Normally, pirates did not carry women to sea. Indeed, they had a custom that strictly forbade such practice. But the evidence is that Rackham and his gang accepted Anne and Mary as equals. According to the accounts of two French captives, the women usually wore dresses on board ship: “When …we gave chase or attacked, they wore women’s”.

Anting-anting is any supernaturally imbued object that, according to those who believe in it, grants its owner extra ordinary powers.

The number seven has been considered a lucky number in many cultures across the world.

A few famous women who were thought to be witches throughout history.

A brief description of Knockers or mine fairies.

A brief look at fairies.

A few old wife’s tales that were believed in the witching times.

Worrall and his wife gave the girl shelter for the night, and the questioned the mysterious foreigner about her circumstances. The young woman answered their questions, using signs and gestures. She made it clear that her name was Caraboo, and that she was a princess from the Far East. She had been kidnapped by pirates and sold to the captain of a ship bound for Europe. When the ship reached England she had escaped and was now wandering the countryside begging for food.

The man in question was the German writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Many years later Goethe was still intrigued by the apparent encounter with his own double. When it happened he had found it comforting, for he had just said a sad farewell to the woman he loved, Fredericka…“However it may be with matters of this kind generally,” he wrote in his autobiography, “this strange illusion in some measure calmed me at the moment of parting.”

The legend is certainly not the first, not is it the only one, of its kind. Remarkably similar tales of pipers who spirit away children figure in folklore all over Europe and throughout the Middle East. But unlike most of the other folktales, the Hamelin story gives precise dates, contradictory though they may be.