But all these theories neglect one specific key to the Hamelin mystery. “They don’t explain the very particular date cited for the loss of the children, and the local sense of trauma,” Reimer noted. “Did something happen that officials had been covering up? Something so traumatic that it was transmitted orally for so long in the town’s collective memory, over decades and even centuries?”
In fact, the date chronicled in all the local documentation pinpoint 26 June as the day the children disappeared. This day is also the date of pagan midsummer celebrations. The fact the documentation also emphasises that the youth followed the Piper to the Koppen, commonly translated as “hills”, suggest another link. “There were regions in Germany where midsummer was celebrated by lighting fires on the hills,” said Reimer. All that leads to one particularly macabre reading of the Pied Piper legend. Perhaps the Piper, emblematic of a pagan shaman, playing his flute, was leading the youth of Hamelin to their midsummer festivities when the local Christian faction, hoping to cement conversion of the region, waylaid and massacred the group. A less bloody theory: maybe the children were spirited away to local monasteries.
— The grim truth behind the Pied Piper