Tradition: German Mythology
Alternative Names: Dragon of Kempten
Category: Dragon
The Myth
Long ago, a dragon was said to have been associated with a house near the Rathaus in Kempten. The creature was so closely connected with the building that a depiction of a dragon was once painted or carved upon the wall as a sign commemorating the strange event that had taken place there.
The house was once inhabited by a merchant who cheated and exploited the people around him. When his life finally came to an end and he lay dying in his room, a dragon suddenly came flying through the air. It pierced straight through the wall of the room and breathed fire before the dying man’s bed.
After the man’s death, the dragon crawled back through the hole it had made in the wall and remained there until the dead man’s body was carried away. The hole proved impossible to repair. Whenever the inhabitants tried to seal it, it would mysteriously reopen during the night.
The strange opening therefore remained for many years, and a representation of the dragon was eventually placed upon the house as a memorial to the event.
A darker telling gives the story a slightly different meaning. The house had once been an inn, where a foreign traveller arrived after having lived a wicked and godless life. Because of his sins, he was believed to have been promised to the Devil. When his appointed time finally came, the Devil appeared in the form of a dragon and carried the condemned man away through the closed walls of the building, leaving the mysterious hole behind.
In either telling, the dragon appears at the moment of death, breaking through the boundary between the ordinary world and the supernatural realm to claim the dying man.
Sources
“Der Drache.” SAGEN.at – Traditionelle Sagen aus Deutschland (Bayern, Allgäu). Reproduced by SAGEN.at.
https://www.sagen.at/texte/sagen/deutschland/bayern/allgaeu/drache_2.html