The Pied Piper Was Real: 130 Children Disappeared and Never Came Back
By: Linda Caroll
Tags: Nonfiction, Germany, History, Truth, Fairy Tale

But wait… what happened to the children?

For years, historians didn’t really know. There were many hypotheses, but one by one, research would prove them wrong.

Some historians thought the children died of the plague and the Pied Piper was a reference to death. Problem was, the dates didn’t add up. And there were no adult deaths of the plague at that time, either.

Another suggested the piper was a pedophile who murdered them, but that was ruled out, too. No bodies were found. And how would one man subdue 130 children at the same time? Nope. That wasn’t it.

So many theories, I could write an entire story about them. But they were all proven wrong, one after another.

Truth is stranger than fiction…

Turns out June 26 wasn’t just the day the children disappeared. It was also the day of a pagan midsummer celebration. A piper would show up and merrily lead people into the hills (koppen) for a midsummer fire-lighting ceremony.

Interesting, right?

But wait. It gets better.

Fairy tale scholar Jack David Zipes found evidence that someone came to Hamelin that summer, looking for people to colonize parts of Eastern Europe.

Recruiting people to migrate was a common practice, especially in times of hardship. No different than the way people migrated to California, the “land of opportunity” during the Dirty 30s and the great depression.

In medieval Germany, recruiters wore colorful (pied) clothing and played a flute, so people who wanted to migrate could hear them and follow along in the merry procession.

Entire families who were struggling would join into the festive parade and dance away, into the hills. Never to be seen again.

A German linguist named Jürgen Udolph wondered if the children of Hamlin had followed a flutist — not to a midsummer fire lighting ceremony — but as part of a migration.

Can you even imagine that possibility?

That maybe, just maybe, they followed the wrong piper?

That instead of following the piper leading them to the midsummer fire ceremony, they followed the piper leading a migration? The recruiter, seeing adults and children following, would have thought nothing of it.

And the children’s parents just watched, thinking their kids were off to a midsummer celebration in the hills.

It’s almost beyond belief, isn’t it?

Surely, this theory must be as crazy as all the others.

Surely, the research would prove it to be wrong.

And yet, his hunch seems to check out. According to place-name evidence, the most common surnames in Hamelin at the time the children disappeared appear with shocking frequency in the areas of Uckermark and Prignitz, near Berlin. They were the destinations of the migration tour.

And the rats? No one led them away…

There were rats, of course. But no one played a pipe and led the rats away. They just kept on making life miserable until sanitation became a thing.

According to historians who were trying to figure out what happened to the children, the rats were added to the Pied Piper story in 1559.

The rats didn’t even appear in earlier versions of the Pied Piper story.

They were added 275 years after the children disappeared.

Why? Who knows? Maybe it was an easier story to believe or tell if the town was being punished for not “paying the piper” so to speak.

Maybe it was just too harsh to think that a piper showed up and their children followed him into the hills and never came back. Even though that’s exactly what happened, as it turns out.

No one led the rats out of town and took the children as punishment. That’s not how it happened.

But if those rats hadn’t been added to the story, it’s possible there’d be no annual Pied Piper Parade and no one telling the story of those children still today. They’d have been forgotten hundreds of years ago.