Creepy Details of Fairy Tales Ignored in Modern Versions

9. Goldilocks is a wizened criminal

Robert Southey’s 1837 adaptation of the folktale of The Three Bears was published prior to the addition of Goldilocks to this fable. Instead, his version used an “impudent, bad old woman” who broke into the Three Bears’ home. Her demise:

Now the windows were open because the Bears, like good, tidy Bears, as they were, always opened their bed-chamber window when they got up in the morning. Out the little old woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall; or ran into the wood and was lost there; or found her way out of the wood, and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her.

I love the fact that this story occurs in a universe where sentient bears and human legal structures coexist seamlessly. Southey’s logical sequel to this story should have been The Three Bears 2: Bear Police.