Queen of Rats

Couple of folklorey bits related to our sewer dwelling critters. You might've seen the graphics around before!

The Queen of Rats is a folklore creature in Tistow similar to the famous Rat Queen of the London sewers, that toshers (men who made a  living hunting treasures in the sewers in the 19th century) believed to  bring luck.

She watched and followed the toshers quietly, unseen and was said to take the form of a beautiful woman if she wanted to confront one of the toshers (..this did often involve something more intimate  than just chatting). She had a bunch of rat like features though, like her eyes and feet. Not something you'd necessarily notice in the dark  anyway. 

If a tosher met her, he wasn't allowed to talk about the event, otherwise the man would fall in some very bad luck.

The most famous person to supposedly have met the queen of rats, who's tale was released some time after his death, was a man called Jerry Sweetly.

He's said to have met her in a pub and danced with her before she dragged him off with the intention to make love to him. The Queen supposedly gave him a love bite on the neck (she was known to mark her companions to stop other rats from harming them) which caused Sweetly to lash out. The girl disappeared and the next thing Sweetly saw was a giant rat up on the rafters, shouting (quoting from another article):

“You’ll get your luck, tosher, but you haven’t done paying me for it yet!”

Offending the Queen Rat had serious consequences for Sweetly, the same tradition ran. His first wife died in childbirth, his second on the river, crushed between a barge and the wharf. But, as promised by legend, the tosher’s children were all lucky, and once in every generation in the Sweetly family a female child was born with mismatched eyes–one blue, the other grey, the color of the river.

In Tistow, the toshers, both men and children alike, build shrines in the tunnels and leave offerings for the Queen in the hopes of gaining her favour. They're the best people to go to if you ever need to know anything about the tides and safe routes.