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”.

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 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.

Was the city of Hamelin in Germany really bewitched by the Pied Piper?

From Debi’s collection of short stories, Sweet Tea and Tumbleweeds, Tall Tales and Two Faces comes this delightful story about the simple joys of growing up in Texas.

The ghost of a hitchhiking girl gets you in a deadly car crash… or just vanishes behind the gates of the cemetery, as Chicago’s most famous phantom: Resurrection Mary.

…insight in one of the most practiced traditions in Ancient Egypt.

Fisherman have endless stories of fishing tales, this one had I not been there, I would have never believed.

The French author Albert Dauzat told a fascinating legend that emerged from World War One in a book that was published two years after the Great War. Civilian skeptics laughed at the soldiers’ tales of the murderous giant hound of No Man’s Land, but to the soldiers it was a gruesome reality…