New Mermaid Short: Hessian Soldier Haunted at Sea by a Rhine Siren

"The Siren Song: A Hessian Soldier Haunted at Sea" is free to watch on TIME's YouTube

ATLANTA, Sept. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- A new cinematic short film reframes one of the American Revolution's strangest footnotes as water-spirit folklore: a young Hessian soldier, crossing the Atlantic in 1776, begins to hear a siren call him into the sea.

The Siren Song: A Hessian Soldier Haunted at Sea (~5 minutes) is free on TIME's YouTube:
https://youtu.be/yh2VwOnGOM0

Written by Atlanta filmmaker Hoyt Dwyer, the short treats the Hessian voyage not as a battle reenactment but as a ghost story. German tradition usually keeps the Lorelei and related nixie figures on the Rhine. This film flips the geography: the haunting travels with the soldier (desire, curse, and command) across the ocean toward a war that will not wait for him.

In the piece, a siren (Elsa) pulls at a man torn between love and the army that owns him. Commanders answer the uncanny with force. The folklore question left open is older than 1776: what happens when a water spirit's claim and a human contract collide, and which one the sea honors.

Dwyer framed it for audiences already in mermaid and European folk traditions (Lorelei, Undine, Melusine, Atlantic crossings), not military-history completists alone. "The war is the frame," he said. "The story is the haunting."

Stills and a one-line synopsis available on request.

About Hoyt Dwyer
Hoyt Dwyer is a writer and director based in Atlanta. He studied at FAMU International in Prague.

SOURCE Hoyt Dwyer