Pippi is a girl who is 9 years old. She lives alone in Villa Villekulla, an old house in a garden way out at the end of a small town (the name of the town is not given). She lives there all alone because her father, a sea captain called Captain Efraim Longstocking, disappeared when he was washed overboard in a storm and her mother died when she was very young. Pippi believes that her mother is now an angel in Heaven, watching her through a peephole and her father, instead of drowning after being washed overboard, had actually floated to an island filled with cannibals and become a cannibal king.