Hamelin's own records say 130 children disappeared on June 26, 1284. A lost stained-glass window and town chronicles mourned them for centuries — and the rats weren't added to the story for another 250 years.
The familiar fairy tale alongside the documentary evidence: a town that recorded the loss of its children as sober history, not a story.
The 1384 chronicle line 'It is 100 years since our children left' and the destroyed church window that first depicted the piper.
Medievalists.net on what historians actually know about the 1284 event and the eastward migration that may explain the vanished children.
The darker readings — plague, the Children's Crusade, a dance-mania tragedy — and why none of them has ever been proven.
Mental Floss traces how a grim medieval record became a children's tale — rats and all — centuries after the fact.
Author Jen Campbell untangles the real medieval record from the fairy tale that grew on top of it.
A walk through the leading theories for the 1284 disappearance and why the mystery still has no accepted answer.