August 9, 2025 • 62 mins
Out in the sun-blasted dunes of the Gobi, where the wind cuts like a straight razor and the sand moves endlessly, there’s a story on the hushed tongues of herdsmen and half-mad nomads. They call it the Mongolian Death Worm—a crimson nightmare that spits lightning, vomits acid, and burrows under your feet like Satan’s own cattle prod. No one’s ever caught one, but plenty claim they’ve felt it thrumming under the sand, waiting. And if you stick around long enough in that desert, with your brain baking in the sun, you’ll start to wonder if the thing’s even real… or if it’s just the desert itself trying to kill you. Citizens of the Milky Way, prepare yourselves for The Mongolian Death Worm!
Music and Editing by Gage Hurley
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Music and Editing by Gage Hurley
Check out VaporVerse: https://www.youtube.com/@vaporversemusic
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
In the late two thousands, four musicians entered the Gobi
Desert with a dream to channel a legend, to awaken
something primal, to scream until the voids screamed back. They
called themselves death Worm, formed in a Mongolian yurt behind
(00:28):
an abandoned vinyl shop, death Worm, fuse throat singing, industrial sludge,
and a cryptid obsession into a genre they called wormcore.
Leading the charge was towards sludge, went shirtless, scale tattoos,
a man people have called a prophet, or at the
(00:51):
very least deeply concussed.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
So Worm came to me in a vision.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I was hallucinating on fermented mare's milk in asana. It
slithered out of the steam.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
And whispered, start a band awaken the buried one, open
the pit, and I said, I shall do your bidding, Crimson,
Lord of the beneath. And then I got shushed. Apparently
I was shouting there are other people in the sauna,
but the message was clear.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Un lead guitar Malachite Kazakh, known to fans and federal
authorities as mal spoke through distortion and crowbar tuning ritual.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
We tune in drop Kyoshah it's not a real note, technically,
it's more of a ton of vent. It vibrates the sand,
It softens the boundaries between worlds. The worm hears it.
That's what matters. Dogs really fucking hate it.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
And on drums, a man known only as Bort the
Burrower Shank. He doesn't read music, he reads tectonic shift.
I don't keep time. I channeled seismic events. That was
a four point two in eastern Kazakhstan. And on base
Fungus John, a man of few words and fewer garments,
(02:16):
and the unblinking stare of someone who's seen a few things.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
The Worm has no mouth, and yet it screams. I
can hear it. Also, I haven't blinked since twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Their albums became cult classics in certain very unregulated corners
of the Internet. Hits included Mute is Thrown, Throb of
the Berry, digest me slowly, I deserve it. He rises
(02:58):
at noon and he still moist noon and he stills,
and the controversial ballad Electrocute Me, Daddy Worm, You cute it,
but success would come at a price.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Tark we got movement under the mosh pit.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
He comes opens the foam cannons.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
We don't have liability insurance.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Death Worm disbanded in twenty eleven after an instant involving
pirate technics and the spontaneous collapse of a small dune ecosystem.
Their whereabouts remain unknown, but according to legend and Mongolian authorities,
they are quote strongly encouraged not to return. People say, well,
(04:00):
it isn't real, but neither is love. And I wrote
four albums about both citizens of the Milky Way. My
(04:26):
name is Dylan Hackworth.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
And I'm Gage Hurley.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
And you have arrived in the sands of Aracus, where
we are hunting for a different kind of spice. That's right,
We're gonna be riding a whole different kind of shi
hallooed today. Folks. Oh, buckle up, Buckle up, because this
(04:50):
one gets really weird and really icky. This isn't one
I'd listen to while you're having lunch. Let's just say,
because if you ever find yourself wandering the scorched expanse
of Mongolia's Gobi Desert, a place so dry we need
lube just to make this episode, don't be surprised if
(05:13):
the wind is carrying more than just hot sand. Every
now and then, in the shade of a rusted jeep
or the hush of a half collapsed yert, you might
hear a local speaking in a low, grave tone. And
while their voices may be hushed, it'll carry the weight
of something ancient, something feared for centuries and longer. They
(05:39):
speak of a creature that slithers, SLINKs and sores, a
thing that wriggles along the scorched sands of the Gobi.
Sometimes even in the night it's heard howling. And the
teller of this tale they don't give this creature some
grand mythic name. No, the local call it the ogoi korkoi,
(06:03):
which I'm sure I mispronounced, but that's Mongolian for large
intestine worm and baby. It's just about as vile as
it sounds, and according to legend, it's every bit as
deadly as the name implies. Because the name isn't just descriptive,
it's a warning. This week's episode is the Mongolian death worm.
(06:30):
Oh yes, yes, yes, you can almost hear somewhere there's
someone sitting in the dark clouds of Scandinavia, somewhere going
I have a name, my dear, for a band we
call it some death.
Speaker 5 (06:42):
Swam, uber heavy, uber heav Ye.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
This is not some sleek serpent or some shimmering beast
the far off past. No, this thing is squat, ugly
and mean as hell, a grotesque red parody of life itself.
The locals say it's about two to five feet long,
depending on who's telling the tale, and depending on how
(07:07):
close the look you actually get of this thing, which
you might think two to five feet that's not I mean,
compared to some cryptids. Hey, that's small fries. That's peanuts, baby,
that's peanuts. That's because this thing comes extra deadly. Because
despite any variations of the reports, all agree on one thing.
(07:29):
This thing is something that should never move on its own,
nor is it even something that should exist. Something that
sounds more at home in the dunes of a Racus
than the sands of the Gobie. A fat, bloated tube
of blood colored flesh, slick and wet looking. It doesn't
(07:52):
slither like a snake, nor does a dig like a mole.
It pulses, it heaves forward like a sinister sausage, trying
to break free of its casing. They say it lives
just beneath the cracked skin of the desert, hiding and
waiting with the patience that only something ancient can muster.
(08:14):
And here's the kicker. You don't see the thing until
it's already seen you, and you're already on the menu.
One moment, you're trudging across the top of a dune,
sweat in your eyes, boots full of sand, and that's
when you feel it, strange vibration, like something deep underfoot
(08:34):
is breathing, as if smiling that it already has you.
And then without warning, the ground explodes and whatever you were,
oh mama, you ain't no more.
Speaker 5 (08:49):
A sausage that eats you. Terrifying and ironic, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
A fat, bloated tube of blood colored flesh. Was the
most disgusting thing I could think of to describe this thing.
And it's true. It's true. You see, the Mongolian death
worm isn't just some backwoods boogeyman built to scare kids
away from sand dunes. No, this thing has a kill count,
and it doesn't mess around. According to legend, it doesn't
(09:17):
just burst from the ground like a bad dream to
scare away travelers who venture onto its territory like some
scooby Doo villain. No, no, no, this thing finishes what
it starts. Locals say it can spit a corrosive yellow venom,
something so toxic it doesn't even burn. It melts a
(09:38):
person away where they stand, skin bone. You name it
instant death on contact. And if that wasn't enough to
ruin your afternoon, well this thing comes fully wired death.
And I mean that almost literally. Some stories claim that
it can also discharge electricity to stun or kill prey.
(10:02):
So this thing may not even take you in a
sudden explosion of acid. It may stun you, so you
gotta lay there and wait for it to take its
sweet time to come to you. That's right. This thing
can zap you like a living cattle prod. Or maybe
it'll just fry you where you stand, like some desert
(10:23):
bug zapper with a taste for lost hikers. Whether venom
or voltage, take your pick. Either way, the result is
the same lifeless body, sprawled out on the sand and
in some cases a puddle, staring up at the blazing,
indifferent sun. The gobie desert takes no prisoners, and neither
(10:45):
does the death worm. And before you chalk it up
to just modern campfire nonsense, stories of the death worm
can find a way to wiggle into your mind. And
these stories go back for generations. These aren't just TikTok
tails or internet form embellishments. These stories of the death
worm stretch back centuries, passed down from the lips of
(11:09):
nomadic herders who know the gobe like you would know
your own neighborhood. These folks who can read the desert
like a map, who know when a shadow linger is
one second too long, or when the wind gives you
a subtle heads up that something wicked this way comes.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
I mean, this thing can spit acid or shock you
like a cattle prod. It's like a combination of two
of the most fearsome villains in movie history, Anton Shagur
and the Zeno Morph.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Yes, absolutely, I mean this is truly it's different than
other cryptids, you know, than what you typically think of
as a cryptid, and not even just because it's a worm,
but just because of its it's like abilities.
Speaker 5 (11:56):
Really, I've never heard of anything like that.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
It's truly like heavy metal. It's truly like something you
would see on a cover of a heavy metal album,
like a some Scandinavian death metal like you know something
like really wild. I mean it is. This thing means
a business, because what's bigfoot gonna do? Bigfoot? If it
kills you, it's probably just.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
Gonna gonna rip your arms off.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yeah, this motherfucker, this guy melts you down to porridge.
He takes you in a to go cup. Well, according
to the locals, the death worm, it doesn't haunt the busy,
well worn paths of the go bet. Now, this thing
is an outsider. Like most cryptids, It keeps to the margins,
(12:38):
to the dead zones of the desert. The place is
so remote and inhospitable that few things other than sun
and sand can even stand it. Regions where you could
walk for days and never see another soul, just you
the heat and the silence of the desert, until, of course,
(13:00):
something beneath the surface decides you've walked far enough in
a place that already feels abandoned by time, where the
silence is louder than any desert wind, the idea of
a predator hiding just beneath the sand doesn't really feel
far fetched. In fact, in many ways it feels inevitable,
(13:22):
because the desert can hide a lot. After all, As
the sand ceaselessly rearranged with the wind. The very mask
of the desert itself changes, and with these changes, the
bones of creatures older than memory are both hidden away
or brought to light, caravans that wandered off the map
(13:43):
and never came back. And if you believe the stories,
something is still alive out there, laying is still as death,
waiting for the unfortunate rambler. But it's the color that
sticks with the people who have actually lived to see
this creature and actually tell someone about it. Everyone describes
(14:07):
it the same way. Red blood red, not rusty, not
a brownish red, but like raw muscle, like something half
cooked by the sun. Because in a land painted in
nothing but sun bleached golds and weary tans, the flash
of scarlet in the sands a visual you won't soon forget.
(14:30):
Some say that it's lined with jagged spike like growth
set its side, almost like I kind of imagine, almost
like a stegosaurus, but like on the sides, you know,
it's kind of something like that. That's what some people say,
as if nature decided to make this thing a switchblade
that could slither now. Others say that it oozes a
(14:51):
thick jelly like mucus that poisons the ground that it touches,
leaving behind a trail that glistens in the heat, like
some kind of snail from hell. Then there's those who
claim that its body is smooth, like the skin of
a snake pulled tight. But it's the head that always
(15:12):
comes last in every story. They say it widens and
then it strikes, like its jaw is unhinging into a gaping, nightmarish.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
Maw, which is something snakes.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Do, right. Absolutely, they kind of write.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
I think the anaconda does that. Absolutely. You know it
also conjures up the movie tremors.
Speaker 6 (15:38):
Oh yeah, And obviously those are much bigger, but certainly
though they're kind of carnivorous sandworms, which is essentially what
we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Good shout out, because I forgot I have not seen
that movie in so long.
Speaker 5 (15:53):
I rewatched it last year. It was pretty good. It's
good eighties cheese, which I love.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Absolutely. Nope with half a brain goes looking for the
Mongolian deathworm. As you might expect, you don't just go
about just strap on a fanny pack and walk out
into the gobie. You don't track this thing, you don't
bait it and you damn sure don't catch it. To
the locals, the death worm is not a trophy to
(16:19):
be captured, but rather it's a trap for those that
think they can. It's something you treat the way you
treat a rusted landbine buried in a field somewhere. You
keep your distance. You don't poke at it with a
damn stick, You don't go to investigate, You don't test
the limits of its patients, because legend says it doesn't
(16:43):
really have any. If you're lucky, you'll never even be
in the right conditions to see the Mongolian deathworm, because,
according to the old stories, the death worm has its preferences.
Maybe it lacks it's sand, dry, bone dry. It likes
life remote miles from the nearest village or source of help.
(17:06):
And it likes the kind of midday heat that will
give you a stroke faster than you can even say
the word. Basically, if you ever find yourself in those
exact conditions, quietly and carefully walk the other way. If
the ground doesn't explode beneath you first. Naturally, not everyone
(17:27):
buys the story. To even see this thing, you've already
got to be in conditions that most actively try to avoid.
It's understandable why someone might see NeSSI. You know, you
go to the beautiful lock to take for a family event,
or you take photos or whatever. Same thing with Bigfoot.
You're going for a hike, You're doing all that. No,
the place where the death worm even hangs is a
(17:49):
place you don't even want to go.
Speaker 5 (17:51):
Yeah, it's a lot like the Arctic. It's the opposite.
It's just brutal and inhospitable.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Exactly rightsolutely because over the years, scientists, skeptics, and sand
caked adventures have all taken their turn and rolling their
eyes at the legend. To most of them, the Mongolian
death worm is just a story, a desert bedtime tale
cooked up to keep curious kids from walking too far
(18:20):
into the dunes without an adult, the sort of regional
flavor of boogeyman wrapped in folklore and acid. And to
be fair, it's a completely understandable point on their part.
There are no known creatures, especially not worms, that match
anything close to that description passed down through Mongolian lore,
(18:41):
especially not five foot crimson abominations pulsing through the sand.
Nor is there anything resembling a venomous sausage, zapping travelers
with a fleshy taser. The skeptics now, they talk about
mirages and hallucinations triggered by dehydration and sunstroke. And they'll
(19:01):
tell you how fear can warp the mine, how a
fleeting glimpse of a desert snake or a trick of
the light can balloon into a nightmare with teeth. And
maybe they're rights. But if that's all it is, then
why did the stories keep slithering back despite the doubts,
Despite the scientists with their pesky charts and graphs. The
(19:26):
tails refuse to die. Around campfires scattered across the Gobie
elders still tell the tale. Their face is lit by
the flickering flames and memory, Their voices dropped to a hush,
not for drama, but out of respect for a creature
that few have seen. It's not just respect, even, it's fear.
(19:51):
They speak of the way that the sand shifts barely
subtly when the death worm stirs beneath it, like something
rolling over in its sleep. They warn the younger ones
not to stray away from the well worn paths, not
because of dehydration or bandits even, but because the desert,
(20:12):
much like the deep sea, holds things within it that
seem to not belong to this earth, things that we
were never meant to find, and more importantly, things that
don't want to be fould And that's the part that
sticks with you. Even those who've never laid eyes on it,
(20:33):
speak of the death Worm with the quiet certainty of fact,
not fate. To them. It is not a question of
if it's real. It's a given, like the sun's setting,
like the changing of the seasons, like the sands that
change with the wind. The death Worm isn't a legend.
It's a fixture of the Gobi Desert, as real and
(20:54):
as ruthless as a sudden sandstorm on a clear sky day.
And really, can you blame those that fear it, Because
when you're alone in the middle of the Goby, surrounded
by nothing but wind and heat and silence, silence that's heavy,
one that weighs on you, your mind starts listening to
(21:16):
that quiet, and you begin to wonder, and then you
begin to feel it that something might be moving just
beneath your boots, not loud, not fast, but something ancient,
something that doesn't need eyes to know you're there, something
(21:37):
waiting for you to take just one more step. There's
something about this death worm that doesn't just rattle the nerves.
It unlocks something, a fear older than memory. It's a
dread that lives inside of all of those who know
the goby well in the places where science can't shine
(21:58):
a pesky flashlight, because the worm isn't just about venom
or voltage. It's about the awful idea that beneath the
thin crust of safety we pretend this world is built on.
There are things that don't care what we believe, things
that don't fit into biology charts or museum exhibits, things
(22:20):
that aren't man but aren't beast, but something else entirely,
things that move in the blind spots and slither in silence,
that leave behind no answers, just footprints made of more questions,
more complexity, and more fear. And thus the death worm endures,
(22:43):
a creature born of hot sand and raw terror, thrumming
just below the surface, hesitant to believe. Folks, well, haha,
if so, you're not the only one who thinks the
death worm sounds like something dreamed up after want too
many drinks around desert campfire. Something equal parts booze, heat, exhaustion,
(23:04):
and paranoia. When Western scientists first caught wind of these stories, huh,
they rolled their eyes so hard you could probably hear
it echo like a bowling alley across the dunes, A
blood red worm that spits acid and shoots electricity. You know,
the average academic. It sounds less like zoology and more
(23:26):
like something scribbled on the back of a napkin by
a screenwriter on the set of a monster movie, a
creature cooked up with B movie bravado, but out in
the gobie. It's no joke to the nomadic Mongolian zoo
call that harsh, sun bleached wasteland home. The death worm
was treated with the same weary respect you'd give a
(23:48):
venomous snake. Wasn't something to even speculate about. It was
something to just be avoided. And those who claim to
have crossed its path don't spin yarns or embellished details
they told of. They're encounters with the same haunted seriousness
you would hear in the voice of someone describing a
near fatal car crash on an empty highway. One of
(24:11):
the most chilling through lines in this legend of the
death worm is its impeccable sense of timing. This thing
is practically the fred astare of the desert, almost like
it doesn't chase or stalk its prey, but rather it
appears just for a moment, and then something just dies
again and again. Witnesses would report the same disturbing pattern,
(24:35):
a flash of red beneath the sand, a faint vibration,
and then silence, followed by the collapse of not just
people but animals. Do camels, big ones, creatures built to
survive the hellish heat and go months without water. They
would drop like sacks of grain, as if they'd been
(24:59):
hit by some invisible pulse, a static charge that kills,
or a toxin too subtle to see but strong enough
to shut down something the size of a truck. Some
swear that death comes from simply touching the thing. Just
brushing against its hide was enough to end your life.
(25:20):
No bite or strike, just simple contact and then nothing.
In a place like the Gobi, where survival balances on
the edge of every drop of water and every scrap
of shade you can find, a creature like that doesn't
stay a curiosity for long. It becomes a warning, a rumor,
(25:43):
a monster cloaked in the logic of death itself. There
were other stories too, the kind that stay with you
long after the fires burned away and you've crawled into
your jammy jams for bedtime. Accounts from travelers who swore
they saw something un natural stirring beneath the sand. And
(26:03):
we're not talking about mere wind or the shifting of dunes,
but literal ripples, like something long and sinuous was deliberately
moving just below the surface, tracing slow, lazy circles beneath
their feet. Some said that they stood frozen, unable to move,
as the desert floor began to writhe and even bubble,
(26:26):
like the earth itself was alive, trying to breathe. And
that's when it would happen, the worm exploding up through
the crust in a flash of glistening red, its blood
colored body catching the light just long enough to scorch
itself into your memory before vanishing back down with a
(26:46):
hiss and gone. It leaves behind no trace, only silence
and a desert traveler who has now shut their pants. Sometimes,
out in the Gobi, it seems like they're horizon never ends,
and the sun seems to cook reason out of your skull.
It's not hard to see how something like that, real
(27:09):
or not, could take root in a person's mind. It
doesn't just scare you, it brands you. And once you've
seen the sand move like that, you never look at
it the same way. Again. The stories didn't just scare
the locals. They caught the attention of outsiders too, folks
with money to burn and a brain full of bad ideas.
(27:33):
Enough that over the course of the twentieth century, more
than a few expeditions made their way to the Gobi,
not for fossils or fame, but for a glimpse of
the worm of legend. One of the earliest and most
famous was in nineteen twenty two, the same year that
the tomb of King Tutan Common was discovered in Egypt,
(27:55):
a similar expedition was headed out to the Gobi trying
up a worm. And this expedition, in nineteen twenty two
was led by none other than Roy Chapman Andrews. If
Indiana Jones had a real world prototype, Andrews would be
a strong candidate. A swaggering naturalist with a knack for
(28:16):
finding dinosaur bones and dodging danger. He wasn't hunting monsters,
not exactly, but he was after ancient history. But when
your neck deep in the Gobi and the local start
talking about something red and deadly slitherin underfoot, you start
to listen. And to his credit, Andrews did just that.
(28:38):
He recorded the tales he overheard carefully and with reverent respect,
as though he was a scientist first and foremost, measuring
bones instead of a boogeyman. He didn't roll his eyes
like those of his predecessors. He knew that every great
legend starts with the flicker of something real, something we
(28:59):
always try to remember here on Creep Street, some seed
that is buried in the dirt. But even after miles
of sand, in weeks of interviews, Andrews never saw the
worm for himself, not even a flicker of scarlet movement
on the sand, No blurry photos, no suspicious trails, just
(29:20):
stories and lots of sand. However, this is what Chapman
would say of the stories and the reports that he
collected on his expedition. This is probably an entirely mythical animal,
but may have some little basis in fact, For every
Northern Mongolian firmly believes in it and gives essentially the
(29:42):
same description it is said to be about two feet long,
bodies shaped like a sausage, and to have no head
or legs. It is so poisonous that even to touch
it it means instant death. It is reported to live
in the most arid, sandy regions of the Western What
reptile could have furnished the basis for the description as
(30:05):
a mystery? So here you're even seeing Andrews say, my
gut is telling me this thing isn't necessarily real. But
how interesting that for centuries people have kept essentially the
same description. The only thing that really varies is just
whether it's two to five feet. Every description remains the same.
(30:28):
There was no embellishment, There was not a lot added
to it, like oh this time it can fly or
this time it can tap dance, And there's no like
added things really along the way, which is considering is
pretty interesting.
Speaker 5 (30:41):
And the length could just be different ages of the
same creature, but centuries apart the same basic description of it.
I mean that that's got to attest to something.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Right, It's one of those things cryptids. I need to
learn more about the actual school of cryptozoology so that
I have a better like vocabulary when it comes to
describing it, because in a way, there's almost something mystical
about it in a way as opposed to like a
flesh and blood. To me, the impression I get is
(31:16):
it's it would be more kin to like a desert entity.
It makes me think of something that and not even
to be silly, but like something that would be in
like the desert region of a Zelda game. Almost a
magic kind of associated with it. And I don't mean
magic has in fairy tale and not real, but or
interdimensional like something. Maybe there is something out there. There
(31:39):
is maybe some rift or something deep in that desert
that most don't see or encounter, because why go there
in the first place, And this thing is able to
kind of pop in and out of our reality. Maybe
it doesn't even intend to show up. Maybe all it
knows is it's just going through the sand and it
doesn't even realize it's left one verse version of Earth
(32:01):
or whatever into another. You know.
Speaker 5 (32:03):
Yeah, a wormhole of.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Sorts, literally a wormhole absolutely Ooh. Just had to take
a quick pause there, Creep Street, just to give your
poor palpitating hard arrest. If you're enjoying this episode, go
ahead and follow us on Facebook. Instagram at creep Street Podcast,
Twitter at creep Street Pod, TikTok at creep Street Podcast.
(32:28):
That's right, and if once a week is not enough
for you, just head on over to patreon dot com
for all sorts of goodies. We got three different tiers there,
something for every tier, so get your fixings. We even
got a free tier where you can listen to the
weekly sketches before they go live on the episode. Now,
without further ado, back to today's story. In the decades
(32:56):
that followed Andrew's expedition, the mystery did not die down,
but rather a dug in baby the Goby's Red Menace
kept calling, and more than a few brave souls answered.
The dare explorers, monster hunters, cryptid chasers, all of which
lured by that perfect cocktail of danger in the unexplained.
(33:20):
One of the most relentless was Ivan mackerel, a check
cryptozoologist who by the nineteen nineties had become completely obsessed
with the death worm. And we don't mean mildly curious
or merely academically interested. No, No, this check chap was obsessed.
Mackerel chased the worm with the kind of wide eyed
(33:42):
enthusiasm usually reserved for buried treasure or flying saucers, and honestly,
his methods weren't that far off. He led multiple expeditions
into the Gobi, rolling deep with gear that felt more
like science fiction than pure science. He brought sonar rigs,
explosives meant to rattle the worm out of hiding, and
(34:03):
best of all, a custom built dune buggy, something straight
out of Mad Max, complete with giant tires and a
mounted camera. He tore across the desert like a Morton
Joe on a cryptid hunt, held bent on finding the
thing that the rest of the world had written off
his myth. And yet even with all his gadgetry and
(34:24):
all his passion, the sand kept its secrets. Yes, despite
all the effort and gear and gadgets and dune buggies
kicking up plumes across the desert horizon, Ivan Macro found
exactly what every expedition before him had found. Jack Diddley
squat no word, no scorched bones, no mysterious blast craters,
(34:51):
not even a crusty old scorch mark on a rock
to ride home about. The go Be gave him what
the go Be gives most who come looking for answers
sand in a whispering silence of the desert wind, its
own way of giving you the middle finger. But what
Mackerel did uncover was something harder to measure, a deeper
(35:16):
truth that lingered beneath the surface, like the worm itself.
What he found was belief. Richard Freeman, one of the
UK's most prominent cryptozoologists, had this to say of Mackerel's
expedition and its discoveries. The expedition's interpreter, Sugi, told them
(35:36):
of a dramatic instant from his childhood. A party of
geologists had been visiting Sugi's home region, and one of
them was poking into the sand with an iron rod
when he suddenly collapsed as if poleaxed. His colleagues rushed
to his aid, only to find him dead. As they
examined the ground into which he had shoved, they saw
(36:00):
while the sand began to churn violently, and out of
the dune came a huge, bloated death worm. Well, the
locals still spoke of the death worm with unshakable conviction,
not as an old folk tale or cautionary fable, but
as a fact of frickin' life. Some refused to set
foot in the so called worm zones. Others told stories
(36:24):
about relatives or neighbors who died after ignoring the old warnings.
They weren't looking for worm sign, as Stilgar might say,
and thus they were cut down by something unseen, something
sudden and final. To the people who call the go
Be Home, the death worm wasn't some monster movie villain.
(36:46):
It was part of the dang landscape, as real and
as dangerous as a dust storm or a dried up well.
It was baked into their understanding of the place, a
living reminder that in a desert this fast and merciless,
not everything buried stays dead, and not everything unseen is imaginary.
(37:10):
And think about it. That really put it into perspective.
For example, you know, like we know, hey, if you're
walking through the woods, look out for poison ivy. Now,
it doesn't mean you're going to not live your life
because poison ivy's out there. That I thought was kind
of interesting to look at it. They don't look at
(37:30):
as a fable or this thing. It's just a fact
of life, the way you would.
Speaker 5 (37:35):
If a black bear shows up in your backyard here
in the States, even you just stay inside. You don't
go near it.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Like happen to our cousin Madison. She watched it on
her Uh, they watched it on their security cam. A
black bear came out. It was like walking around by
the car and everything well. Other expeditions have come and
gone as well, just like dust on the wind, and
each one or right with high hopes and leaving with
sunburns and empty pockets. Sun came armed with cutting edge tech,
(38:08):
rigging up electrical sensors under the sand and hope that
even the slightest of twitches, a trimmer, anything might give
away the worm's location. Others took a simpler approach, tense thermoss,
nerves of steel, camping for days near supposed hot zones,
baking under the brutal sun by day, shivering through the
(38:28):
bone deep cold by night. They all waited, but to
no avail. But the gobie is not generous with its mystery.
If the worm was out there, it wasn't interested in
being found. No vibrations were recorded, no rippling dunes, no
hiss or flash, no crimson coil erupting from the dust.
(38:51):
Just the vast echoing quiet, the kind that starts to
hum in your ears if you sit with it too long,
the truth became harder and harder to pin down, and
one thing grew clear. The Gobi Desert doesn't just let
it you in on the skivvy. It doesn't just tell
you what it's thinking. In fact, it seems to swallow
(39:12):
them whole and anyone who dares try to discover them.
Because despite the lack of hard proof, no body, no bones,
not even a track that could be blamed on a
lizard or a gust of wind, the stories would never stop.
In fact, they multiplied and spread around the world. Some
locals claim to have seen the things slicing through the
(39:33):
sand like a fat, furious river of blood, leaving behind
no trench or no ripple, just a feeling of dread
and the hope that it wasn't still nearby. Others described
something even more surreal, the worm lifting part of itself
above the surface and spitting a strange, viscous liquid that
(39:55):
hissed and sizzled. The moment it hit flesh or fabric,
victim didn't even have a chance to scream. They just
collapsed in a paralyzed state, cooked from the inside out.
Then there were the camels, those hardy tanks of the desert.
People spoke of them dropping without warning, struck by an
(40:16):
unseen force, their bodies convulsing, their eyes rolling back in
their heads, legs folding beneath them like broken scaffolding, and
then the stillness of death. And yet not one corpse,
no fossil, no skeletal evidence, no skeletal remains, no scales
or teeth to hang in a museum. Just stories on
(40:40):
top of more stories, but nevertheless, stories told again and
again over centuries, and with a consistency that refuses to
be ignored, details that echo from one generation to the next,
like the desert itself is passing them forward. Even the
(41:00):
most ardent of skeptics have to admit that it is strange.
Not every researcher came back empty handed in the imagination department, though,
because some returned from the Gobi with a different theory altogether.
Maybe the Mongolian death worm isn't a worm at all.
Some have speculated it might be a misidentified animal, something
(41:24):
real but rare, a highly adapted desert reptile, perhaps maybe
a sand boa or some as of yet undiscovered species
of skink, which, folks, if you're wondering at home, what
the hell is skink Is it's actually a type of lizard.
Its strange movement and sudden appearances only magnified the legend
(41:47):
by heat fear in the desert's habit of warping time.
Others pointed to the land itself, in a place as
volatile and unforgiving as the Gobi. Maybe this wasn't a
creature at all. Maybe it was underground gas pockets occasionally
rupturing and releasing noxious fumes. Maybe shifting sands generates static
(42:10):
charges that discharge violently under just the right conditions, the
kind of phenomenon that could kill livestock in an instant,
or cause a traveler to drop in their tracks without warning.
And when it happens, when something unseen lashes out, our
brains fill in the gaps. They shape the tear and
(42:32):
give it teeth, because in the Gobe, if you forget
the threats, you die, And so the stories stick, and
maybe over time the danger becomes a monster, a monster
red and glistening, made of myth, born from heat and
fear and a primal need to make sense of the senseless. Still,
(42:57):
for all of the clever theories and scientific maybe is
nothing quite ties the boat No tidy explanation manages to
stitch up this whole thing without a few threads dangling loose.
Why the fear? Why not just a casual wariness, but
a deep, bone set fear passed through generations, a fear
(43:21):
so widespread and consistent that it stretches not only through
the generations but geography, like the creature itself slithering beneath
the sand. Also, why the crimson color, Why that same
flash of red in every story told over and over
(43:41):
by people who haven't even met each other, but all
seem to remember the same nightmare. And why the reputation.
We're not talking about a place that is lacking in
real world natural threats. The Gobie is already home to vipers, wolves,
not to starvation, dehydration, and just general exposure to the elements.
(44:04):
The desert can kill you six ways from the number six,
and yet one thing, this dang worm, that is what
earns the hushed rumors and fireside warnings. But why, that's
the question that keeps creeping back of all the things
that could kill you in the desert, Why this mythical worm.
(44:26):
Maybe there's something out there that doesn't care about the
categories or the boxes, that we try to put in it,
something that isn't a reptile or even a worm, or
even a freak accident of geology, something that can't be
just proked and prodded or packed an ice, A monster
that doesn't need to leave tracks behind. Maybe the Mongolian
(44:50):
death worm is exactly what all of those who've seen
it claim it to be, a venom spitting, lightning laced blood,
red killer worml under the sand, waiting for the next
unlucky traveler. Or maybe it's something even stranger. Maybe it
didn't crawl out of the sand at all, but out
(45:10):
of the collective imagination of people shaped by one of
the harshest landscapes on Earth, forged by blistering heat, punishing isolation,
and a silence so deep it can swallow you whole.
Maybe it's not born of biology, but from our collective fear,
and kept alive by centuries of caution and the simple,
(45:34):
unnerving truth that some places were never meant to be
mapped out. We often talk about the tulpa, a thought form,
something that might be brought into reality by our collective fear.
If a group of people, through generations continue to fear
this thing, maybe that's what keeps it alive. There are
(45:56):
no bones though, no fossilized remains locked in musseuics, No
strange specimens suspended and cloudy from alde high tagged and
filed under unclassified. No crisp photos, not even blurry photos
for that matter, not even a half convincing smear across
a dusty pair of binoculars. Just stories, but dozens of them,
(46:21):
hundreds if you look hard enough, told with hushed voices,
with details too specific and to like to feel like
lies or hearsay, told by people who have nothing to
gain by telling them, and sometimes plenty to lose. But
still just stories or all we have to go on,
(46:43):
and maybe that's the only kind of proof the Gobi
Desert is ever going to give us. You can only
chase the cryptid so long before science starts tapping on
your shoulder, arms crossed and eyebrows or raised, wondering how
much longer this is going to take? And can't it
speak to the manager? And in the case of the
Mongolian deathworm, science didn't just knock. It kicked the door
(47:06):
in with a clipboard and a healthy dose of skepticism. Biologists, herpetologists,
which I can only imagine study herpes. Desert ecologists, cryptozoologists
with sunburns and PhDs, all of them have tried to
strip the myth down to its bones. They've all trudged
(47:28):
through the dunes, run the data crossed, reference the sightings,
they've dug, they've scanned, they've measured, they've camped, and after
all that, the conclusion is always the same. If the
death worm is real, it's the most uncooperative creature in
the animal kingdom, or the cryptid kingdom for that matter,
whether Bigfoot is real or not, We at least have
(47:51):
what people claim to be tracks or photos or videos
or eyewitness accounts, but not with the death worm. Other
than a few eyewitness accounts, there's no tracks, no tunnels,
no droppings, no skeleton, just fear and the stories passed
down through generations. And maybe that's the most unnerving part
(48:13):
of all. Some say this whole thing is just a
case of cryptid confusion, that maybe people have been seeing
ordinary animals all along, creatures that are already in existence,
catalog classified, and just doing what they do while the
human brain does what it does, filling in the blanks
(48:33):
with teeth and terror. This theory tends to lean on
the usual suspects, of course, like desert reptiles with a
knack for burrowing and just enough mystery to get the
imagination buzzing. The death adder, the sand boa, even the
tartar sand boa. None of them read though, none of
them venom spitting, none of them capable of shorting out
(48:55):
your nervous system like a taser. But still they slink,
they vanish, They ripple under the sand, and under the
right conditions, a little scorching heat, a dash of stirring wind,
sweat in your eyes, and a healthy dose of your
brain being halfway fried, it's easy to make a mistake,
because the mind's a funny thing. When it's in survival mode.
(49:17):
It cuts corners, baby, it rewrites details. It sees danger
first and asks questions later, and every so often it
is from those very circumstances that legends are born. Other
theories veer off the map entirely. Forget biology or ecology.
We're talking about deep, deep in the human psyche, because
(49:41):
life in the gobee isn't just hard, it's indifferent, and
that is the key word here. The desert doesn't care
about who you are or how prepared you came, or
how many prayers you packed in your fanny pack. Out there,
people travel for days with nothing but the wind in
their ears and an ocean of dunes on every horizon.
(50:06):
It's the kind of isolation that bends the mind a little,
stretches it thin. It made me think of one of
our main source for our episode on the Donner Party,
called the Indifferent Stars Above, because isn't that really the
scariest thing. It's looking up in the sky and it's
not that the forces of whatever it is, God, whatever.
(50:29):
It's not that they might rescue you, or even that
they might hate you and are trying to destroy you.
It's they don't care that you're not even a blip
on their radar. And that was something that was so
haunting about that book, The in Different Stars Above. It
really makes you think when those people were starving and
(50:50):
pushed beyond limits, like those stars they would look up
at every night. I mean, it made me think of,
in a similar way, like the harsh reality of the desert,
the stars above, the sand, the wind. You are just
a bug out there, and in that emptiness, danger becomes
bigger and more terrifying. In every regard when someone drops
(51:15):
dead under the sun with no wounds and no warning,
especially back in the day, maybe when people weren't as
savvy too. Obviously, they knew that heat exposure would kill you, obviously,
But back in a day maybe where more I guess
what you would call rational explanations weren't as easy to
come by. I mean, it's no wonder that it might
(51:37):
the answers of reality might not be sufficient to fill
in those gaps. So the mind reaches for something else.
It reaches for something ancient, something with fangs. It becomes
a kind of folklore placeholder, a shape to give to
the shapeless, a monster to stand in for the chaos.
(51:59):
Because nature too cruel and random to understand. Sometimes it's
easier to believe in an evil red worm with lightning
breath than to believe in nothing at all. And then
there's the theory that maybe this was never about animals
to begin with. Maybe the Mongolian death worm, for all
its crimson, grotesqueness and nightmarish flare, isn't really a creature
(52:23):
but a metaphor, a slithering stand in for the constant,
grinding threat of survival in a place that wants you gaunt,
a symbol of things that live beneath the surface, not
just of the sand, but of the human mind. When
you're out there alone in a place that doesn't care
(52:44):
if you make it back. Because the gobie at first
doesn't look dangerous. There's no tangled jungle, no dripping fangs,
and the foliage, no howls in the nights. What it
has is emptiness, distance, solitude, and truths hidden away very
(53:05):
just deep enough to keep you guessing, to keep you searching.
And in a place like that, the death worm fits
in perfectly. It fills in those blank spaces and gives
shape to the fear. It gives the dead name. Even
if the death worm didn't exist, you would almost have
(53:26):
to invent it. And I'll tell you Gage, I think that,
like we've always said, who knows, this is a particular
thing like sandworm at least right now, you know. And
I think maybe as we do more cryptid episodes, things
will click together more. But this to me just kind
of it's almost like a thing on its own. Like
even though most cryptids are quote unquote reclusive by nature,
(53:50):
you know, they're hard to find, this is like something
on a different level. Like I said, it's almost like
a mythical it makes me think of and I know
it's obvious it's easy to think of Dune, but having
read the core six books over the last year, it's,
you know, almost I see Dune and a lot of things,
and I could see how it's a metaphor for something
(54:11):
that is so at least Bigfoot is like something we
can understand NeSSI is something we can understand. This worm
is so monstrous that it would make sense that it
would reside in a place where you literally maybe would
not see it. It's something so like love crafty and
where something is so grotesque, almost like you can't even
(54:32):
see it, Like it's infathomable in a way, even though
we're talking about something that's only three or five three
to five feet long. It almost feels like something cosmic
to me, something interdimensional. If I had to pick a
supernatural reason, a supernatural explanation for this, I think I
would lean toward more something interdimensional, Like it's maybe there's
(54:54):
a version of Earth or another reality where these things
do exist, and maybe it's what a place for a
slip in time to exist where people would rarely come
across it way out there, like it's the kind of place,
you know, where most people wouldn't go. And so let's
say maybe it's even the world governments know there's like
(55:17):
some sort of rift out there. Maybe there's you know
what I mean, you would pick a place that's remote
that where people just wouldn't want to go. This is
definitely a weird one. What do you think about all this?
Speaker 5 (55:27):
Well, they talk about the people of the area, treat
it almost as they treat it as fact. They don't
question it, and we don't have really any concrete evidence
for this thing. But to me, the consistency of the accounts,
especially across such long periods of time, is very compelling.
(55:51):
I mean, in true crime stories change within days.
Speaker 1 (55:55):
Yes, a lot of times yes.
Speaker 5 (55:57):
And so that is quite a feat on its own
that they actually are so consistent over such long period
of time. Now, again, this is in such an inhospitable
place and such a secluded part of the world. It
makes sense why there hasn't been concrete evidence even if
(56:20):
it does actually exist. It's just so rare to see,
and then even rarer obviously to have the people who
are actually trying to find it out there with equipment
actually find it. So that to me is very compelling,
the consistency across time. And yeah, I mean I could
also see it being something like cosmic something otherworldly like
(56:44):
you're talking about, but it kind of does, i mean,
resemble things that are on this Earth in some ways. Obviously,
the acid thing and stuff like that is highly unusual,
but it's not completely out of the realm of the
possibility that it could be some creature we haven't discovered
on this Earth that maybe is even really endangered, really
(57:06):
rare and has not been spotted. Now, I mean it
is quite different. I mean, it has similarities to a
lot of things on Earth, but it is different too.
I mean they talked about the spikes on it. Yeah
about you know, I mean the acid alone. I don't
know of a lot of creatures that snakes I think
(57:27):
that's acid, or maybe lizards, but nothing to the degree
that they've described here, either where it's just like melts
or even just you know, the people that they've talked
about having the acid on them, it's almost like they
instantly die, yeah, before.
Speaker 1 (57:43):
It's even like, yeah, it's not like a I melt,
you know, like a body horror thing. It's almost like
it right. Well, and also to your point, you know,
I was thinking about, for example, like in Native American lore,
the idea of the thunderbird, how that is a creature,
not necessarily it's not like a god, but it's a
creature that is seen to have like supernatural abilities that
(58:06):
can sometimes control weather or something, you know, things like that.
Whereas when you look at this death worm to the
cultures that know it, kind of like what you said,
it's not given this like backstory of like, oh that's
when God created the worm to you know, there's not
like some theological.
Speaker 5 (58:25):
Or cultural yeah.
Speaker 1 (58:28):
Right, there's not a like they don't attach a supernatural
element to it. It seems it seems like if anything,
Westerners have done that. So you're you're very right, I think,
you know, kind of like how in the deep Sea
there's they say there's things we still haven't discovered, and
and I'm sure that's true. It's like the Great Desert.
Because let's also think about it, like these things require
(58:50):
these kinds of expeditions require money, so like.
Speaker 5 (58:54):
And they're dangerous too. You know, their teams do them
for very long.
Speaker 1 (59:00):
Right, and it's like what's the ultimate reward? What would
you I mean, you might describe, but it's like.
Speaker 5 (59:06):
There's not a financial incentive necessarily. You know, if you
just snap a photo or you know, if you don't
actually get the creature, that would be the only way
I would think that maybe a university or something would
be interested in paying for it. So, yeah, you're right,
I mean, there's not like a big incentive for people
to actually track this thing down. But you know, to
(59:29):
your point about the wormhole as well, or the dimensional
rift or whatever, if if it's something like that, that's
also a kind of thing where that would also seem
to be extremely rare, and it's not that convenient that
it would be in an inhospitable place, because, to be honest,
most of the world kind of is. I mean, the
(59:52):
odds are in the favor of if a wormhole or
a dimensional rift were to open up, the odds are
not in the favor of it being in a post
populated area.
Speaker 1 (01:00:01):
Hey, it's hard out here in these streets. You know
what I'm saying, right, it's hard out here for a
worm Well, I'll tell you what, Gage, I got a
list of names I wouldn't mind going into the go
Be Desert with.
Speaker 5 (01:00:12):
Oh yeah, who's that? Good luck to you.
Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
The names of our top tier Patreon subscribers, of course,
the dream James Watkins, the Finish Face Via Lungphus, the
Madman Marcus Hall, the Tenacious Teresa Hackworth, the Heartbreak Kid,
Chris Hackworth, Theoso Swave, Sean Richardson, the Notorious Nicholas Barker,
the terrifying Taylor lash Met, the Count of Cool, Cameron Corlis,
the arch Duke of Attitude, Adam Archer, the Sinister Sam Kayker,
the Nightmare of New Zealand, noahleene Vavili, the Loathsome Johnny Love,
(01:00:38):
the carnivorous Kevin Bogie, the Killer Stud Karl stab the
fire Starter Heather Carter, the conquer Christopher Damian Demris, the
awfully Awesome Annie, the murderous Maggie Leech, the ser of
Sexy Sam Hackworth, the Evil Elizabeth Riley, Laura and hell Fire,
Hernandez Lopez, the maniacal Laura Maynard, the vicious Karen van
Vier and the arch Nemesis Aaron Bird, the sadistic Sergio Castillo,
the rap Scallion Ryan Crumb, the Beast Njamin Hwang, the
(01:01:00):
devilish Chris Ducett, the Psycho Sam, the Electric Emily Jong
the ghoulish Girt Hankum, the renegade Corey Ramos, the crazed Carlos,
the antagonist, Andrew Park, the monstrous Mikaela Sure, the witchy
Wonder JP Weimer, the Freiki Ben Forsyth, the barbaric Andrew Berry,
the mysterious Marcella, the hillacious Kyle Hoffman, and Pug Blorb
the Poulter.
Speaker 5 (01:01:19):
Guys.
Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
Oh, that's right, that's right. If you want to join
the expedition into the Unknown on a whole new level, folks,
head on over to patreon dot com slash creep Street
Podcast for all sorts of goodies. Who would have thought
we had our own Oracus right there in the gobie.
As a lover of Doune myself, it's yeah, very fun episode.
(01:01:43):
But ladies and gentlemen, ghouls and gals and all that,
Oh creep Street, creep Street, creep Street, We thank you
so much, We love you, and we thank you so
much for your patronage, and we can't wait to make
these things bigger and better as time goes on. We've
got a lot of fun stuff in the works, and
we love you, Citizens of the Milky Way. My name
(01:02:05):
is Dylan Hackworth.
Speaker 5 (01:02:06):
And I'm Gage Hurley.
Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
Good night and goodbye.
Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Try and wrestle up and worm
In the late two thousands, four musicians entered the Gobi
Desert with a dream to channel a legend, to awaken
something primal, to scream until the voids screamed back. They
called themselves death Worm, formed in a Mongolian yurt behind
(00:28):
an abandoned vinyl shop, death Worm, fuse throat singing, industrial sludge,
and a cryptid obsession into a genre they called wormcore.
Leading the charge was towards sludge, went shirtless, scale tattoos,
a man people have called a prophet, or at the
(00:51):
very least deeply concussed.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
So Worm came to me in a vision.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I was hallucinating on fermented mare's milk in asana. It
slithered out of the steam.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
And whispered, start a band awaken the buried one, open
the pit, and I said, I shall do your bidding, Crimson,
Lord of the beneath. And then I got shushed. Apparently
I was shouting there are other people in the sauna,
but the message was clear.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Un lead guitar Malachite Kazakh, known to fans and federal
authorities as mal spoke through distortion and crowbar tuning ritual.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
We tune in drop Kyoshah it's not a real note, technically,
it's more of a ton of vent. It vibrates the sand,
It softens the boundaries between worlds. The worm hears it.
That's what matters. Dogs really fucking hate it.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
And on drums, a man known only as Bort the
Burrower Shank. He doesn't read music, he reads tectonic shift.
I don't keep time. I channeled seismic events. That was
a four point two in eastern Kazakhstan. And on base
Fungus John, a man of few words and fewer garments,
(02:16):
and the unblinking stare of someone who's seen a few things.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
The Worm has no mouth, and yet it screams. I
can hear it. Also, I haven't blinked since twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Their albums became cult classics in certain very unregulated corners
of the Internet. Hits included Mute is Thrown, Throb of
the Berry, digest me slowly, I deserve it. He rises
(02:58):
at noon and he still moist noon and he stills,
and the controversial ballad Electrocute Me, Daddy Worm, You cute it,
but success would come at a price.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Tark we got movement under the mosh pit.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
He comes opens the foam cannons.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
We don't have liability insurance.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Death Worm disbanded in twenty eleven after an instant involving
pirate technics and the spontaneous collapse of a small dune ecosystem.
Their whereabouts remain unknown, but according to legend and Mongolian authorities,
they are quote strongly encouraged not to return. People say, well,
(04:00):
it isn't real, but neither is love. And I wrote
four albums about both citizens of the Milky Way. My
(04:26):
name is Dylan Hackworth.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
And I'm Gage Hurley.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
And you have arrived in the sands of Aracus, where
we are hunting for a different kind of spice. That's right,
We're gonna be riding a whole different kind of shi
hallooed today. Folks. Oh, buckle up, Buckle up, because this
(04:50):
one gets really weird and really icky. This isn't one
I'd listen to while you're having lunch. Let's just say,
because if you ever find yourself wandering the scorched expanse
of Mongolia's Gobi Desert, a place so dry we need
lube just to make this episode, don't be surprised if
(05:13):
the wind is carrying more than just hot sand. Every
now and then, in the shade of a rusted jeep
or the hush of a half collapsed yert, you might
hear a local speaking in a low, grave tone. And
while their voices may be hushed, it'll carry the weight
of something ancient, something feared for centuries and longer. They
(05:39):
speak of a creature that slithers, SLINKs and sores, a
thing that wriggles along the scorched sands of the Gobi.
Sometimes even in the night it's heard howling. And the
teller of this tale they don't give this creature some
grand mythic name. No, the local call it the ogoi korkoi,
(06:03):
which I'm sure I mispronounced, but that's Mongolian for large
intestine worm and baby. It's just about as vile as
it sounds, and according to legend, it's every bit as
deadly as the name implies. Because the name isn't just descriptive,
it's a warning. This week's episode is the Mongolian death worm.
(06:30):
Oh yes, yes, yes, you can almost hear somewhere there's
someone sitting in the dark clouds of Scandinavia, somewhere going
I have a name, my dear, for a band we
call it some death.
Speaker 5 (06:42):
Swam, uber heavy, uber heav Ye.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
This is not some sleek serpent or some shimmering beast
the far off past. No, this thing is squat, ugly
and mean as hell, a grotesque red parody of life itself.
The locals say it's about two to five feet long,
depending on who's telling the tale, and depending on how
(07:07):
close the look you actually get of this thing, which
you might think two to five feet that's not I mean,
compared to some cryptids. Hey, that's small fries. That's peanuts, baby,
that's peanuts. That's because this thing comes extra deadly. Because
despite any variations of the reports, all agree on one thing.
(07:29):
This thing is something that should never move on its own,
nor is it even something that should exist. Something that
sounds more at home in the dunes of a Racus
than the sands of the Gobie. A fat, bloated tube
of blood colored flesh, slick and wet looking. It doesn't
(07:52):
slither like a snake, nor does a dig like a mole.
It pulses, it heaves forward like a sinister sausage, trying
to break free of its casing. They say it lives
just beneath the cracked skin of the desert, hiding and
waiting with the patience that only something ancient can muster.
(08:14):
And here's the kicker. You don't see the thing until
it's already seen you, and you're already on the menu.
One moment, you're trudging across the top of a dune,
sweat in your eyes, boots full of sand, and that's
when you feel it, strange vibration, like something deep underfoot
(08:34):
is breathing, as if smiling that it already has you.
And then without warning, the ground explodes and whatever you were,
oh mama, you ain't no more.
Speaker 5 (08:49):
A sausage that eats you. Terrifying and ironic, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
A fat, bloated tube of blood colored flesh. Was the
most disgusting thing I could think of to describe this thing.
And it's true. It's true. You see, the Mongolian death
worm isn't just some backwoods boogeyman built to scare kids
away from sand dunes. No, this thing has a kill count,
and it doesn't mess around. According to legend, it doesn't
(09:17):
just burst from the ground like a bad dream to
scare away travelers who venture onto its territory like some
scooby Doo villain. No, no, no, this thing finishes what
it starts. Locals say it can spit a corrosive yellow venom,
something so toxic it doesn't even burn. It melts a
(09:38):
person away where they stand, skin bone. You name it
instant death on contact. And if that wasn't enough to
ruin your afternoon, well this thing comes fully wired death.
And I mean that almost literally. Some stories claim that
it can also discharge electricity to stun or kill prey.
(10:02):
So this thing may not even take you in a
sudden explosion of acid. It may stun you, so you
gotta lay there and wait for it to take its
sweet time to come to you. That's right. This thing
can zap you like a living cattle prod. Or maybe
it'll just fry you where you stand, like some desert
(10:23):
bug zapper with a taste for lost hikers. Whether venom
or voltage, take your pick. Either way, the result is
the same lifeless body, sprawled out on the sand and
in some cases a puddle, staring up at the blazing,
indifferent sun. The gobie desert takes no prisoners, and neither
(10:45):
does the death worm. And before you chalk it up
to just modern campfire nonsense, stories of the death worm
can find a way to wiggle into your mind. And
these stories go back for generations. These aren't just TikTok
tails or internet form embellishments. These stories of the death
worm stretch back centuries, passed down from the lips of
(11:09):
nomadic herders who know the gobe like you would know
your own neighborhood. These folks who can read the desert
like a map, who know when a shadow linger is
one second too long, or when the wind gives you
a subtle heads up that something wicked this way comes.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
I mean, this thing can spit acid or shock you
like a cattle prod. It's like a combination of two
of the most fearsome villains in movie history, Anton Shagur
and the Zeno Morph.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Yes, absolutely, I mean this is truly it's different than
other cryptids, you know, than what you typically think of
as a cryptid, and not even just because it's a worm,
but just because of its it's like abilities.
Speaker 5 (11:56):
Really, I've never heard of anything like that.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
It's truly like heavy metal. It's truly like something you
would see on a cover of a heavy metal album,
like a some Scandinavian death metal like you know something
like really wild. I mean it is. This thing means
a business, because what's bigfoot gonna do? Bigfoot? If it
kills you, it's probably just.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
Gonna gonna rip your arms off.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yeah, this motherfucker, this guy melts you down to porridge.
He takes you in a to go cup. Well, according
to the locals, the death worm, it doesn't haunt the busy,
well worn paths of the go bet. Now, this thing
is an outsider. Like most cryptids, It keeps to the margins,
(12:38):
to the dead zones of the desert. The place is
so remote and inhospitable that few things other than sun
and sand can even stand it. Regions where you could
walk for days and never see another soul, just you
the heat and the silence of the desert, until, of course,
(13:00):
something beneath the surface decides you've walked far enough in
a place that already feels abandoned by time, where the
silence is louder than any desert wind, the idea of
a predator hiding just beneath the sand doesn't really feel
far fetched. In fact, in many ways it feels inevitable,
(13:22):
because the desert can hide a lot. After all, As
the sand ceaselessly rearranged with the wind. The very mask
of the desert itself changes, and with these changes, the
bones of creatures older than memory are both hidden away
or brought to light, caravans that wandered off the map
(13:43):
and never came back. And if you believe the stories,
something is still alive out there, laying is still as death,
waiting for the unfortunate rambler. But it's the color that
sticks with the people who have actually lived to see
this creature and actually tell someone about it. Everyone describes
(14:07):
it the same way. Red blood red, not rusty, not
a brownish red, but like raw muscle, like something half
cooked by the sun. Because in a land painted in
nothing but sun bleached golds and weary tans, the flash
of scarlet in the sands a visual you won't soon forget.
(14:30):
Some say that it's lined with jagged spike like growth
set its side, almost like I kind of imagine, almost
like a stegosaurus, but like on the sides, you know,
it's kind of something like that. That's what some people say,
as if nature decided to make this thing a switchblade
that could slither now. Others say that it oozes a
(14:51):
thick jelly like mucus that poisons the ground that it touches,
leaving behind a trail that glistens in the heat, like
some kind of snail from hell. Then there's those who
claim that its body is smooth, like the skin of
a snake pulled tight. But it's the head that always
(15:12):
comes last in every story. They say it widens and
then it strikes, like its jaw is unhinging into a gaping, nightmarish.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
Maw, which is something snakes.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Do, right. Absolutely, they kind of write.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
I think the anaconda does that. Absolutely. You know it
also conjures up the movie tremors.
Speaker 6 (15:38):
Oh yeah, And obviously those are much bigger, but certainly
though they're kind of carnivorous sandworms, which is essentially what
we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Good shout out, because I forgot I have not seen
that movie in so long.
Speaker 5 (15:53):
I rewatched it last year. It was pretty good. It's
good eighties cheese, which I love.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Absolutely. Nope with half a brain goes looking for the
Mongolian deathworm. As you might expect, you don't just go
about just strap on a fanny pack and walk out
into the gobie. You don't track this thing, you don't
bait it and you damn sure don't catch it. To
the locals, the death worm is not a trophy to
(16:19):
be captured, but rather it's a trap for those that
think they can. It's something you treat the way you
treat a rusted landbine buried in a field somewhere. You
keep your distance. You don't poke at it with a
damn stick, You don't go to investigate, You don't test
the limits of its patients, because legend says it doesn't
(16:43):
really have any. If you're lucky, you'll never even be
in the right conditions to see the Mongolian deathworm, because,
according to the old stories, the death worm has its preferences.
Maybe it lacks it's sand, dry, bone dry. It likes
life remote miles from the nearest village or source of help.
(17:06):
And it likes the kind of midday heat that will
give you a stroke faster than you can even say
the word. Basically, if you ever find yourself in those
exact conditions, quietly and carefully walk the other way. If
the ground doesn't explode beneath you first. Naturally, not everyone
(17:27):
buys the story. To even see this thing, you've already
got to be in conditions that most actively try to avoid.
It's understandable why someone might see NeSSI. You know, you
go to the beautiful lock to take for a family event,
or you take photos or whatever. Same thing with Bigfoot.
You're going for a hike, You're doing all that. No,
the place where the death worm even hangs is a
(17:49):
place you don't even want to go.
Speaker 5 (17:51):
Yeah, it's a lot like the Arctic. It's the opposite.
It's just brutal and inhospitable.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Exactly rightsolutely because over the years, scientists, skeptics, and sand
caked adventures have all taken their turn and rolling their
eyes at the legend. To most of them, the Mongolian
death worm is just a story, a desert bedtime tale
cooked up to keep curious kids from walking too far
(18:20):
into the dunes without an adult, the sort of regional
flavor of boogeyman wrapped in folklore and acid. And to
be fair, it's a completely understandable point on their part.
There are no known creatures, especially not worms, that match
anything close to that description passed down through Mongolian lore,
(18:41):
especially not five foot crimson abominations pulsing through the sand.
Nor is there anything resembling a venomous sausage, zapping travelers
with a fleshy taser. The skeptics now, they talk about
mirages and hallucinations triggered by dehydration and sunstroke. And they'll
(19:01):
tell you how fear can warp the mine, how a
fleeting glimpse of a desert snake or a trick of
the light can balloon into a nightmare with teeth. And
maybe they're rights. But if that's all it is, then
why did the stories keep slithering back despite the doubts,
Despite the scientists with their pesky charts and graphs. The
(19:26):
tails refuse to die. Around campfires scattered across the Gobie
elders still tell the tale. Their face is lit by
the flickering flames and memory, Their voices dropped to a hush,
not for drama, but out of respect for a creature
that few have seen. It's not just respect, even, it's fear.
(19:51):
They speak of the way that the sand shifts barely
subtly when the death worm stirs beneath it, like something
rolling over in its sleep. They warn the younger ones
not to stray away from the well worn paths, not
because of dehydration or bandits even, but because the desert,
(20:12):
much like the deep sea, holds things within it that
seem to not belong to this earth, things that we
were never meant to find, and more importantly, things that
don't want to be fould And that's the part that
sticks with you. Even those who've never laid eyes on it,
(20:33):
speak of the death Worm with the quiet certainty of fact,
not fate. To them. It is not a question of
if it's real. It's a given, like the sun's setting,
like the changing of the seasons, like the sands that
change with the wind. The death Worm isn't a legend.
It's a fixture of the Gobi Desert, as real and
(20:54):
as ruthless as a sudden sandstorm on a clear sky day.
And really, can you blame those that fear it, Because
when you're alone in the middle of the Goby, surrounded
by nothing but wind and heat and silence, silence that's heavy,
one that weighs on you, your mind starts listening to
(21:16):
that quiet, and you begin to wonder, and then you
begin to feel it that something might be moving just
beneath your boots, not loud, not fast, but something ancient,
something that doesn't need eyes to know you're there, something
(21:37):
waiting for you to take just one more step. There's
something about this death worm that doesn't just rattle the nerves.
It unlocks something, a fear older than memory. It's a
dread that lives inside of all of those who know
the goby well in the places where science can't shine
(21:58):
a pesky flashlight, because the worm isn't just about venom
or voltage. It's about the awful idea that beneath the
thin crust of safety we pretend this world is built on.
There are things that don't care what we believe, things
that don't fit into biology charts or museum exhibits, things
(22:20):
that aren't man but aren't beast, but something else entirely,
things that move in the blind spots and slither in silence,
that leave behind no answers, just footprints made of more questions,
more complexity, and more fear. And thus the death worm endures,
(22:43):
a creature born of hot sand and raw terror, thrumming
just below the surface, hesitant to believe. Folks, well, haha,
if so, you're not the only one who thinks the
death worm sounds like something dreamed up after want too
many drinks around desert campfire. Something equal parts booze, heat, exhaustion,
(23:04):
and paranoia. When Western scientists first caught wind of these stories, huh,
they rolled their eyes so hard you could probably hear
it echo like a bowling alley across the dunes, A
blood red worm that spits acid and shoots electricity. You know,
the average academic. It sounds less like zoology and more
(23:26):
like something scribbled on the back of a napkin by
a screenwriter on the set of a monster movie, a
creature cooked up with B movie bravado, but out in
the gobie. It's no joke to the nomadic Mongolian zoo
call that harsh, sun bleached wasteland home. The death worm
was treated with the same weary respect you'd give a
(23:48):
venomous snake. Wasn't something to even speculate about. It was
something to just be avoided. And those who claim to
have crossed its path don't spin yarns or embellished details
they told of. They're encounters with the same haunted seriousness
you would hear in the voice of someone describing a
near fatal car crash on an empty highway. One of
(24:11):
the most chilling through lines in this legend of the
death worm is its impeccable sense of timing. This thing
is practically the fred astare of the desert, almost like
it doesn't chase or stalk its prey, but rather it
appears just for a moment, and then something just dies
again and again. Witnesses would report the same disturbing pattern,
(24:35):
a flash of red beneath the sand, a faint vibration,
and then silence, followed by the collapse of not just
people but animals. Do camels, big ones, creatures built to
survive the hellish heat and go months without water. They
would drop like sacks of grain, as if they'd been
(24:59):
hit by some invisible pulse, a static charge that kills,
or a toxin too subtle to see but strong enough
to shut down something the size of a truck. Some
swear that death comes from simply touching the thing. Just
brushing against its hide was enough to end your life.
(25:20):
No bite or strike, just simple contact and then nothing.
In a place like the Gobi, where survival balances on
the edge of every drop of water and every scrap
of shade you can find, a creature like that doesn't
stay a curiosity for long. It becomes a warning, a rumor,
(25:43):
a monster cloaked in the logic of death itself. There
were other stories too, the kind that stay with you
long after the fires burned away and you've crawled into
your jammy jams for bedtime. Accounts from travelers who swore
they saw something un natural stirring beneath the sand. And
(26:03):
we're not talking about mere wind or the shifting of dunes,
but literal ripples, like something long and sinuous was deliberately
moving just below the surface, tracing slow, lazy circles beneath
their feet. Some said that they stood frozen, unable to move,
as the desert floor began to writhe and even bubble,
(26:26):
like the earth itself was alive, trying to breathe. And
that's when it would happen, the worm exploding up through
the crust in a flash of glistening red, its blood
colored body catching the light just long enough to scorch
itself into your memory before vanishing back down with a
(26:46):
hiss and gone. It leaves behind no trace, only silence
and a desert traveler who has now shut their pants. Sometimes,
out in the Gobi, it seems like they're horizon never ends,
and the sun seems to cook reason out of your skull.
It's not hard to see how something like that, real
(27:09):
or not, could take root in a person's mind. It
doesn't just scare you, it brands you. And once you've
seen the sand move like that, you never look at
it the same way. Again. The stories didn't just scare
the locals. They caught the attention of outsiders too, folks
with money to burn and a brain full of bad ideas.
(27:33):
Enough that over the course of the twentieth century, more
than a few expeditions made their way to the Gobi,
not for fossils or fame, but for a glimpse of
the worm of legend. One of the earliest and most
famous was in nineteen twenty two, the same year that
the tomb of King Tutan Common was discovered in Egypt,
(27:55):
a similar expedition was headed out to the Gobi trying
up a worm. And this expedition, in nineteen twenty two
was led by none other than Roy Chapman Andrews. If
Indiana Jones had a real world prototype, Andrews would be
a strong candidate. A swaggering naturalist with a knack for
(28:16):
finding dinosaur bones and dodging danger. He wasn't hunting monsters,
not exactly, but he was after ancient history. But when
your neck deep in the Gobi and the local start
talking about something red and deadly slitherin underfoot, you start
to listen. And to his credit, Andrews did just that.
(28:38):
He recorded the tales he overheard carefully and with reverent respect,
as though he was a scientist first and foremost, measuring
bones instead of a boogeyman. He didn't roll his eyes
like those of his predecessors. He knew that every great
legend starts with the flicker of something real, something we
(28:59):
always try to remember here on Creep Street, some seed
that is buried in the dirt. But even after miles
of sand, in weeks of interviews, Andrews never saw the
worm for himself, not even a flicker of scarlet movement
on the sand, No blurry photos, no suspicious trails, just
(29:20):
stories and lots of sand. However, this is what Chapman
would say of the stories and the reports that he
collected on his expedition. This is probably an entirely mythical animal,
but may have some little basis in fact, For every
Northern Mongolian firmly believes in it and gives essentially the
(29:42):
same description it is said to be about two feet long,
bodies shaped like a sausage, and to have no head
or legs. It is so poisonous that even to touch
it it means instant death. It is reported to live
in the most arid, sandy regions of the Western What
reptile could have furnished the basis for the description as
(30:05):
a mystery? So here you're even seeing Andrews say, my
gut is telling me this thing isn't necessarily real. But
how interesting that for centuries people have kept essentially the
same description. The only thing that really varies is just
whether it's two to five feet. Every description remains the same.
(30:28):
There was no embellishment, There was not a lot added
to it, like oh this time it can fly or
this time it can tap dance, And there's no like
added things really along the way, which is considering is
pretty interesting.
Speaker 5 (30:41):
And the length could just be different ages of the
same creature, but centuries apart the same basic description of it.
I mean that that's got to attest to something.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Right, It's one of those things cryptids. I need to
learn more about the actual school of cryptozoology so that
I have a better like vocabulary when it comes to
describing it, because in a way, there's almost something mystical
about it in a way as opposed to like a
flesh and blood. To me, the impression I get is
(31:16):
it's it would be more kin to like a desert entity.
It makes me think of something that and not even
to be silly, but like something that would be in
like the desert region of a Zelda game. Almost a
magic kind of associated with it. And I don't mean
magic has in fairy tale and not real, but or
interdimensional like something. Maybe there is something out there. There
(31:39):
is maybe some rift or something deep in that desert
that most don't see or encounter, because why go there
in the first place, And this thing is able to
kind of pop in and out of our reality. Maybe
it doesn't even intend to show up. Maybe all it
knows is it's just going through the sand and it
doesn't even realize it's left one verse version of Earth
(32:01):
or whatever into another. You know.
Speaker 5 (32:03):
Yeah, a wormhole of.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Sorts, literally a wormhole absolutely Ooh. Just had to take
a quick pause there, Creep Street, just to give your
poor palpitating hard arrest. If you're enjoying this episode, go
ahead and follow us on Facebook. Instagram at creep Street Podcast,
Twitter at creep Street Pod, TikTok at creep Street Podcast.
(32:28):
That's right, and if once a week is not enough
for you, just head on over to patreon dot com
for all sorts of goodies. We got three different tiers there,
something for every tier, so get your fixings. We even
got a free tier where you can listen to the
weekly sketches before they go live on the episode. Now,
without further ado, back to today's story. In the decades
(32:56):
that followed Andrew's expedition, the mystery did not die down,
but rather a dug in baby the Goby's Red Menace
kept calling, and more than a few brave souls answered.
The dare explorers, monster hunters, cryptid chasers, all of which
lured by that perfect cocktail of danger in the unexplained.
(33:20):
One of the most relentless was Ivan mackerel, a check
cryptozoologist who by the nineteen nineties had become completely obsessed
with the death worm. And we don't mean mildly curious
or merely academically interested. No, No, this check chap was obsessed.
Mackerel chased the worm with the kind of wide eyed
(33:42):
enthusiasm usually reserved for buried treasure or flying saucers, and honestly,
his methods weren't that far off. He led multiple expeditions
into the Gobi, rolling deep with gear that felt more
like science fiction than pure science. He brought sonar rigs,
explosives meant to rattle the worm out of hiding, and
(34:03):
best of all, a custom built dune buggy, something straight
out of Mad Max, complete with giant tires and a
mounted camera. He tore across the desert like a Morton
Joe on a cryptid hunt, held bent on finding the
thing that the rest of the world had written off
his myth. And yet even with all his gadgetry and
(34:24):
all his passion, the sand kept its secrets. Yes, despite
all the effort and gear and gadgets and dune buggies
kicking up plumes across the desert horizon, Ivan Macro found
exactly what every expedition before him had found. Jack Diddley
squat no word, no scorched bones, no mysterious blast craters,
(34:51):
not even a crusty old scorch mark on a rock
to ride home about. The go Be gave him what
the go Be gives most who come looking for answers
sand in a whispering silence of the desert wind, its
own way of giving you the middle finger. But what
Mackerel did uncover was something harder to measure, a deeper
(35:16):
truth that lingered beneath the surface, like the worm itself.
What he found was belief. Richard Freeman, one of the
UK's most prominent cryptozoologists, had this to say of Mackerel's
expedition and its discoveries. The expedition's interpreter, Sugi, told them
(35:36):
of a dramatic instant from his childhood. A party of
geologists had been visiting Sugi's home region, and one of
them was poking into the sand with an iron rod
when he suddenly collapsed as if poleaxed. His colleagues rushed
to his aid, only to find him dead. As they
examined the ground into which he had shoved, they saw
(36:00):
while the sand began to churn violently, and out of
the dune came a huge, bloated death worm. Well, the
locals still spoke of the death worm with unshakable conviction,
not as an old folk tale or cautionary fable, but
as a fact of frickin' life. Some refused to set
foot in the so called worm zones. Others told stories
(36:24):
about relatives or neighbors who died after ignoring the old warnings.
They weren't looking for worm sign, as Stilgar might say,
and thus they were cut down by something unseen, something
sudden and final. To the people who call the go
Be Home, the death worm wasn't some monster movie villain.
(36:46):
It was part of the dang landscape, as real and
as dangerous as a dust storm or a dried up well.
It was baked into their understanding of the place, a
living reminder that in a desert this fast and merciless,
not everything buried stays dead, and not everything unseen is imaginary.
(37:10):
And think about it. That really put it into perspective.
For example, you know, like we know, hey, if you're
walking through the woods, look out for poison ivy. Now,
it doesn't mean you're going to not live your life
because poison ivy's out there. That I thought was kind
of interesting to look at it. They don't look at
(37:30):
as a fable or this thing. It's just a fact
of life, the way you would.
Speaker 5 (37:35):
If a black bear shows up in your backyard here
in the States, even you just stay inside. You don't
go near it.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Like happen to our cousin Madison. She watched it on
her Uh, they watched it on their security cam. A
black bear came out. It was like walking around by
the car and everything well. Other expeditions have come and
gone as well, just like dust on the wind, and
each one or right with high hopes and leaving with
sunburns and empty pockets. Sun came armed with cutting edge tech,
(38:08):
rigging up electrical sensors under the sand and hope that
even the slightest of twitches, a trimmer, anything might give
away the worm's location. Others took a simpler approach, tense thermoss,
nerves of steel, camping for days near supposed hot zones,
baking under the brutal sun by day, shivering through the
(38:28):
bone deep cold by night. They all waited, but to
no avail. But the gobie is not generous with its mystery.
If the worm was out there, it wasn't interested in
being found. No vibrations were recorded, no rippling dunes, no
hiss or flash, no crimson coil erupting from the dust.
(38:51):
Just the vast echoing quiet, the kind that starts to
hum in your ears if you sit with it too long,
the truth became harder and harder to pin down, and
one thing grew clear. The Gobi Desert doesn't just let
it you in on the skivvy. It doesn't just tell
you what it's thinking. In fact, it seems to swallow
(39:12):
them whole and anyone who dares try to discover them.
Because despite the lack of hard proof, no body, no bones,
not even a track that could be blamed on a
lizard or a gust of wind, the stories would never stop.
In fact, they multiplied and spread around the world. Some
locals claim to have seen the things slicing through the
(39:33):
sand like a fat, furious river of blood, leaving behind
no trench or no ripple, just a feeling of dread
and the hope that it wasn't still nearby. Others described
something even more surreal, the worm lifting part of itself
above the surface and spitting a strange, viscous liquid that
(39:55):
hissed and sizzled. The moment it hit flesh or fabric,
victim didn't even have a chance to scream. They just
collapsed in a paralyzed state, cooked from the inside out.
Then there were the camels, those hardy tanks of the desert.
People spoke of them dropping without warning, struck by an
(40:16):
unseen force, their bodies convulsing, their eyes rolling back in
their heads, legs folding beneath them like broken scaffolding, and
then the stillness of death. And yet not one corpse,
no fossil, no skeletal evidence, no skeletal remains, no scales
or teeth to hang in a museum. Just stories on
(40:40):
top of more stories, but nevertheless, stories told again and
again over centuries, and with a consistency that refuses to
be ignored, details that echo from one generation to the next,
like the desert itself is passing them forward. Even the
(41:00):
most ardent of skeptics have to admit that it is strange.
Not every researcher came back empty handed in the imagination department, though,
because some returned from the Gobi with a different theory altogether.
Maybe the Mongolian death worm isn't a worm at all.
Some have speculated it might be a misidentified animal, something
(41:24):
real but rare, a highly adapted desert reptile, perhaps maybe
a sand boa or some as of yet undiscovered species
of skink, which, folks, if you're wondering at home, what
the hell is skink Is it's actually a type of lizard.
Its strange movement and sudden appearances only magnified the legend
(41:47):
by heat fear in the desert's habit of warping time.
Others pointed to the land itself, in a place as
volatile and unforgiving as the Gobi. Maybe this wasn't a
creature at all. Maybe it was underground gas pockets occasionally
rupturing and releasing noxious fumes. Maybe shifting sands generates static
(42:10):
charges that discharge violently under just the right conditions, the
kind of phenomenon that could kill livestock in an instant,
or cause a traveler to drop in their tracks without warning.
And when it happens, when something unseen lashes out, our
brains fill in the gaps. They shape the tear and
(42:32):
give it teeth, because in the Gobe, if you forget
the threats, you die, And so the stories stick, and
maybe over time the danger becomes a monster, a monster
red and glistening, made of myth, born from heat and
fear and a primal need to make sense of the senseless. Still,
(42:57):
for all of the clever theories and scientific maybe is
nothing quite ties the boat No tidy explanation manages to
stitch up this whole thing without a few threads dangling loose.
Why the fear? Why not just a casual wariness, but
a deep, bone set fear passed through generations, a fear
(43:21):
so widespread and consistent that it stretches not only through
the generations but geography, like the creature itself slithering beneath
the sand. Also, why the crimson color, Why that same
flash of red in every story told over and over
(43:41):
by people who haven't even met each other, but all
seem to remember the same nightmare. And why the reputation.
We're not talking about a place that is lacking in
real world natural threats. The Gobie is already home to vipers, wolves,
not to starvation, dehydration, and just general exposure to the elements.
(44:04):
The desert can kill you six ways from the number six,
and yet one thing, this dang worm, that is what
earns the hushed rumors and fireside warnings. But why, that's
the question that keeps creeping back of all the things
that could kill you in the desert, Why this mythical worm.
(44:26):
Maybe there's something out there that doesn't care about the
categories or the boxes, that we try to put in it,
something that isn't a reptile or even a worm, or
even a freak accident of geology, something that can't be
just proked and prodded or packed an ice, A monster
that doesn't need to leave tracks behind. Maybe the Mongolian
(44:50):
death worm is exactly what all of those who've seen
it claim it to be, a venom spitting, lightning laced blood,
red killer worml under the sand, waiting for the next
unlucky traveler. Or maybe it's something even stranger. Maybe it
didn't crawl out of the sand at all, but out
(45:10):
of the collective imagination of people shaped by one of
the harshest landscapes on Earth, forged by blistering heat, punishing isolation,
and a silence so deep it can swallow you whole.
Maybe it's not born of biology, but from our collective fear,
and kept alive by centuries of caution and the simple,
(45:34):
unnerving truth that some places were never meant to be
mapped out. We often talk about the tulpa, a thought form,
something that might be brought into reality by our collective fear.
If a group of people, through generations continue to fear
this thing, maybe that's what keeps it alive. There are
(45:56):
no bones though, no fossilized remains locked in musseuics, No
strange specimens suspended and cloudy from alde high tagged and
filed under unclassified. No crisp photos, not even blurry photos
for that matter, not even a half convincing smear across
a dusty pair of binoculars. Just stories, but dozens of them,
(46:21):
hundreds if you look hard enough, told with hushed voices,
with details too specific and to like to feel like
lies or hearsay, told by people who have nothing to
gain by telling them, and sometimes plenty to lose. But
still just stories or all we have to go on,
(46:43):
and maybe that's the only kind of proof the Gobi
Desert is ever going to give us. You can only
chase the cryptid so long before science starts tapping on
your shoulder, arms crossed and eyebrows or raised, wondering how
much longer this is going to take? And can't it
speak to the manager? And in the case of the
Mongolian deathworm, science didn't just knock. It kicked the door
(47:06):
in with a clipboard and a healthy dose of skepticism. Biologists, herpetologists,
which I can only imagine study herpes. Desert ecologists, cryptozoologists
with sunburns and PhDs, all of them have tried to
strip the myth down to its bones. They've all trudged
(47:28):
through the dunes, run the data crossed, reference the sightings,
they've dug, they've scanned, they've measured, they've camped, and after
all that, the conclusion is always the same. If the
death worm is real, it's the most uncooperative creature in
the animal kingdom, or the cryptid kingdom for that matter,
whether Bigfoot is real or not, We at least have
(47:51):
what people claim to be tracks or photos or videos
or eyewitness accounts, but not with the death worm. Other
than a few eyewitness accounts, there's no tracks, no tunnels,
no droppings, no skeleton, just fear and the stories passed
down through generations. And maybe that's the most unnerving part
(48:13):
of all. Some say this whole thing is just a
case of cryptid confusion, that maybe people have been seeing
ordinary animals all along, creatures that are already in existence,
catalog classified, and just doing what they do while the
human brain does what it does, filling in the blanks
(48:33):
with teeth and terror. This theory tends to lean on
the usual suspects, of course, like desert reptiles with a
knack for burrowing and just enough mystery to get the
imagination buzzing. The death adder, the sand boa, even the
tartar sand boa. None of them read though, none of
them venom spitting, none of them capable of shorting out
(48:55):
your nervous system like a taser. But still they slink,
they vanish, They ripple under the sand, and under the
right conditions, a little scorching heat, a dash of stirring wind,
sweat in your eyes, and a healthy dose of your
brain being halfway fried, it's easy to make a mistake,
because the mind's a funny thing. When it's in survival mode.
(49:17):
It cuts corners, baby, it rewrites details. It sees danger
first and asks questions later, and every so often it
is from those very circumstances that legends are born. Other
theories veer off the map entirely. Forget biology or ecology.
We're talking about deep, deep in the human psyche, because
(49:41):
life in the gobee isn't just hard, it's indifferent, and
that is the key word here. The desert doesn't care
about who you are or how prepared you came, or
how many prayers you packed in your fanny pack. Out there,
people travel for days with nothing but the wind in
their ears and an ocean of dunes on every horizon.
(50:06):
It's the kind of isolation that bends the mind a little,
stretches it thin. It made me think of one of
our main source for our episode on the Donner Party,
called the Indifferent Stars Above, because isn't that really the
scariest thing. It's looking up in the sky and it's
not that the forces of whatever it is, God, whatever.
(50:29):
It's not that they might rescue you, or even that
they might hate you and are trying to destroy you.
It's they don't care that you're not even a blip
on their radar. And that was something that was so
haunting about that book, The in Different Stars Above. It
really makes you think when those people were starving and
(50:50):
pushed beyond limits, like those stars they would look up
at every night. I mean, it made me think of,
in a similar way, like the harsh reality of the desert,
the stars above, the sand, the wind. You are just
a bug out there, and in that emptiness, danger becomes
bigger and more terrifying. In every regard when someone drops
(51:15):
dead under the sun with no wounds and no warning,
especially back in the day, maybe when people weren't as
savvy too. Obviously, they knew that heat exposure would kill you, obviously,
But back in a day maybe where more I guess
what you would call rational explanations weren't as easy to
come by. I mean, it's no wonder that it might
(51:37):
the answers of reality might not be sufficient to fill
in those gaps. So the mind reaches for something else.
It reaches for something ancient, something with fangs. It becomes
a kind of folklore placeholder, a shape to give to
the shapeless, a monster to stand in for the chaos.
(51:59):
Because nature too cruel and random to understand. Sometimes it's
easier to believe in an evil red worm with lightning
breath than to believe in nothing at all. And then
there's the theory that maybe this was never about animals
to begin with. Maybe the Mongolian death worm, for all
its crimson, grotesqueness and nightmarish flare, isn't really a creature
(52:23):
but a metaphor, a slithering stand in for the constant,
grinding threat of survival in a place that wants you gaunt,
a symbol of things that live beneath the surface, not
just of the sand, but of the human mind. When
you're out there alone in a place that doesn't care
(52:44):
if you make it back. Because the gobie at first
doesn't look dangerous. There's no tangled jungle, no dripping fangs,
and the foliage, no howls in the nights. What it
has is emptiness, distance, solitude, and truths hidden away very
(53:05):
just deep enough to keep you guessing, to keep you searching.
And in a place like that, the death worm fits
in perfectly. It fills in those blank spaces and gives
shape to the fear. It gives the dead name. Even
if the death worm didn't exist, you would almost have
(53:26):
to invent it. And I'll tell you Gage, I think that,
like we've always said, who knows, this is a particular
thing like sandworm at least right now, you know. And
I think maybe as we do more cryptid episodes, things
will click together more. But this to me just kind
of it's almost like a thing on its own. Like
even though most cryptids are quote unquote reclusive by nature,
(53:50):
you know, they're hard to find, this is like something
on a different level. Like I said, it's almost like
a mythical it makes me think of and I know
it's obvious it's easy to think of Dune, but having
read the core six books over the last year, it's,
you know, almost I see Dune and a lot of things,
and I could see how it's a metaphor for something
(54:11):
that is so at least Bigfoot is like something we
can understand NeSSI is something we can understand. This worm
is so monstrous that it would make sense that it
would reside in a place where you literally maybe would
not see it. It's something so like love crafty and
where something is so grotesque, almost like you can't even
(54:32):
see it, Like it's infathomable in a way, even though
we're talking about something that's only three or five three
to five feet long. It almost feels like something cosmic
to me, something interdimensional. If I had to pick a
supernatural reason, a supernatural explanation for this, I think I
would lean toward more something interdimensional, Like it's maybe there's
(54:54):
a version of Earth or another reality where these things
do exist, and maybe it's what a place for a
slip in time to exist where people would rarely come
across it way out there, like it's the kind of place,
you know, where most people wouldn't go. And so let's
say maybe it's even the world governments know there's like
(55:17):
some sort of rift out there. Maybe there's you know
what I mean, you would pick a place that's remote
that where people just wouldn't want to go. This is
definitely a weird one. What do you think about all this?
Speaker 5 (55:27):
Well, they talk about the people of the area, treat
it almost as they treat it as fact. They don't
question it, and we don't have really any concrete evidence
for this thing. But to me, the consistency of the accounts,
especially across such long periods of time, is very compelling.
(55:51):
I mean, in true crime stories change within days.
Speaker 1 (55:55):
Yes, a lot of times yes.
Speaker 5 (55:57):
And so that is quite a feat on its own
that they actually are so consistent over such long period
of time. Now, again, this is in such an inhospitable
place and such a secluded part of the world. It
makes sense why there hasn't been concrete evidence even if
(56:20):
it does actually exist. It's just so rare to see,
and then even rarer obviously to have the people who
are actually trying to find it out there with equipment
actually find it. So that to me is very compelling,
the consistency across time. And yeah, I mean I could
also see it being something like cosmic something otherworldly like
(56:44):
you're talking about, but it kind of does, i mean,
resemble things that are on this Earth in some ways. Obviously,
the acid thing and stuff like that is highly unusual,
but it's not completely out of the realm of the
possibility that it could be some creature we haven't discovered
on this Earth that maybe is even really endangered, really
(57:06):
rare and has not been spotted. Now, I mean it
is quite different. I mean, it has similarities to a
lot of things on Earth, but it is different too.
I mean they talked about the spikes on it. Yeah
about you know, I mean the acid alone. I don't
know of a lot of creatures that snakes I think
(57:27):
that's acid, or maybe lizards, but nothing to the degree
that they've described here, either where it's just like melts
or even just you know, the people that they've talked
about having the acid on them, it's almost like they
instantly die, yeah, before.
Speaker 1 (57:43):
It's even like, yeah, it's not like a I melt,
you know, like a body horror thing. It's almost like
it right. Well, and also to your point, you know,
I was thinking about, for example, like in Native American lore,
the idea of the thunderbird, how that is a creature,
not necessarily it's not like a god, but it's a
creature that is seen to have like supernatural abilities that
(58:06):
can sometimes control weather or something, you know, things like that.
Whereas when you look at this death worm to the
cultures that know it, kind of like what you said,
it's not given this like backstory of like, oh that's
when God created the worm to you know, there's not
like some theological.
Speaker 5 (58:25):
Or cultural yeah.
Speaker 1 (58:28):
Right, there's not a like they don't attach a supernatural
element to it. It seems it seems like if anything,
Westerners have done that. So you're you're very right, I think,
you know, kind of like how in the deep Sea
there's they say there's things we still haven't discovered, and
and I'm sure that's true. It's like the Great Desert.
Because let's also think about it, like these things require
(58:50):
these kinds of expeditions require money, so like.
Speaker 5 (58:54):
And they're dangerous too. You know, their teams do them
for very long.
Speaker 1 (59:00):
Right, and it's like what's the ultimate reward? What would
you I mean, you might describe, but it's like.
Speaker 5 (59:06):
There's not a financial incentive necessarily. You know, if you
just snap a photo or you know, if you don't
actually get the creature, that would be the only way
I would think that maybe a university or something would
be interested in paying for it. So, yeah, you're right,
I mean, there's not like a big incentive for people
to actually track this thing down. But you know, to
(59:29):
your point about the wormhole as well, or the dimensional
rift or whatever, if if it's something like that, that's
also a kind of thing where that would also seem
to be extremely rare, and it's not that convenient that
it would be in an inhospitable place, because, to be honest,
most of the world kind of is. I mean, the
(59:52):
odds are in the favor of if a wormhole or
a dimensional rift were to open up, the odds are
not in the favor of it being in a post
populated area.
Speaker 1 (01:00:01):
Hey, it's hard out here in these streets. You know
what I'm saying, right, it's hard out here for a
worm Well, I'll tell you what, Gage, I got a
list of names I wouldn't mind going into the go
Be Desert with.
Speaker 5 (01:00:12):
Oh yeah, who's that? Good luck to you.
Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
The names of our top tier Patreon subscribers, of course,
the dream James Watkins, the Finish Face Via Lungphus, the
Madman Marcus Hall, the Tenacious Teresa Hackworth, the Heartbreak Kid,
Chris Hackworth, Theoso Swave, Sean Richardson, the Notorious Nicholas Barker,
the terrifying Taylor lash Met, the Count of Cool, Cameron Corlis,
the arch Duke of Attitude, Adam Archer, the Sinister Sam Kayker,
the Nightmare of New Zealand, noahleene Vavili, the Loathsome Johnny Love,
(01:00:38):
the carnivorous Kevin Bogie, the Killer Stud Karl stab the
fire Starter Heather Carter, the conquer Christopher Damian Demris, the
awfully Awesome Annie, the murderous Maggie Leech, the ser of
Sexy Sam Hackworth, the Evil Elizabeth Riley, Laura and hell Fire,
Hernandez Lopez, the maniacal Laura Maynard, the vicious Karen van
Vier and the arch Nemesis Aaron Bird, the sadistic Sergio Castillo,
the rap Scallion Ryan Crumb, the Beast Njamin Hwang, the
(01:01:00):
devilish Chris Ducett, the Psycho Sam, the Electric Emily Jong
the ghoulish Girt Hankum, the renegade Corey Ramos, the crazed Carlos,
the antagonist, Andrew Park, the monstrous Mikaela Sure, the witchy
Wonder JP Weimer, the Freiki Ben Forsyth, the barbaric Andrew Berry,
the mysterious Marcella, the hillacious Kyle Hoffman, and Pug Blorb
the Poulter.
Speaker 5 (01:01:19):
Guys.
Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
Oh, that's right, that's right. If you want to join
the expedition into the Unknown on a whole new level, folks,
head on over to patreon dot com slash creep Street
Podcast for all sorts of goodies. Who would have thought
we had our own Oracus right there in the gobie.
As a lover of Doune myself, it's yeah, very fun episode.
(01:01:43):
But ladies and gentlemen, ghouls and gals and all that,
Oh creep Street, creep Street, creep Street, We thank you
so much, We love you, and we thank you so
much for your patronage, and we can't wait to make
these things bigger and better as time goes on. We've
got a lot of fun stuff in the works, and
we love you, Citizens of the Milky Way. My name
(01:02:05):
is Dylan Hackworth.
Speaker 5 (01:02:06):
And I'm Gage Hurley.
Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
Good night and goodbye.
Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Try and wrestle up and worm
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