No story terrifies me more than the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It’s a deep, visceral fear of time and misinformation; nobody knows the true story and it is likely that nobody ever will. No matter how you look at it, 103 children were neatly, surgically removed from all recorded history. A man came to the village for reasons we can’t be certain of and managed to pursuade or force over a hundred young people to abandon their parents, their older siblings and their lives for the unknown.
Later iterations gave us rats and children being lured off into a magical gateway beneath the mountains but before that it’s just… A mass vanishment. And like, say you don’t believe that the pied piper existed, say you strip the story down to its bare bones —it doesn’t get any more comforting. To deny the existence of the piper is to infer that the people of Hamelin lied about the cause of the tragedy deliberately. Why? To hide something? Or if the whole tragedy was invented, what was the purpose? For what reason did they stand to gain from the supposed dissapearance of all their young? What threat was that big?
