One spring in the Late Middle Ages, the town of Hamelin in Lower Saxony had a rat problem: the town was overrun with them. The mayor and the town council were perplexed. “What shall we do!” they cried. Then the town blacksmith had an epiphany, and said, “Let’s hire a Rat Catcher!” (a common occupation in the Middle Ages.) The mayor, not to be outdone, said, “Not just any rat-catcher, but The Bestest Rat Catcher! And I know of him!” So the mayor sent a messenger to find the Bestest Rat Catcher. The town council offered to pay the princely sum of 1000 guilders for his services.

Sometime in early summer, the messenger returned with the Bestest Rat Catcher. He was clothed from head to toe in colorful patched (or “pied”) garments. The townsfolk were again perplexed, he looked nothing like what they expected. To catch a rat, you must get dirty. But the Bestest Rat Catcher assured them he just had to play his Magic Pipe and the rats would follow him away.

On Sunday, 22 July 1376, while the entire town was at church, the Pied Piper of Hamelin did just that. He danced through the town merrily playing his pipes and, just as he said, the rats poured out of the houses and buildings. He led them away to the Weser River, where he boarded a flat boat, and pushed himself off. When the rats tried to follow, they all drowned.

The Bestest Rat Catcher returned to town and when the townsfolk emerged from the church, they were astonished and grateful that the rats were gone. But the greedy mayor was not. He didn’t think the Rat Catcher did enough work, “How could he clear the town so quickly? He did not do a thousand guilders worth of work! It must be the work of the Devil!” The Blacksmith, ever the wise one, managed a compromise: The Bestest Rat Catcher would not be burned at the stake, but would receive only 50 guilders, still a great sum for a day’s work. The Mayor kept the rest of the money.

The Bestest Rat Catcher felt cheated and vowed revenge.

The next Sunday, the Pied Piper returned. But this time he was not in his clothing of bright patches, but garments of deep dark ominous colors. The Pied Piper again played his pipes and danced merrily through the streets. But this time he was not trying to catch rats, but the town’s children. While the adults were again at Mass, the children gleefully followed the Pied Piper as he led them over a hill and far away.

When the adults returned home from Mass, they were horrified to find that only three children were left in Hamelin: one was deaf, and couldn’t hear the Piper. One was blind, and danced into a tree. And finally one was lame, and couldn’t keep up.

The rest of the children, and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, were never seen again.

(There’s two dates for Pied Piper story: one was in 1376 and the other in 1284, but both are on 22 July. The reigning theory is that the “Pied Piper” was actually an emigration recruiter that was getting paid to help Germans settle in recently devastated lands. The first area was along the Baltic, where the Teutonic Knights just wiped out the original Ugric Prussians [1376], and the other was in Transylvania, which the Mongols completely depopulated in the 1230s [1284].)