With property disclosure laws silent on the matter of resident cryptid fauna, estate agents and tenants’ rights advocates across Bavaria are at an impasse.

The question landed on my desk on a Tuesday, which is my archive day, and I will be honest with you: I finished my afternoon in the county records room before I responded, because some questions deserve the courtesy of a clear head and a completed index card. The question was this. If you are a landlord in Bavaria, and your property contains a wolpertinger — not a suspected wolpertinger, not a historical wolpertinger, not a wolpertinger referenced in local legend and possibly present on a seasonal basis, but a confirmed, resident, fourteen-witness wolpertinger — are you legally, ethically, or by any reasonable standard of human decency obligated to disclose this to the next tenant before they sign the lease? Fourteen witnesses. I want you to sit with that number.

The wolpertinger, for those whose reference texts do not yet cover the Bavarian composite fauna — and I would suggest rectifying this before spring, when the relevant window opens — is a creature assembled, as far as any reliable account can determine, from components that have no business sharing a body. Antlers. Wings. The body of a rabbit or squirrel, depending on the sighting. Fangs, sometimes. Occasionally a tail that belongs to something else entirely. It is not aggressive in the documented sense, but I have read enough field accounts to know that ‘not aggressive’ and ‘fine to share a kitchen with indefinitely without warning’ are not the same category of statement. The fourteen witnesses in the current case were not all present simultaneously. They accumulated over a tenancy of three years. The outgoing tenant collected them carefully, as one does.

Community Notice

What the Law Says, and What the Law Has Chosen Not to Say

Bavarian property disclosure law requires sellers and landlords to inform prospective tenants of material defects — structural issues, damp, prior flooding, certain categories of contamination. It does not mention cryptid fauna. It does not mention fauna of any kind, cryptid or otherwise, unless the fauna constitutes a verifiable health hazard under a separate regulatory framework that also, as it happens, does not mention wolpertingers. I contacted three property law specialists and one tenants’ rights advocate for this piece. Two of the property law specialists declined to comment on the grounds that they were not familiar with the relevant creature. The third asked me to send her the field literature, which I did, and she has not yet responded, which I consider its own kind of answer. The tenants’ rights advocate, to her credit, engaged fully.

There is a principle in tenants’ rights that a person is entitled to know the material conditions of the property they are entering into a legal relationship with. I would argue that a creature which has been witnessed by fourteen separate individuals over a three-year period, and which has, by the outgoing tenant’s account, eaten through two bread bins and rearranged the contents of a wardrobe on at least six occasions, is a material condition.

— Ingrid Meissner, Tenants’ Rights Advocate, Munich

The estate agent representing the property — I am not naming the agency, as I have dealt with estate agents before and prefer to preserve what goodwill remains available to me in that sector — issued a statement describing the wolpertinger as a ‘feature of local character’ and noting that the property’s proximity to woodland was ‘disclosed in the listing.’ I read this statement several times. I have a brown envelope in my filing cabinet at home that contains documentation about my own cellar, documentation I have read in full and have not shared with the estate agent who sold me the house twenty-two years ago. I want to be clear that I am not advocating for non-disclosure on the basis of personal practice. I am simply noting that the instinct to file certain things under a general heading and lock the cabinet is not unique to me, and that this does not make it correct.

The wolpertinger is not a pest in the conventional sense. It does not damage structures. It does not present a documented zoonotic risk. What it presents is a sustained and unignorable presence, and a person’s right to know about a sustained and unignorable presence before they commit to a twelve-month lease seems to me to be something we should be able to agree on without requiring a specific statute.

— Dr. Hannelore Voss, Faculty of Folklore and Material Culture, University of Regensburg

The legal impasse, as matters stand, will not resolve itself without either a test case or legislative amendment, and neither appears imminent. What I can tell you — and I say this as someone who has lived with undisclosed documentation about her own cellar for twenty-two years, who drives past a decommissioned quarry once a month to take readings, who has a category of cat she references without describing — is that the decision not to tell someone something and the question of whether you are obligated to tell them something are not the same decision, and conflating them is a convenience, not a principle. Fourteen witnesses. Someone made a choice about what to put in the listing. That choice will have consequences for whoever signs the lease. Bavaria’s property law has nothing to say about this. I do, and I have said it.