The Horrific Real Endings of Five Fairy Tales

Fairy tales seem rather innocent -- why wouldn't they be? They're for children, right? Well, yes, but children may have been of a different caliber in previous centuries because the original endings of these five fairy tales are far from what we would consider kid's fare:

1. Little Red Riding Hood
In the original French version by Charles Perrault, the little girl is given false directions by the wolf to her grandmother's house. When she gets there, the wolf eats her. That's it. There's no woodsman or grandmother or anything, just a dead child. The moral of the story is to never take advice from strangers.

2. The Pied Piper
In the popular version, the villagers finally cough up the money so that the children the Pied Piper led out of the village are returned. In the original, the Pied Piper leads the children to a river where they all drown (except for one boy who was disabled and couldn't keep up). The entire village was then devoid of children.

3. Goldilocks
The original tale (which dates back to 1837) has two possible variations. In the first, the bears find Goldilocks and rip her apart and eat her. In the second, Goldilocks is actually an old hag who jumps out of a window when awakened by the bears. Unfortunately, she breaks her neck as a result.

4. Cinderella
In a variation by the Brothers Grimm, the nasty stepsisters cut off parts of their own feet in order to fit into the glass slipper, but they are punished for their attempted trickery by two pigeons who pluck out their eyes. The stepsisters spend the rest of their lives as blind, limping beggars, while Cinderella lives in the prince's castle.

5. Sleeping Beauty
In perhaps the most disturbing story of the lot, Sleeping Beauty is not awakened by a kiss at all in the original version. Rather, the king sees her asleep and decides to take carnal advantage of the situation and essentially rapes her. After nine months, Sleeping Beauty gives birth to two children (while still asleep). One of the children sucks her finger, which removes a piece of flax that was keeping her asleep. She awakens to find that she has been raped and is the mother of two children.