The Piper Who Vanished With the Children of Hamelin

In the town of Hamelin, in the diocese of Minden, a stained-glass window was placed in the church around the year 1300. It showed a colourfully dressed piper and several children clothed in white. For centuries this window would be the earliest surviving trace of a story that the town itself seemed determined to remember: a tragedy dated precisely to the Feast of Saints John and Paul, in the Year of Our Lord 1284.

The fullest early account survives not in the window, which was destroyed in 1660, but on the back of a manuscript called The Golden Chain, written in Latin by the monk Heinrich of Herford in 1370. A later hand added a note describing a young man of about thirty, handsome and finely dressed, who crossed the bridges into Hamelin through the West Gate and began playing a silver pipe through the streets. All the children who heard him — 130 in number — followed him out through the East Gate to a place called Calvary, and there they vanished without a trace. Mothers ran from town to town searching, and found nothing.

The account notes something remarkable: the people of Hamelin did not simply forget. They began counting time from the disappearance, marking years since their children's departure the way others counted years since a birth or a reign. A town record dated 1384 states plainly: 'It is 100 years since our children left.'

The rats, so central to the story as most people know it today, are entirely absent from these earliest tellings. They were not added until a version composed around 1559. Before that date, the piper's grievance and his revenge had nothing to do with vermin at all — only with children, a pipe, and an unexplained vanishing.

In the fuller legend that eventually took shape, the town hires the piper to rid it of a rat infestation for a promised fee of 1,000 guilders. He lures the rats into the river Weser with his music, drowning them all. But the town's leader reneges, offering a fraction of the sum — some tellings say as little as fifty guilders — and even accuses the piper of having caused the infestation himself. Enraged, the piper leaves, vowing revenge. He returns on the feast day, dressed now in green like a hunter, and plays a different tune. This time it is the children who follow, led out of town and into a mountainside, never to be seen again. In some versions, three children remain behind — one lame, one deaf, one blind — and it is they who tell the townsfolk what happened.