The Burning of Zozobra!
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
4.6 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 15 October 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In the months leading up to Labor Day, people are hard at work at the Santa Fe Plaza Mall. |
| 0:07.1 | 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. |
| 0:18.7 | And now, it's stuffing time. |
| 0:22.1 | Hundreds of people show up ready to stuff a gigantic puppet full of shredded paper. |
| 0:28.7 | We invite the community to have a pizza party to come and stuff in. |
| 0:33.4 | And I will tell you, it was kind of funny this year because we were going to open the doors at 9 o'clock. |
| 0:38.7 | And when we did, there was a line in it all the way you could even imagine it. |
| 0:42.9 | And his 50-foot body was stuffed. |
| 0:47.8 | Every chicken wire hole was stuffed by 1 p.m. |
| 0:52.5 | This is not your standard puppet. |
| 0:56.5 | This puppet's name is Zezobra. |
| 1:00.4 | Technically, Zazobra is a ghost. |
| 1:03.9 | This tall, thin ghost, wearing a robe, |
| 1:08.5 | which makes it look like he is floating just above the ground. |
| 1:12.5 | He has big green eyes, big flappy ears, and long dangling limbs. |
| 1:18.8 | So his arms move, his mouth moves, his head goes back sides to side, his eyes move. |
| 1:24.7 | And so it's really a lot of specialty work, shaping the face, shaping a nose or eyebrows or, you know, the ears, |
| 1:32.1 | or making the monster as beautiful as we possibly can. |
| 1:37.4 | So what are the people of Santa Fe, New Mexico? |
| 1:41.5 | Planning on doing, exactly, with this giant, horrifying, beautiful monster. |
| 1:49.4 | Well, they're going to light him on fire. |
| 1:52.7 | We'll have people come up to us and say, you can't burn that one. It's too beautiful. That one's too |
... |
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