How Zozobra Set Alight the Hearts of Santa Fe Residents

Dylan Thuras: In the months leading up to Labor Day, people are hard at work at the Santa Fe Plaza Mall. Inside of this strip mall, the people of Santa Fe, New Mexico, are building a gigantic 50-foot-tall marionette out of wood and chicken wire. And now, it’s stuffing time. Hundreds of people show up ready to stuff a gigantic puppet full of shredded paper.

Ray Sandoval: We invite the community to have a pizza party to come and stuff him. And I will tell you, it was kind of funny this year because we were going to open the doors at 9 a.m, and when we did, there was a line, you know, all the way—you couldn’t even imagine it. And his 50-foot body was stuffed—every chicken wire hole—was stuffed by 1 p.m.

Dylan: This is not your standard puppet. This puppet’s name is Zozobra. Technically, Zozobra is a ghost. This tall, thin ghost wearing a robe, which makes it look like he is floating just above the ground. He has big green eyes, big flappy ears, and long, dangling limbs.

Ray: So his arms move, his mouth moves, his head goes back side to side, his eyes move. And so it’s really a lot of specialty work shaping the face, shaping a nose or eyebrows or, you know, the ears or making the monster as beautiful as we possibly can.

Dylan: So what are the people of Santa Fe, New Mexico planning on doing, exactly, with this giant, horrifying, beautiful monster? Well, they’re going to light him on fire.

Ray: We’ll have people come up to us and say, “You can’t burn that one. It’s too beautiful. That one’s too nice.” You have to create yourself some emotional distance because Zozobra can be viewed as a big stuffed animal, right, that you just kind of get a little too attached to. And so I’ve got to keep my distance since I’m the guy that gets to light him on fire. You know, I have to remind myself often that that’s his purpose. His purpose is to be destroyed.

I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This episode was produced in partnership with Visit Santa Fe. Do you have anything in your life that is kind of bumming you out? Once a year, the city of Santa Fe, they’ve got an answer for you. We are going to head to the burning of Zozobra, where a crowd of 50,000 people gets together to release their gloom and light a gigantic puppet on fire.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Ray: The city of Santa Fe has a love affair with a 50-foot monster. You know, restaurants have Zozobra painted in their windows. You see Zozobra on fire trucks. You see Zozobra on murals. You see him, you know, on kids’ menus.

Dylan: This is Ray Sandoval. He runs the Burning of Zozobra Festival for the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe. In other words, Ray is really the person responsible for lighting Zozobra on fire. Ray’s own love affair with Zozobra goes a ways back. He first visited the festival when he was just around five years old.

Ray: I remember staring up at this, you know, this huge effigy and then all of a sudden the lights go off and it starts to come alive. It starts moving and it’s doing these, you know, growls. And I remember looking down at my cousins and they were grabbing my parents’ legs and they were crying and they were putting their face into my parents’ legs. And I just thought, “God, they’re so stupid. They’re missing this.”

Dylan: Today in Santa Fe, the Burning of Zozobra is a huge festival attracting crowds of over 50,000 people. There are fireworks, there is performance art, there is dancing, lots of serious pyrotechnics. But the roots of this festival go way back, over a hundred years back. And back then, it started out on a much, much smaller scale with a little act of arson. Maybe you could call it a cathartic burning. It begins in the 1920s when a painter named Will Shuster blew into Santa Fe.

Ray: He was gassed in the trenches of World War I and he developed a lung ailment. And so he was told that he needed to come out west because he couldn’t live in Philadelphia anymore. The humidity was going to kill him. And so he gets here and meets up with four other painters and they become the Cinco Pintores.

Dylan: The Cinco Pintores lived in a kind of ramshackle house in the center of town. They didn’t have much money, they were just scraping by at the time. But then one Christmas, Shuster caught a big break: He sold one of his paintings. And with this cash in hand, he thought, “All right, guys, let’s go out on the town. We’ll have a nice dinner. We will celebrate.” So, they went down to this fancy new hotel to have their Christmas dinner. But everybody was in a terrible mood.

Ray: And so he carried a sketchbook with him and he took out pieces of paper and put them on the table and he demanded that they write down what was bothering them. And then after they did that, he put them all together on the table, grabbed the candle and lit them on fire and said that their sadness was gone.

And of course, the bartender comes out and sees this fire on top of the table and he kicks them all out. And so they’re now in the Santa Fe Plaza, it’s starting to snow and they just all start laughing. And so Shuster comes up with this idea that you could symbolically burn away those things that are bothering you if you could write them down and then light them on fire.

Dylan: The following spring, Shuster went down to Mexico for Easter and he witnessed something that kind of rewired his brain. There was this parade where people would carry an effigy of Judas through the streets and you’d spit at the effigy, you’d throw shoes at him. And then you would get burnt at the end of the parade.

Ray: So this sparks a little bit of an idea inside his head. So, Shuster decides this is the perfect way to do this. If we can create a monster that everybody decides is bad and we can stuff our glooms in them, then we could burn them away and we can kind of have this ritual to cleanse our community.

Dylan: Shuster came up with his own Judas to burn, his own character that represented everything he wanted to get rid of. This gloomy old ghost named Zozobra. It’s the Spanish word for “anxiety” or “worry.” He built a little five-foot marionette and he held the first burning in his backyard in 1924. The next year, Zozobra got bigger, and so did the event. It became public, attracted more people. And then the next year, Zozobra got bigger and then bigger and bigger.

Ray: Zozobra caught fire and he’s still burning.

Dylan: Will Shuster kept the burning of Zozobra going until the 1960s when he turned the event over to the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, which still runs it to this day. Of course, a big part of what they do is getting this figure of Zozobra just right. He’s huge, kind of scary, but also kind of cute.

They’ve also doubled his original size, taking him from the max that Shuster brought him up to, which was about 20 feet, and growing him all the way to 50 feet high. But what is equally important is what is inside Zozobra.

So earlier, we were talking about how all the volunteers get together before the festival to stuff this giant puppet with shredded paper. In the world of Zozobra, these little papers are more than just kindling. The papers are called glooms. And in the weeks leading up to the event, you write your own glooms down, whatever is bothering you, whatever you want to let go of, and then you can drop them off in gloom boxes throughout the city of Santa Fe.

Then volunteers will take these glooms and stuff them inside of Zozobra. So all of the whole city of Santa Fe’s glooms can go up in flames together. But say you have something that’s really bothering you, and writing it down just won’t cut it. In that case, you can drop off other things that you’d like to see burn, too.

Ray: We had a wedding dress that just went up, and then we’ve had really personal items. I know that I had a woman who had survived breast cancer, and so she wanted to burn her bra in Zozobra. And we’ve had, you know, old love letters. We’ve had wedding albums. We’ve had, you know, wedding invitations. We’ve had just, you know, citations, old mortgages, really bad diagnosis, somebody’s death certificate, somebody’s ashes, who put in their will that they wanted to be, that they wanted a portion of their ashes to go up with Zozobra.

Dylan: So picture this: You have a massive crowd of 50,000 people. The giant ghost puppet of Zozobra looms ahead of you, waving its arms, moving its eyes. There is music, there is dancing, and all of your glooms and your dooms from the year have been stuffed inside of this figure.

Ray: You’re having this deeply personal experience, which is you are reflecting on what you yourself want to let go of. What is it that’s holding you down in your life? What is it, what gloom is holding you there? There we start chanting, “Burn him! Burn him!”

And so basically what happens is that there’s a firework inside Zozobra’s mouth. So when you light the fuse, the fire goes into the mouth. And if you get it just right, these flames start going up across his cheek. And so it looks like he’s breathing fire.

When people see that, that firework go off in the mouth, you have this collective gasp by 50,000 people all at once. And then all of a sudden you hear this pause and then this roar comes over the crowd. And it’s just, it’s amazing because the amount of energy that you can feel from that crowd. And it’s something that just needs to be experienced.

Dylan: The festival has been going on for over 100 years now. To shake things up a bit from year to year, Ray and the Kiwanis Club have been experimenting with dressing Zozobra up in slightly different costumes. This year, Zozobra was wearing kind of steampunk getup, big goggles, an old-fashioned coat. If you want a little preview of next year, 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. So they’re giving Zozobra a little bit of an American Revolution theme.

Ray: Zozobra has stolen King George, his powdered wig, his scepter, his royal robes, and a crown.

Dylan: No matter how Zozobra looks on the outside, Ray says at the core, the festival has really stayed the same. It’s part public celebration, part private reflection, and everything in between. It is a chance to let go.

Ray: Zozobra is really the story between the duality within ourselves as human beings, that good or bad. And really that battle is, who are you going to be like? Are you going to be more like Zozobra and spread gloom into the world, or are you going to be more like the fire spirit and spread light? So this, you know, this dichotomy of being with 50,000 people and having this very communal experience and at the same time having a very personal experience, I think is just really, truly the magic of the event.

Dylan: The burning of Zozobra takes place every year in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Friday before Labor Day. Start planning your trip now.

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