Old tales describe nightly gatherings of young people for games and dances in remote places. However, since the devil often had a hand in this, the custom was no longer tolerated by the high authorities and was banned.
One such dance site was once located near the Geiessbach stream on a high plateau jutting out into Lake Brienz. On a starry Saturday night, lads and lasses frolicked and danced in the flat grassy area. The full moon hovered above the surrounding fir trees, letting its pale light pass softly over the dark gravel onto the merry company. On a fallen tree trunk behind a hazel tree, the musicians played soft, wistful tunes. The dance went around in circles. Sometimes the dancers joined hands to form a chain, sometimes they hopped along in pairs, alternating steps or spinning deliberately around themselves. But when the violinists began to play their strings more fervently, a nimble lass jumped onto a flat stone in the middle of the circle, twirled around it a few times in cheerful jubilation, and then slipped back to her dance partner.
Soon it was getting close to midnight. Out of nowhere a strange, lean man wearing a funny little green hat with a feather on his head appeared. He played a little violin with the sweetest of sounds that flattered the ears of the dancers. It was suddenly as if their bodies and limbs had become supple and bendable like willow rods!
Gradually, however, the rhythm of the violin became quicker and quicker and the tunes wilder and wilder. Oh, how the skirts began to fly! How they whirled and twirled, round and round, as if in a trance! And how the faces grew hot and red in the wild frenzy! Again and again, faster and faster, the stranger played his music, his wild, blood-tingling foreign melodies...
Yet all of the sudden the music broke off in a sharp snap. At the same time a terrible scream rang through the night, piercing the marrow of everyone’s bones. This was followed by a heavy splash in the water. People ran around in confusion, pushing to the edge of the cliff. But there was nothing more to see but the moonlit circles of waves in the open water. A lad and a lass, the most handsome pair in the area, had danced madly out over the ledge and into the lake and drowned most miserably. Thus, the secret revelry came to a sorrowful end.
And the strange violinist had disappeared, as mysteriously as he had come.
Albert Streich (1897-1960), from ‘Brienzer Sagen’ (Brienz Legends), 1938