Outside the laboratory, copper wires suspended on poles run for more than a mile into the countryside. Inside, mysterious equipment – coils of wire, weirdly shaped jars, strange crystals, saucers of murky liquid – glows and pulsates. The few local people who dare to approach the mansion tell of explosions, of bolts of lightning that strike when no storms are near, and of the reclusive, secretive nature of the scientist himself.

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”.

The communication may take the form of a direct message conveyed psychically by one friend to the other, a message sent through a medium, or even an intuition or conviction by one friend that the other is dead. Christie-Murray keeps a register of everyone taking part in the scheme and will investigate any messages that are received.

Imagine translating Portuguese, a language you speak, into French, a language of which you have a rudimentary grasp, and then, via literal translation from a French-English dictionary, into English, a language of which you have not the slightest knowledge. You will have some idea of the likely outcome, but nothing can prepare you for the credible, surreal, and often hilarious contents of Carolino’s New Guide.

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.

And in 1971, after a reckless, drunken drive through town following his most recent robbery, Philip McCutcheon of Yorkshire, England, made his 20th appearance in court.

“Where the hell are the parachutes?” demanded Miller as he claimed into the airplane. “What’s the matter, Miller,” mocked his companion, Col. Don Baesell. “Do you want to live forever?”..The door slammed shut, and the Norseman taxied down the runway and took off into the fog..These were the last recorded moments of Miller’s life. The Norseman never arrived.

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.

Circumstantial Evidence? …English politician and justice of the peace Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was found murdered on October 17, 1678. His body had been left in a ditch on Greenberry Hill in London. Three men were arrested and tried for the crime. Their names were Robert Green, Henry Berry, and Lawrence Hill.