the rat king was like a general concept
already that was established. And we see two different authors
exploring things with the idea, but for different purposes.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
Oh okay. So even in these slightly altered or just
different forms, we see that the idea of the rat
king is often used to symbolize something. It means something
about religious life or politic life, for morality.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
That's right. Doab, writing about the example in Arnt's work, writes, quote,
the rat king appears like an almost perfect parody of
the community building ambitions that dominated German public life during
and following the Napoleonic Wars. So he says, you know,
the community building we're talking about here, This would have

(09:23):
been things like community singing, community storytelling, various community minded
efforts that were present in the culture of the time period.
And the mouse king is presented perhaps as the unpleasant
underbelly of social cohesion. Quote, the rat represented the dark
side of community, the dark side of dependency, the dark

(09:43):
side of proximity.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
Tied so closely to one another that you, in the end,
are all doomed, doomed to a common fate.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yes, yeah, and so all of this would have been
during a century in which Germany was transitioning from a
largely rural society to a largely urban one. But of
course these literary treatments did not invent the concept. Rather, again,
they find imaginative and or metaphorical uses of something that
was already present in the public mindset. So what could

(10:12):
that be? What could they have possibly been commenting on
what had been seen, what had been witnessed, what was alive,
and the zeitgeist of the time.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Right, So I guess this brings us to the question
many listeners probably already know the basic idea, but what
is a rat king? In the common modern understanding, it
is a group of rats who are joined at the tail,
usually described or represented with the tails entangled in a
huge not ball, and going all the way back to

(10:44):
the sixteenth century, there have been dozens of documented accounts
of rats discovered in this state, multiple rats three or
more joined by the tail, sometimes hiding underneath floorboards, inside walls,
protruding from earth and burrows, often with the rats still alive,
arranged like the spokes of a wheel. And there are

(11:07):
also physical specimens of alleged rat kings preserved and photographed
with their tails entwined in this way, though of course,
in these cases the rats are generally already dead, so
it can be hard to rule out hoaxes in the
case of like a rat king that's actually kept in
a museum somewhere that we'll have some educated commentary on
the plausibility of hoaxes versus natural origin later on.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
I will say that you can certainly do some image
searches and see some rat kings or alleged rat kings,
but these are not pleasant images to look at. Like
a lot of like monstrous curiosities or alleged curiosities of
the natural world or even the unnatural world, are interesting
to look at or cool looking. The rat king not

(11:51):
so much. I feel like it kind of seems to
catch on as an idea more so than it is
an actual symbol. Like I don't know, there are a
lot of say, bands that use the rat king as
their logo or anything of that nature.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
Oh, I didn't even consider that, but I bet there
are some.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
I bet there are some, but they're probably kind of
going for something outrageous and gross.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
So we wanted to look at the question what are
these masses of mutually doomed rodents? Are they something that
actually forms in nature or merely a legendary cryptid that
inspired some taxidermy hoaxes, And if they do occur in nature,
why and how So, first of all, I want to
mention a major source that I'm going to be using

(12:35):
in this exploration, one of the best things I came across,
which is a book called Rats by an author named
Martin Hart, published by Alison and Busby, originally published in
Dutch in nineteen seventy three, but with an English translation
by Arnold Pomeranz in nineteen eighty two. And this book
has an entire chapter devoted to ratkings and is just

(12:57):
generally an excellent resource on this topic. So to get
a flavor of what an encounter in the wild with
a rat king looks like, I'm going to share an
account from the beginning of Heart's chapter. So the setting
is a cold day in February nineteen sixty three, and
this is actually the most recent discovery of a rat
king that Hart recounts in his book, though there have

(13:20):
been other ones since then. This took place at a
farm in the Dutch town of Rukfenn. A farmer named
Peeve van Ninatten was out in his yard and he
noticed a squealing sound coming from the direction of the barn.
So the farmer followed the squealing to its source, and
when he got to it, he noticed a black rat

(13:41):
peering out from under a heap of bean poles. The
farmer killed the rat, but then when he tried to
pull it out from under the poles, it wouldn't budge.
It was stuck to something, and further uncovering revealed that
the rat he had killed was somehow tied by the
tail to six other He killed the other rats as well,

(14:02):
and then was left with this wheel of rats, consisting
of seven apparently well fed adults, two males and five females.
They were of the species Rattus ratus, the black rat.
They were not brown rats or the species Ratus norwegicus,
which was a bit strange because they were found in
the barn and chicken coop area of the farm, which

(14:25):
according to the farmer, was normally inhabited by brown rats
and not black rats, though the farmer knew that he
had black rats living in the loft of his house
some distance away. On closer examination of the tail knot,
most of the rats were tied only by the tips
of their tails, though one rat had basically its entire
tail tangled up. The knot also contained external material, like

(14:50):
some straw. The flesh of the tails appeared compressed where
it had been tied against the others, and an X
ray revealed that there were some bone fractures in the
tails and in the rats of their vertebrae. Examination indicated
that the tails appear to have been joined like this
for a while, which is a little perplexing because the

(15:10):
rats did appear to have eaten well like they didn't
appear emaciated and rob I've attached some pictures for you
to look at of the rat king of Rukfinn. Here's
the whole rat king with the seven individuals, and then
there's a close up of the tail not. It does
look very grizzly.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah yeah. Worth noting, of course that rats tails are
I belief, semi prehensile. But you can imagine in a
situation like this, if they were to come intertwined and
certainly broken, there'd be very little that rats could do
to free themselves.

Speaker 3 (15:42):
That's right. There are some accounts of people witnessing or
claiming to witness a rat here or there breaking out
of the tangle, like actually getting out, either by detaching
like part of its tail coming off, injuring itself to escape,
or managing to untangle and get out, but this seems rare.
Mostly the rats appear stuck this way, and to summarize

(16:05):
a large later section of Hearts chapter, a lot of
the accounts of rat king discoveries from history take basically
the same form as the story I just told. Someone
is attracted to the sound of squealing, and then they
discover behind or underneath something a single rat, and then
they attack it, and then later discover that it is

(16:25):
joined to at least two others in extreme instances dozens
of others.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yeah. Yeah, And in a lot of time, I've seen
multiple accounts where it's something you know it's taking place at,
say a barn or perhaps an urban environment. I guess
you could you could point out that these would be
you know, human spaces, human places. Rats, of course, their
populations growing in the very places where human populations grow

(16:55):
and living alongside us in the shadows.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
I think that is significant, and let's come back to
that when we talk about the conclusions of a paper.
I'm going to get to later. So another section of
Heart's chapter here is an interesting diversion on the origin

(17:21):
of the name rat king. It is a kind of
weird thing to call a collection of rats tied together
by the tail, Like, what is especially kingly about this?

Speaker 2 (17:31):
Right? Right? I mean, a king, by its very nature,
is an individual ruling over the mini We tend not
to think of a king as being a composite of
multiples exactly.

Speaker 3 (17:42):
But the way Heart lays it out, I think you
can kind of see the way the meaning applied to
this term has sort of crept and morphed over time.
So according to Heart, the term rat king is a
direct translation of the medieval German ratten konig, though in
this usage it originally had nothing to do with tail notts.
It meant quote one who lives well on the backs

(18:05):
of others. So you can think of a sort of
opulent parasite, or in a way one might argue any king,
somebody who you know, lives off the labor of others.
They live well, they're you know, they're they're well fed.
They get all the luxury they desire with other people
doing the work. And that sort of social human association
with the term rat king is explained somewhat by its

(18:28):
usage in the sixteenth century text by an author named
Conrad Gessner called Historia Animalium. From what I can tell,
this seems to be a kind of a kind of
great source document of like cryptozoologists, they love looking back
to Conrad Gessner's entries in this But the point Gessner
makes in this book, as summarized by Heart, is quote,

(18:50):
some would have it that the rat wax is mighty
in its old age and is fed by its young.
This is what's called the rat king. Okay. So the
idea is that like some rats get like old and
venerable as rats go, and then the other rats will
start to serve it as a king. They'll bring it food,
they'll bring it little baubles and like pieces of velvet

(19:13):
or luxury items. You know, they're coming to serve their
rat king. So that rat king is living well by
doing nothing off of the labor of the other rats
in its nest.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
Of course, you could easily tell the same fanciful story
and point out that, hey, rats look after their elders,
how honorable.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Yeah, yeah, you could exactly say that. Though to be clear,
in featuring this story, I do not mean to endorse
the idea that there's biological evidence for this. This seems
to be more like a you know, an early modern
story about how rats work, not anything that's backed up
by research. Another early usage of the term rat king,
though apparently having nothing to do with the the you know,

(19:54):
the the wheel of rats tied together by the tail,
is a quote from the founder of the protest Reformation,
Martin Luther, in a passage attacking the Catholic Church. Luther says, quote,
the archbishops have a primate above them. The primate's a patriarch,
and finally there is the pope, the king of the rats,
right at the top.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Kind of kind of complicated here we have primates and rats.

Speaker 3 (20:20):
Well, the primate's that's like a position in the Catholic Church.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Oh okay, sorry, I'm just picturing an actual primate. So
he's like Martin Luther is talking about apes, he's talking
about rats. He might be if flinging something at a devil.
He's just sesus going wild.

Speaker 3 (20:36):
That usage of primate can be confusing and has confused
me in the past. Yeah, but no, he's just talking
about like the positions and like, yeah, the worst one
who's like sort of the the evil king at the
top of this institution that Luther hated, that's the rat
king the pope, And that Luther quote would have been
sixteenth century as well. Heart writes that after this, the

(20:58):
term ratten Koenig came to refer to a king rat
who sat on a throne made of knotted tails. So
this seems like there's some morphing now where you're getting
halfway to the rat king idea we have today. And
I guess in this formulation, if I'm picturing it picturing
it right, it's not just that there are multiple rats

(21:20):
with their tails nodded, but there's a king rat riding
that knot of tails like a palanquin or a litter.
You know, it's like sitting upon the throne of tails.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
I'm a little hazy on where I saw this, but
there was an old bit. I think Robert Sniegel had
something to do with this, the comedian behind Triumph the
insult comic dog. But oh ok, there was the sketch.
Perhaps listeners can can write in about where I'm remembering
this from, But the sketch was always the same. Here's
a snake and it has a sizeable lump in its body.
It's like an anaconda or something, and you have to

(21:52):
guess what the lump is based on the shape of it,
and so looking at the snake, the lump appears to
be an old woman in a rocking chair. And then
they reveal, after everyone's had a chance to guess, they
reveal what the contents of the rat stomach happens to be,
and it is a pile of dead rats in the
shape of a woman in a rocking share. That's good.

Speaker 3 (22:14):
But to come back to this image, it is a
striking image, though Hart says it is not known where
this idea first came from. But okay, so that's like
a rat king on a throne of knotted tales. You
take away the king and then what you've got left
is just rats with nodded tales. And according to Hart,
the first source to visually depict a rat king in

(22:36):
any form, and this is I think, in the form
that we now understand it as just a group of
rats with nodded tales. The first publication to contain this
was an addition of a sixteenth century book called the
Emblemata by a Hungarian author named Johannes Sambucus or I
think in his original language, Janosh Samboki. And this was

(23:00):
an emblem book, which was a genre of literature that
used to be quite popular, which would be essentially a
catalog of allegorical illustrations or images. So in one common format,
each page of this book would have a picture like
a drawing that has some weird stuff going on in it,
and then a Latin motto, and then some text, often poetry,

(23:24):
explaining or interpreting the image. So for a modern example
that people can understand, I'm just making this up, imagine
a book that's got a page that has an illustration
of Lady Justice blindfolding blindfolded holding a sword in scales
and a Latin motto that means to give everyone their due.

(23:45):
Then there would be some text describing what the image
means and that the scales mean the weighing of the evidence,
and the blindfold means impartiality and so forth. In the
case of the Raking in the Emblemata by Johanna Sambucus,
the book picks a scene with seven rats in a street,
tied together by the tail, though none of them appears

(24:06):
to be particularly elevated or king like. It just looks
like seven common rats tied together, And in fact, they
don't even look like rats. They look more like a
cross between ferrets and wiener dogs. And there is a
man looming over all of them, raising a baton, presumably
to beat them to death.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
But then there's another man raising a baton or something
that's facing away from them, Like, yeah, I guess it
almost like he's leading them, or maybe he's saying, hey,
come beat these rats.

Speaker 3 (24:33):
I don't know that's a good point. I don't understand
what the other guy's doing. Yeah, his backs to them.
He almost looks like they're both raising the sticks, and
this other guy looks like he's gonna like whack a
big flower bush with it. I don't know. M I've
got more on this page in a second, but I
just briefly did want to say that in early symbolic usage.
The idea of rats tied together by the tails seems

(24:58):
to be symbolically loaded significant to people. The image meant
something about the structures or causes that bound people inextricably
to one another. Now in the Emblemata, Johanna Simbucus explains
that there's like a poem underneath the illustration, saying that
there was once a man who was plagued by rats

(25:19):
for many years, and then one day a servant came
across a group of seven rats stuck together by the tail. Now,
at this point Hart didn't say anything else about the emblemata,
but I got really interested. I wanted to know what
the book said about this illustration, so I did some
real digging. I found a full scan and transcription of
the Latin text of the Emblemata. I have no idea

(25:42):
what most of the text in this book is about,
but searching through the pages I found some really good
pictures I just wanted to share with you. Rob One
is like a guy who's going out to I think,
pick some berries off of a bush, but he looks
like Exeter from this island Earth, and there's some storm
clouds in the background. Another one is I don't even
know how to describe this. There's like a giant baby

(26:05):
holding up these horns underneath his arms, but they're also
kind of snakes and they've got fruit coming out of them,
and he has a giant, I don't know, thread spool
on his head, and then there's some other guys looking
at him, like get a load of this guy. A
lot of the images in this book have the energy
of like my bird is better than your bird, or
this guy with a dog head is bothering my dog.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
Yeah. Yeah, Like there's something going on, there's some sort
of drama or interaction, but it's all trapped in some
sort of cryptic imagery.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
There's one I really like of a guy who's got
like a fishing net and he's kneeling beside the water's
edge and he's like, yes, I'm going to touch this squid.
There's like a dead looking squid in the water.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, and the sheep are watching on kind of I
guess with disapproval or approval. It depends if he's about
to grab that squid or if he's letting the squid go.
It does remind me of something that came up in
a past episode, like different ideas about whether it is
right to eat squid or if they should not be eaten.
So maybe this concerns that, but it could concern various things.

Speaker 3 (27:13):
I guess that may well be the subject matter. Another
one I liked is there's a dude in a very
wide brimmed hat approaching a man who appears to be sick,
laying on like a cot on the floor, and he's
coming at him with severed heads in each hand. Is like,
which of these heads is yours?

Speaker 2 (27:29):
Oh? This one is frightening.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
But anyway, coming back to the rat king, Okay, I
found the page that it's on, and God helped me.
I tried to manually translate this passage from the Latin
via Google Translate, extremely rough results, somewhat funny. I'm sure
I'm doing a horrible job getting the meaning here, but
here's the best I could come up with. So the
motto at the top of this image says catput seditionis tolendum,

(27:56):
which means to remove the head of the rebellion. And
here's the translation that I was able to come up with.
It is not a fictional story that the shrew mice
harassed the patrons and dug up the house too much,
don't a safe battle that many had hid for years
being treated badly by the enemy. While the servant beholds

(28:18):
the seven hidden, their tails firmly tied. The lord tried
to torture all these with poison, but the labor was
long in vain. While the plan was slaughtering something behind
the treachery, not a single one appeared from it. In
this way, also the connections of the wild animals. These
traps must first be removed, for peace is a result

(28:38):
of the gods. When the author of the evil is slain,
so the good flows. Now. Notice it's interesting that this
is the first visual depiction of a rat king in
the way we understand it. But it doesn't use the
term ratking or any equivalent term. It just says, you know,
the rats and then shows them tied together this way
and explains that they're tied by the tail. As far

(29:01):
as interpreting this text, I'm fumbling in the dark because
you know, bad translation. But the moral allegory might be
something about how the conjoined rats cannot be defeated until
like the author of the evil is undone or the
thing from which the evil flows is undone, which maybe means,
I guess, could refer to a so called king of

(29:23):
these rats, though there doesn't appear to be one pictured,
or maybe it means just by Maybe it means like
the nodding of the tail is the author of the
evil here, though in that case it would seem kind
of counterproductive to untie their tails if you wanted to
fight the rats. But honestly, I do not know. I
admit failure in discovering the meaning of this, because.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
One of the things about alleged real life encounters with
rat kings is that their tangled tales make them significantly
easier to kill. Yeah, because that is almost always what
happens next, or has happened to some degree as they
are discovered.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
That's yeah, exactly right. So there is an interesting thing
I uncovered by this translate exercise, which is the line
about how this is not a fictional story. That's the
first thing it says. And I guess this means that
it is supposed to refer to a specific sighting of
a real rat king known to the author, but it
doesn't specify who, where or when.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
Hmm. You know. This also touches on something that I'll
mention in Tomorrow's Monster Fact episode. The tying of a
knot has been a part of human magic since prehistoric times.
We see it in some of the most ancient recorded rituals.
We see it in the magics of the ancient Egyptians,
for instance. It seems to be pretty common to tie
a knot is to bind something, and in the case

(30:46):
of the rat King, perhaps to transform something. There seems
to be something inherently magical about not.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
Yeah, yeah, I agree, and that so maybe the knot
in the tails is the thing from which the evil
flows in this poem, I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah, Or it's the person who tied the knot, or
or you know, there's so many ways to interpret it.
You know, certainly when you get into these other treatments
as well, it's the not something that just occurs via proximity,
via overcrowding, via the complexities of urban living, or whatever
the you know, however one ends up interpreting it. I
also like how the image, the specific image kind of

(31:23):
implies that the rats, all of them, are running away
from each other, like all of them have a totally
different idea about which direction they should go, almost kind
of a cartoonish situation. Where they all are trying to
solve the problem but cannot because they're not actually addressing
the problem at the root, their tails being tied.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
To get interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Though, on the other hand,
from what I can tell, sources from this period do
not really display any propensity for understanding the plight of
a rat from the rats perspective. They pretty much all
view rats as just like a disgusting evil that must
be destroyed to understand.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
I mean, that is essentially the case, and the tale
of the rat is the most disgusting part. I mean,
I know we probably have some rat fans out there.
We're not talking about your pet rats. We're talking about
rats encountered in the wilds of human habitats and agriculture
and cities and so forth.

Speaker 3 (32:20):
Yeah, I mean, these were people who part of their
daily life was battling rat infestation. But coming back to
Heart's history here, so he describes a few other things
in the development of this idea of the rat king.

(32:42):
The term rat king in its modern usage, referring to
rats joined together by a knot of the tales, appeared
more and more in print after this. Hart mentions a
seventeen to fifty seven dictionary by Nol Gomel that included
the term rat king, defining it as a number of
rats joined together by their tails. There are also equivalent

(33:02):
terms in French which are usually thought to be related
to the German rat and koenig, though some have offered
competing etymologies there. But beyond the evidence of people using
the term and evincing knowledge of the concept going back
to the sixteenth century, there are also allegedly factual accounts

(33:23):
of rat king finds, so not just people saying, hey,
here's what a rat king is, but actual, like I
saw ratking there was one here at this time. So
Hart says that from fifteen sixty four to nineteen sixty
three he was able to turn up a total of
fifty seven accounts of distinct rat kings, though he says

(33:45):
that some of these cases are clearly deliberate forgeries or
otherwise less than fully authentic, so this certainly doesn't mean
fifty seven instances where yes, there was a real rat
king the fifty seven claims, with some subset of those
being seemingly credible. The majority of the accounts come from Germany.
To name a few early ones, there was a rat

(34:06):
king of Donzig allegedly made of nine rats found alive
in sixteen twelve in the loft of a house. Mentioned
in a letter from a professor to a colleague, there
was a rat king of Strasbourg consisting of six live rats,
which was reported and depicted in illustration in the French
gazette mercur Galant in sixteen eighty three. Apparently some of

(34:30):
these reports came with helpful explanations, for example, the knowledge
that God sends ratkings to mankind to remind us of
our wickedness, and then like listing out the sins that
the rat king might be useful in calling to your attention,
Like remember when you did this? Yeah, here's a rat
king to remind you. And so heart goes on to
chronicle a bunch more of these fifty something odd accounts

(34:53):
of people stumbling upon ratkings. I'm not gonna go into
all these stories here because most of them have details
that are or at least in most cases where details
of the discovery are available, the details are pretty similar
to anecdotes we've already discussed, though often with additional just
sad grizzly details about the ways the rats were killed.

(35:16):
Often involving boiling water people just like pour boiling water
into a hole that they thought rats were in, and
then also religious explication of the various finds relating to
sin or deliverance from evil. Some of these rat kings
were preserved, often pickled in alcohol, and a few can
actually still be seen in museum collections today.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
And we're still finding rat kings apparently or allegedly. There
was one as recently as twenty twenty one in Estonia,
as reported by the rat King Desk at the Daily Mail,
of course, allegedly found in a chicken coop. There was
a I've got a paper about that one late, you've
got a story, okay, good pocus one. Yeah. So they
are still allegedly occurring, and the details of their discs

(36:00):
are still basically the same as they've always been.

Speaker 3 (36:03):
Now this brings us back to the question of where
do these things come from? Are these really things that
occur in nature? Does this just happen to rats sometimes?
Or are these hoaxes? Are these like the Jenny Hannovers
that people would make out of the remains of rays
and sea animals? Is this like the Fiji Mermaid? Some

(36:25):
investigators have claimed that all rat kings are artificial, practical jokes.
They're all just like people taking dead rats and tying
the tails together. Heart However, after his investigation does not
agree with this, he does think that rat kings occur
naturally and are not all hoaxes, though obviously some of
the ones that have been attested are hoaxes, and we'll

(36:48):
come back to arguments for that. But one argument in
favor of this is something that really is kind of
sad to relate but does inform our knowledge on this,
which is experimental rat kings. Hart said he would not
reproduce these experiments because he considers them cruel and unethical,
but he recounts attempts by a couple of other researchers

(37:09):
to create rat kings in the lab. And I'm not
going to describe the experiments in detail, but the gist
of the findings is that, first of all, if you
tie up the tails of already dead rats, they do
not look like the tail knots of allegedly natural rat kings.
So you just compare the rat kings that are preserved
or people have taken pictures of with like you take

(37:32):
dead rats and tie their tails together. It doesn't look
the same. Apparently, they need to be alive when their
tails are joined together in order to create the rat
king knot ball. However, these rat king experiments did find
that if you anesthetize rats, put them to sleep, and
then glue their tail tips together, then you allow them

(37:54):
to wake up and run around and do their thing
for a period of time, their tails end up tang
in a ball that does pretty much exactly resemble the
tails of ratkings.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
So kind of the difference to some extent between being
given the assignment of hey, go get your computer cable,
go get your mouse cable, and just go ahead and
tangle all that up, versus just leave it alone in
your backpack for a while. See what happens, you know,
and you know, maybe just tug at it loosely. You know.
It's like you're going to have a different sort of

(38:27):
not than the one that you might intentionally tie.

Speaker 3 (38:30):
That's right. And in these these experiments, once the glue
was removed after the rat king tail knot had been
created by live rats, mostly the tails stayed stuck together.
They had become tangled enough that they could not get
free even though the glue was dissolved again.

Speaker 2 (38:47):
Horrifying that this was someone's choice in experimentation. There's like, well,
we've got to We've got to create these rat kings
in order to fully test this. Like, it doesn't seem
like this was necessary. It's nice to have this information,
I guess, but it was certainly not ethically created.

Speaker 3 (39:07):
Yeah, our heart discusses these experiments with what feels like
some degree of scorn, and again he says he won't
reproduce them to check the results for himself. But if
these results are in fact accurate, this does give us
some information that we can use. It does make it
seem like ratkings could be created in nature if rats

(39:28):
tales were somehow initially stuck together while the rats were
still alive. And Heart goes on to offer another argument
in favor of the idea of rat kings being a
real natural phenomenon, which is that, with one exception, all
discovered rat kings are of one species, the black ratus ratus,

(39:50):
in places where rats of other species exist, So you
might have brown rats and black rats occupying the same farm,
but if you find a rat king, it's all ways
the black rat. So if they were all hoaxes, why
wouldn't people be equally making them out of brown rats.

Speaker 2 (40:07):
That's a good point.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
And the black rat, of course has a longer and
more flexible tail than the brown rat, which seems again
like it would make a lot of sense that it
could become more likely entangled under the right or wrong circumstances. Also,
there are examples of so called kings being observed in
other animals, for example, squirrel kings that have been reported.

(40:31):
One example of this was in a zoo in South
Carolina in nineteen fifty one. Now, there have been a
number of hypotheses offered throughout history to explain rat kings
if they are natural phenomena. One idea is that they're
simply born that way. Heart does not think that's very likely,
because they're born with shorter tails, the tails grow longer

(40:54):
over the course of the lifespan, and also it's hard
to imagine how the you know, the rats would survive
and so well until they get older with their tails
all tied together in that way. Another idea is that
the tails might entwine as part of a fear response
as rats huddle together, maybe when they're terrified by something,
they have a reaction that causes their tails to entwine

(41:17):
and then they get tangled and stuck together. Another example.
Another hypothesis is the idea of rats huddling for warmth
and somehow allowing their tail tips to become frozen or
stuck together by a substance, perhaps frozen urine or some
other kind of liquid that freezes the tails together, or

(41:38):
a sticky substance that sticks the tails together, and then
being initially stuck together by that external adhesive material or
frozen material, they could entwine them crawling around, as we
saw in one of those experiments, crawling around and creating
a natural knot just with their own activity and movement.
But I mentioned I was going to get to an

(41:59):
actual scientific paper about rat kings, and I want to
talk about that now. So this one was published in
the Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Biology and
Ecology in two thousand and seven by Andre Miluton, called
rat Kings in Estonia. I looked up the author of
this paper and he's a zoologist and curator at the

(42:19):
University of Tartu National History Museum in Estonia. So the
author begins this paper by looking at the literary record
of evidence for the rat king and he cites Heart
actually is a major resource, and notes that at the
time of this paper in two thousand and seven, there
was still significant question over whether rat kings are ever
created naturally, or they are they all hoaxes, and if

(42:43):
they are created naturally, what the cause is. By Miluton's count,
as of the year two thousand and five, there were
fifty eight reliable accounts of rat kings, six of which
were physically preserved in some way, and across these accounts,
the number of animals joined within a ratki varies from
three to thirty two. The greatest number of rat king

(43:04):
claims come from Germany, followed by France, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium,
and then finally one account from Indonesia, and with one exception,
all of the rat kings the author was able to
study rat king accounts the author was able to study
consisted of a single species, again, Ratus ratus, the black rat.

(43:25):
The one rat species exception is the report from Indonesia,
which was allegedly made of the species Ratus argent tivanter,
which is commonly known as the rice Field rat mill
Youuton also acknowledges, as Heart did, that outside of rats,
there are a few claimed observations of similar quote kings
made of animals like mice and squirrels, but the vast

(43:48):
majority of alleged rodent kings are agglomerations, specifically of Ratus ratus,
the black rat. But the recent discovery of a rat
king at Saaru, which is a small village in Estonia
in Ja Nanuary two thousand and five, seems to have
prompted this new investigation, and the author believes this rat
king may shed some light on how these masses of

(44:08):
creatures are formed. Warning, of course, about this story there
will be some moderately gruesome details about rat corpses and
rat injuries to read from the author's report about this
Estonian incident.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
On sixteen January two thousand and five, farmer Ray and
Kuieve discovered a huddle of squeaking rats on the sandy
floor of his shed in Saru Village, mon East Parish,
Voru County, Estonia. The animals were unable to escape and
the farmer's son killed them with a stick. After that,
a cluster of sixteen rats were excavated from the frozen sand.

(44:44):
Their tails were tangled in a knot that contained frozen sand.
At the time of discovery, only about nine of the
rats were alive. Obviously, the animals tried to dig themselves
out of the narrow tunnel, and the first rats buried
the last ones under the sand. The crater in the
sandy floor could still be seen even two months later.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
I do want to note that the article that I
referred to earlier about an Estonian rat king is actually
from years later. Oh, but the same individual is commenting
on it. This is so it's no uton in both cases.

Speaker 3 (45:19):
Okay, so there was another Estonian rat king after this,
I see. Yeah, well, so to pick up on this story,
So the farmer had no idea what he was looking
at here, didn't know anything about rat king legends or
so he says, but no reason to doubt him really,
but he thought it was weird. So he put this
tangle of rats out on a pile of planks so
the neighbors could come by and gawk at it. And

(45:43):
then about two months later, a relative of the farmer's wife,
who was a journalist, was like, Hey, what's up with this?
You know, maybe you should contact some experts. So this
relative god in contact with some zoologists to see if
the find was significant, and this led to a bunch
of reports in local media and investigation in Estonian academic journals.

(46:05):
On March tenth of that year, the rat King was
taken to the Natural History Museum at the University of Tartu,
where it was submerged in alcohol for preservation and put
on display. And it consisted of thirteen adult black rats,
seven males and six females. There were originally sixteen, but
one was removed and discarded by the farmer, and then

(46:27):
two more were removed by a scavenger. The paper says
probably a pole cat this, I guess. Seemingly, while the
rat king was, you know, on neighborhood display on the
pile of planks.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
It is kind of humorous that his first inclination was like, Wow,
I better put this out on the plank for the
neighbors to see, when, of course, we have these other
traditions and interpretations of the rat king as like a
dire omen or as a punishment from God. But you know,
as he said, he wasn't really familiar with any of
these traditions. He's just like, it's kind of neat. I

(47:00):
guess I'll put it out on the plank.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
Yeah, it's a low key spirit of curiosity. I appreciate it. So,
of the two rats that were scavenged taken away by
some kind of predator or animal, one of the tails
remained attached to the knot. So I guess by the
time the museum got the rat king there were thirteen rats,

(47:22):
but fourteen tails left. The remaining thirteen bodies have undergone
various types of damage and decay. Two of the rats
had their brains eaten by what No speculation here in
the paper. It just says brains eaten. Another one seems
to have had its hind legs nod on, and as

(47:42):
the rat king dried out, the knot appears to have loosened.
So at the museum during examination, some of the rats
separated from the rest. But if you look at the
flesh in the parts of the tail that were trapped
in the knot, that flesh is highly compressed. So the
author concludes that the tail knot was originally very tight
when the animals were alive, and the flesh was higher

(48:07):
pressure in it. I guess the rat was more hydrated.
The author compares this to two other rat king reports
from Estonia, both of which lack physical evidence. One the
so called rat King of Tartu, which allegedly consisted of
three rats and was found sometime around nineteen fifteen to
nineteen twenty. The other was found in a place called
Roika in the early seventies in the winter time, made

(48:31):
of eighteen black rats. So coming to the conclusions the
author draws from this examination and after reviewing the literature
and the others from history, including hearts observations, he's raising
the question how are these things made? A few options.
Number one, it's a hoax. These are artificially manufactured by people.

(48:53):
Number two, the knot is created naturally by chance due
to tail movements. Sometimes maybe you know, the rats are
around each other, so they end up with their tails nodded.
This could be related to the idea that rats become frightened,
you know, like heart rays. They become frightened in their
tails in twine. And then the third option is the
knot is created naturally when tails are stuck together by

(49:15):
some external binding process, such as by gluing or freezing.
And after examining the Saru Village rat king, the author
suggests that this probably is a natural phenomenon, giving several
reasons for doubting it. Was created artificially. First of all,
by all accounts, none of the family of farmers who
found it had ever heard of rat kings, and they

(49:38):
receive no tangible benefits for their find except I guess
maybe the attention of neighbors who came by to see
the thing. And this doesn't rule it out, but it
does make it seem less likely. The next one is
a good point, as was raised by Heart. It's impossible
to tie the tails of living rats in a knot

(49:58):
without anesthesia, and it is not plausible that this kind
of rat anesthetic surgical procedure was carried out on a
rural farm. It's also not plausible that anesthesia was used
to create so many of these attested rat kings from
long ago. Also, remember about how the rats they dried
out and the tail knot became loose. The author points

(50:21):
out that the finder made no attempt to tighten the
knot of the dried tails, which you might imagine someone
would do if they were trying to carry out a hoax.
You know, they might try to tighten it make it
look better.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Because they would have initially tightened the tails of perhaps
dead rats, and then would have needed to do so
again to make sure that they're fined was still presentable.

Speaker 3 (50:42):
Right, So the author does not think it's very likely
these rats were tied together artificially. Now, coming to that
second hypothesis, did the rats simply get their tails wrapped
around one another until a knot formed? Under this hypothesis,
rats that are nervous will attempt to wrap their tails
around one another, and maybe this happens in hillaot forms.
The rat king at Tsaru, though, was discovered partially in

(51:04):
its burrow, where there's no reason to think the rats
would be especially nervous. And the story of the rat
king at Roika was found inside a wall, also a
sheltered place. And then the author in fact it doubts
this could even happen in principle. He writes, quote, I've
kept wild black rats in captivity for about eight years.

(51:24):
Over this period, hundreds of animals were disturbed by people
every day during the cleaning of cages, feeding, catching, or
observing the animals. But an entangling of tails has never
been observed. So Miluton is saying, I don't even think
this happens. Much less would be the explanation of how
the tails end up knotted in a ball. But then

(51:45):
coming to the last hypothesis about the external binding process,
Miliuton writes, quote, according to the third hypothesis for the
formation of a rat king, rats should first huddle together,
as they usually do when sleeping in the nest chain,
especially when it is cold. If their tails become glued
or frozen together, animals try to free themselves by moving

(52:08):
in different directions. These chaotic movements may result in their
tails becoming entangled in a tight knot. Even after removal
of the initial cause sticky substance or ice, they are
no longer able to escape from the knot. The sticky
substance may be blood, food items, nesting material, et cetera.
And I would add to that that Heart mentioned the

(52:29):
possibility of just frozen urine.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
It's about to say, must we add to this list,
but I guess we should for science now.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
Milywton argues that this last hypothesis about the freezing or
sticking together and then that leading to the knot is
the best explanation for the rat kings found in Estonia.
Reasons for this argument. First of all, rat kings in
question appear to have formed within the shelter, not outside
of it. So you know places where they would huddle
together for warmth. In stories of rat kings in which

(53:01):
details about the weather are known, it tended to be
frosty weather. In fact, the rat king of Saru was
found right after the village had experienced sub zero temperatures.
Adding to this, apart from the story attributed to Indonesia,
basically all the stories of rat king sightings are traceable
to colder climates, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, where

(53:22):
there are two things, cold winters and Rattus ratus. Ratus
ratus is more common in southern Europe, where the winters
are more temperate, and in northern Europe. In Canada, where
the winters are colder, the brown rat Ratus norvegicus is
the more common species. So rat kings have and again
to emphasize what I said earlier, rat kings have really

(53:43):
not been reported In the brown rat. They have shorter,
thicker and less flexible tails. So the author argues that
rat kings are in fact to genuine natural phenomena, though
of course sometimes they may be created by people, especially
out of already dead rats. They occur within the nest
of the black rat during cold weather via the gluing

(54:05):
freezing process described earlier, and finally says, most of the
time we will never find out about them.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (54:12):
Not all rat kings that arise are found by people,
and not all finds are reflected in the press, much
less in scientific papers.

Speaker 2 (54:20):
Yeah, this is an idea that I saw discussed in
some other works as well, like, not every rat king
that could assuming that rat kings do occur naturally, not
everyone that occurs naturally is going to turn up because
there are even though there are accounts of them seeming
to be well fed, and these tend to be you know,
the ones that have been found, and they've been found

(54:41):
in say agricultural or urban environments where there's perhaps an
abundance of food. For the most part, they're doomed. They're
going to die, and in many cases they would die
without humans ever laying eyes on them. And then you
may have other cases where they're not reported. You know,
perhaps they it is seen as a dire omen you
better cover this up. I'm not going to put this

(55:02):
on a plank for the neighbors to see. But I
kept coming back, and I guess we've partially answered this,
But I was thinking, well, okay, if all we need
are black rats, cold weather, and the presence of human
agriculture and or urbanization. Then why do we not have
accounts of them from before around fifteen seventy six, Like,

(55:25):
certainly observations of a rat king would be novel, and
it makes sense that you would maybe hear about them,
say during the Roman period. But maybe indeed it does
have to do with it just not being like the
perfect combination of all these forces like again, cold weather,
black rats, human agriculture, urbanization, Like you have to have

(55:47):
everything clicking along just right, and then there's still going
to be a rare occurrence.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
Yeah, that all sounds right to me, though, I think
it is actually a good question you raise. Yeah, why
do these accounts first pop up in the sixteenth century,
especially when the term rat king with a different meaning
was already in common parlance.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Yeah. Interesting, And again, knots have always been of interest
to human beings, and rats have been with us a
long time as well, you know, often seen in a
more ominous light, but also sometimes celebrated for various aspects
of the organism. So it again, it's the kind of
thing that, if observed, would surely be novel enough to

(56:30):
bear repetition in the written record, which of course is
inherently incomplete, so we have to acknowledge that as well.

Speaker 3 (56:37):
Yeah, so I would say where I sit with this
is I think Heart and Miluton make good arguments, and
I would say, if I if I had to guess
one way or another, I would agree with them that
rat kings probably are naturally created, probably along the methods
that the Miluton highlights. But on the other hand, I
would admit that questions still remain and there are some

(56:58):
reasons to be skeptical.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
Now, I want to come back briefly to rat kings
and pop culture, sort of get some of the realistic
horror perhaps off the palette. Here we've touched on a
couple of the major examples of rat kings and pop culture,
at least the major one as far as the modern
audiences are concerned, but a couple of other ones that
I thought are worth mentioning. The idea of a rat king,

(57:25):
particularly as possessing a collective intelligence, is one that has
fascinated me for a while. This idea originates, as far
as I'm aware, in the pages of the British comic
two thousand and a d specifically in the Adventures of
Halo Jones. These were written by the legendary comics author
Alan Moore and illustrated by the legendary comics artist Ian Gibson,

(57:47):
who sadly passed away earlier this week. One of the greats.
But in Halo Jones, the rat King is displayed as
using its advanced intelligence to control all the rats the
world and then take over the world in the process.
I included an illustration from the comic book Here for
You Joe in black and white.

Speaker 3 (58:08):
Is it typing on a computer?

Speaker 2 (58:10):
I believe so. Yeah, these are mass communicating rat kings
right here.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
You never know when you're talking to somebody on the internet.
They could be a rat king. It could have no way,
It absolutely could be. Now related, but separate concept is
that of the cranium rats and dungeons and dragons. These
are psionically enhanced rats. So these are rats that the
e Lithids or the mind flares have toyed with and
they've changed their brains in order to use them as

(58:36):
spies to go out and especially into like the human
world and see what's up. But the thing I always
liked about cranium rats is the idea that one of
these is essentially just a rat. You encounter one cranium rat,
you're just encountering a rat. But if you have two
cranium rats, well they have the collective intelligence, the psionically
connected brain of two rats together, and it builds from there.

(58:59):
So in great number, cranium rats have a vast collective intelligence.
And in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, they have
enhanced psionic abilities, so they'd be able to like basically
like lash out at you with scanner powers. WHOA, So
you really don't want to let them get on the
computer less Like Cameron Vail, they hack into your main
mainframe via scanner powers through the phone lines.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
Yeah. Another frequently cited use of rat kings in pop culture.
I believe Liz Lemon's old boyfriend Dennis Duffy on Thirty
Rock claims in one episode to have seen a rat king,
perhaps in the subway or what have you. That one
definitely stuck in my mind. But I'd forgotten about this one.
It's been a long time since I've read Stephen King's

(59:44):
nineteen eighty six novel It, but there is mention of
a rat king and its vast pages. I had to
look it up to see exactly what is said. But
on page eight hundred and seventy two of the kindle edition,
you have the kids boring the Nyebolt House. This is
the the Haunted House. If you've seen the movie, you
know what I'm talking about, the dark, decayed house that

(01:00:06):
they go to, and Richie opens up a cupboard, looks inside,
and then reports what he has seen. He says, quote,
there's hundreds of them in there. Their tails, they were
all tangled up, bill knotted together like snakes.

Speaker 3 (01:00:21):
Creepy. So page eight seventy two is that near the
end of chapter one.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
Yes, I have a physical copy around here somewhere, but
there's no way I was going to like scan through
it and find one mention of a rat king. So
I had to pony up by the kindle edition do
a word search and find out exactly where King mentions
rat kings because there's a lot of horror, plenty of
horror in that book to go around. Oh yeah, so
that's just a taste of some uses of the rat

(01:00:47):
king in pop culture. But there are others. So if
there are any that are near and dear to your heart,
do you think are particularly insightful write in we would
love to hear from you. Do not send us your
rat kings, though. If you find a rat king, please
find an acceptable authority to report this. All right, we're
going to go ahead and close this episode out again
look to the Monster Fact tomorrow from a little more

(01:01:08):
from me regarding rat king esque matters. But then we'll
be back on Thursday with an episode on you Guessed
It The Nutcracker.

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:01:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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