Who really was the Pied Piper?

The English poet Robert Browning immortalised the story of the Pied Piper in the 1800s with his poem The Pied Piper

of Browning.

It's a story that was told to children from generation to generation, and it gained a permanent

place alongside the brother's grim fairy tales of snow-white and sleeping beauty.

This tale of the Pied Piper, however, while as rich and fantastical

in folkloric expression as these fairy tales, is actually based on a true event. It took place

in the small rural town of Brunswick, in the county of Hamlin, near Hanover and Germany. The year

was 1284 AD, and the event was recorded in the official

town records and later memorialised in a stained glass window of the church there. This window which

displayed the record of the missing children was destroyed along with the church in a blaze

in 1660. However, a number of written accounts held in other places

have survived. The mountain where the children disappeared is called Poppenberg and it's a tree-covered

mountain within the Haas National Park. Inside the park there were hidden villages with

quaint timber-framed homes, old castles, and closed down mines.

The story of the Pied Piper goes that in the village a plague of rats descended.

They ate their way through all the stores of food, attacked and bit people while they slept,

and generally terrified everyone with their wild rampaging.

As the villagers faced a rapidly diminishing food supply,

and with the town's officials running out of ideas on how to try to drive the rats out of town,

an emergency meeting was held at the town hall. The villagers were furious, and they were scared,

and they demanded an urgent resolution to the catastrophe.

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