Creepy - I Saw Santa Crying In My Kitchen

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

And to all a good night.***Guest narration by Owen McCuen***Santa Claus Syndrome***Written by: Ryan Peacock and Narrated by: Cole Burkhardt ***Content Warning: Graphic depictions of gore and violence, child death***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound Design by Pacific Obadiah***Title music by Alex AldeaHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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running from a crampus, beaten the hell out of a pooping log with a stick, cowering in fear of the yule lads, or carving radishes, or any of the other holiday traditions that are actual things. I hope everyone's staying safe and just doing their best. Seriously, a pooping log? No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised.

Freepy Presents I saw Santa crying in my kitchen. With guest narration, by Owen McCune. To some people, I'm going to sound high, and if I'm being honest, I am a little. But just listen. I mean, weed's kind of important to this story, but more of a motivation than anything else. I live in the same shitty house I grew up in. I got it when mom died.

Dad went first from a heart attack of 50. Mom went a few years later from lung cancer. Honestly, it's probably the only reason I can afford to live in a house. I work a shitty job for shitty people and earn shitty money from my efforts. Of the haves and have-nots, guess which one we were. We had a saying around where we grew up. Know how Santa can bring presents to so many houses in one night? He skips the poor neighborhoods.

We were one of those neighborhoods. I'm still in that neighborhood. The friends I have left drink too much and hate their lives in their own ways. Football, hunting season, and fishing open are the only things look forward to. But how much can you really put up with before it all just feels pointless? I didn't really have anyone, and from what I could tell, even if I did find someone, I probably wouldn't have liked them. Or Dave wouldn't have liked me. We would have grown to hate each other as much as my parents.

My day consisted mostly of waking up, taking a dump, going to work for 10 hours, then either going home to eat alone or going out for a few bumps with my equally aimless friends. Last year or so, I'd taken having a couple of puffs from a one-hitter before laying in bed and falling down some YouTube rabbit holes. I couldn't tell you what video it was that sent me down that particular rabbit hole, but I guess It's all it takes as one to change your algorithm. Next thing you know, you're watching videos about strange occurrences and random statistics. Like, did you know that 24 people die from champagne corks each year?

Yeah. Seriously. And most of them come from people getting hit in the face by the cork at a wedding. Cheers to the happy couple, huh? Or that, regardless of the popular theory, suicide rates don't. actually go up around Christmas. With a couple of exceptions, they actually go down. For some reason, there were a bunch of medical papers released from 2009 that made the claim and it just sort of stuck.

I won't bore you with the details, mostly, because I don't remember and don't care to look it up again. I mentioned that because I decided to kill myself on Christmas. I couldn't exactly tell you why Christmas. Maybe there was too much Mariah Carey on the radio. Maybe there was too much of that bullshit holiday cheer that people pretend they have. When really they're all just mad and annoyed and trying to hide it with tinsel. Christmas was always the worst time of year for me.

We didn't have money so Santa didn't show up. Mom would so lovingly say that I must have been on the naughty list and needed to try harder the next year. Meanwhile, the same kids beat the shit out of me in school, rode around on new bikes. Fuck Christmas. and fuck Santa. I'd take some joy out of the season for someone else for a change.

Once I knew I was going to do it, I thought I'd find some sort of peace with it. But Christmas Eve was a sleepless night. I looked at the clock and saw it was after midnight, so technically it was Christmas. Why prolong the inevitable right? I got up thinking I might as well get on with it when I heard something. I thought it was coming from the furnace, some sort of weird. puffing noise that just felt like the cherry on top of a shitty life. Why wouldn't my furnace go out, right?

But it wasn't that. I walked past my fireplace and saw footprints in the ash leading to the kitchen. Seriously, straight from the fireplace. Quick scan around, shut the front door locked, windows shut. As I got closer to the kitchen, I saw someone standing there, facing the sink. No point in mincing words at this point. Santa was standing in my kitchen. That's Santa.

Santa Claus. But not. I imagine just about everyone has the same image as Santa in their head. Maybe it's from all the mall Santas or Coca-Cola commercials I've seen over the years. But I assumed it was going to be a jolly fat man. Instead, I saw a different version. to Santa. I ever see that Billy Bob Thornton movie Bad Santa?

If you haven't, just picture Billy Bob Thornton in a Santa costume and you'll get the idea. The man in my kitchen was old. He had long, stringy gray hair and he was thin. Even thinner than Billy Bob. But he had the red suit and hat, hung off him like draping a coat over a broomstick. He was leaning over the sink and he was crying. I could see bony shoulders bouncing with each even breath. I'm not the most patient person under the best of circumstances,

so you can probably imagine that I didn't react too well at what I assumed to be a crackhead breaking into my house and crying over my sink. But the moment I grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, his eyes, those eyes. They stared into me in a way that made me feel like a scared little kid. They saw me. He saw me. I immediately let go back into my living room,

telling the guy to get the fuck out as sternly as I could manage, but I think my voice cracked. He just stood there sniffling, tears and snot dribbling into his filthy beard. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and said he couldn't leave. He had to stay until I was dead. He walked into the living room and sat down. on my couch. There was no air of authority or confidence at all. He looked like someone scared of his own

shadow. He just sat there, huddled into himself on the couch, and started talking to me. I wanted to get a picture of what I was seeing or a video to show the police, because no way did I really believe you was Santa Claus at the time. And I was in just bad enough of a mood that I wasn't too concerned with someone else going with me to the great nothingness on the other side. But there was something about him. Something... Something that weighed on me that made me hold off. I turned out my phone's video camera and set it on the table.

This is what I recorded. I was born. What year is it? Never mind. It doesn't matter. I lost track of time long ago. I was a toy maker. in a small village that no longer exists.

The people there said that I was touched by God and given the gift of knowledge, true knowledge. I could look at a person and know everything about them. I could see and know with absolute certainty if they were at their very core, a good person or a bad person. As I got older, I thought it would be a kindness. To reward the good little boys and girls in the village with a small trinket one day a year. No, it wasn't on Christmas, as Christmas is a pagan holiday, bastardized by organized religion.

It was just a day I selected in the spring. As the years went by, it was slowly noticed that I wasn't aging like the rest of the people in town. Fortunately for me, the townspeople didn't view this as anything evil at all, but instead as a sign of divinity. I lived well for many years, making my toys and bringing joy to the village as best I could. But one day, I began to notice that what had once just been a feeling that I got about people turned into something else. I started to hear them too I could hear their thoughts worst of all

I could hear their sins I could hear what the baker wanted to do to the school teacher I could hear what the parents did to discipline their children behind closed doors I could hear an apple or a loaf of bread being stolen

not by someone who was hungry and in need, but just by someone too cheap or lazy to pay for it. As time passed, it only got worse. I started to write it all down as a way to get it out of my head and onto a page, journaling, I guess. But that only made things worse when I looked back at what I'd written, and how nearly every single person in the town had done or wanted to do it. do something unspeakably terrible. There were fewer and fewer good little boys and girls. To put it simply, and in a parlance you'd understand, everyone was on the naughty list.

Then one year I didn't give out any presents, but instead decided to leave a small rock for everyone in the town to symbolize that, yes, I remembered them, and I knew that. I knew that, they didn't deserve anything special for the sorts of people they had been. And just like that, the town turned on me. Instead of admitting what they'd done and wanted to do, they demonized me. Call me the devil, said I was there to spread lies and damn them all. Then they killed me, stoning me to death.

Or so they thought. Because of my curse, I suddenly woke up, in the middle of the desert months later. I had no memory of how I got there. I knew I couldn't go back to my home. So I started walking. I walked and walked and walked for year after year. What I quickly learned was that the closer I got to a town, the louder the voices in my head would get,

Until the day came that I realized I had to leave. I had to go somewhere else, somewhere that no one else could go. I moved to a desolate place of ice and snow and sat there in silence. Unable to die for hundreds of years. At that, he got up and walked toward the kitchen, so the audio was unintelligible. Basically, he started bitching about what we used. done in the meantime. The rest of the world moved on and the stories about him got muddled with other historic

figures over the years. Then I got a Santa Claus history list than I kind of wish I'd been high for. Around the same time, he was being stone to death. There was a monk named St. Nicholas near Turkey, I think he said. His back was to me and I heard him shuffling around in my kitchen drawers. St. Nicholas was supposedly very kind and pious. It said he gave away all his inheritance and traveled around helping poor in the sick. His time went on, his popularity spread, and he became known as the protector of children and, of all things, sailors.

There was even a feast to celebrate his death on December 6th. Over the centuries, he'd evolved in one of the most popular saints in Europe. And like so many other saints, the miracles attributed to him were dubious at best. In this case, St. Nick's miracles were actually ones that people had seen the Santa in my kitchen do, which confused me and I asked what his name was. I didn't so much understand how the idea of St. Nick and Santa could be two different people and the same at once. He just scoffed and said it didn't matter. It was a translation thing.

Santa was all anyone knew or expected anyway, so I might as well call him that. And it had been that way for hundreds of years. At least in America, thanks to the Dutch settlers. In 1800 and something, someone from the New York Historical Society started handing out wood cuttings of St. Nicholas at the Society's annual meeting. The background of the engravings contained more of what we think of Santa now, stockings and toys. Then he pulled a book out, just beat all the shit and look older in dirt. I could just make out the title. The History of New York by Washington Irving

Entire to claim that St. Nicholas was a patron saint in New York but I did have to laugh at the description. A rascal with a blue three-cornered hat, red waistcoat, and yellow stockings. Wasn't too long after that Santa started showing up in holiday hats. Even the Salvation Army took up the image to promote giving. Ever since then, Santa's been ringing bells on the street corners by the time Thanksgiving wrapped up. At that point, he finished up whatever he was doing in the kitchen and walked back to the

couch with the groan, and that's when my recorder started picking him up again. Then there was Miracle on 34th Street. A young Natalie Wood played a little girl who believes Chris Kringle, played by Edmund Gwen, who won an Oscar for the role, by the way. Naturally, he didn't thank me, because why would he? He did have some ideas about incorporation that I should take him up on. The Macy's Santa has appeared at almost every Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade since it began in 1924. These ideas and rumors and myths about who I was,

mixed with the idea of a saint who wasn't what everyone remembers, got commercialized and repackaged and sold to the masses. Parents embrace this idea of St. Nick as a way to get their children to stop fighting and shut the fuck up for five minutes for one month out of the year. But there was never any accountability. There was never any real acceptance or understanding. It was all just want, want, want. The spirit of Christmas, if there ever was one in the sort of way that Macy's and Sears tried to present it to Christian households, is dead. Except that the machine can't stop moving once it starts.

Santa, regardless of the fucking stupid claims about the war on Christmas, is no less prevalent than it has ever been. Maybe if the world stopped believing in the Santa lie, if they stopped lying to their own children, I could finally sleep. How can any of you live with the hypocrisy to providing magic to children? Only to steal it away when it no longer serves you. Fucking monsters, all of you.

All this time, I'd been sitting up in the ice and snow. And while I wasn't being overwhelmed, with the echoing voices of sinners every minute of the day, I could still feel you all out there. And what you'd become? You were no longer people of good if you ever had been.

Good only existed if someone was watching you. Good only existed if the person doing it was recognized for what they'd done. Why give a homeless person $10 when you can record it and share it, to everyone to show how good you are.

And you take that good and use it as a shield to hide your true selves to justify anything. There are exceptions, sure, but few and far between. Not nearly enough to silence the voices that claw at my brain at this very moment. So one day, 50 years ago or so, I stood up and I started walking again. I started walking where the voices were the loudest.

I decided that I was going to start doing my part to spread good and cheer again and would do that by witnessing the silence of the worst, darkest voices. Tired of listening to you complain. I'm tired of listening to you cry about how life isn't fair. I'm tired of the version you present versus the version that I hear,

and you, Frank, are as bad as any of them in thought, if not deed, but less fates it. Your deeds have been pretty bad. The voices in your head screaming since you were old enough to have words, I heard you think about killing that dog when you were nine before you ever did it. I heard you steal that $5 from your dad's wallet, and sleep through the beating your mother took for it. I could give you the names of every woman you ever thought about doing all your fucked-up perverted things to,

only to jerk off and cry about it later. I know exactly how you'd kill your boss. But the whining... God, the whining from you is the worst. Life isn't fair. I deserve better. You deserve nothing. You've wasted everything,

and now you want to die. And I'm here to watch and bathe in that beautiful moment when your pitiful whining finally stops. I've learned to crave that moment from you, people. That pure bliss when another worthless voice goes silent. Give it to me. I watched as he pulled out what he'd been working on in the kitchen.

It was a bundle of extension cords from my junk drawer, fashioned into a noose. It hung from his rotted, gloved hand taunting me. I backed up away from him. When I did, I knocked my phone off the table and the recording turned off. So I don't expect you to believe what happened next, but it's true. For whatever that's worth to you. He just stood there staring at me, offering that noose for me to take. But he didn't say anything.

He just waited with these blank lifeless eyes staring into me. Before I said I was being taunted, but it wasn't by him, like Santa or whatever the fuck you want to call him. He almost seemed ambivalent to it all. I was being taunted by the idea of all of it. But the thing I said I was going to do. The thing I knew I was going to do. But I couldn't.

Not because I was scared, but because I was sad. He wasn't wrong. I'm a miserable fuck who isn't happy even when I'm laughing. And the things I've said to myself and plotted in my head have been the darkest sorts of shit for as long as I can remember. But like he said, I was always different. afraid of someone watching. If I thought I could have gotten away with even a few of the things I daydreamed about, I wouldn't have hesitated.

Maybe that's why I decided to kill myself. Couldn't arrest me after the fact as long as I did it right and made sure my ticket was punched. For the first time, I actually felt bad about the person I was. I complained so much about the weight of the world on my shoulders and all the burdens that I had to live with that never for one second did I actually think there was someone else out there. that had to carry that burden because of me. I could barely live with my own thoughts. I couldn't imagine him to hear and feel the thoughts at ten of me,

or a hundred or a million. No wonder he said he was cursed. Cursed to hear and know the worst of us. And cursed that he couldn't even relieve himself of that burden. No wonder that's what he'd become. What we'd turned him into. The two of us stood there for a long time. long time and until I think he finally knew I couldn't go through with it.

Then my pity for him had actually changed his mind. He dropped the noose to the floor and shook his head and told me if I wasn't going to kill myself that I could at least do him a favor and shut the fuck up for five minutes a day. Then he walked back to the chimney, bending down with a groan and looking up it. He looked back at me and walked at the front door, unlocking it and stepping out into the blowing. snow. The last thing I heard Santa Claus say to me was, not a total loss.

The guy down the street just closed his garage door and turned down his car before disappearing into the night. I'm not going to pretend that I completely changed after that night. My bitter roots run deep. But I do try to be better. I try to forgive other people and forgive myself.

I start baking. I'm sharing it with my neighbors. Life still sucks a lot of the time. But I try to make little windows of it suck less. And if there's any sense of fairness in the world, I give him that five minutes a day, where I just shut the fuck up. For your bonus episode,

Creepy Presents, Santa Claus Syndrome. written by Ryan Peacock and narrated by Cole Burkart. There is little official documentation available that describes Rockwell disease, informally known as Santa Claus Syndrome. Observing patients is difficult, as the condition is extremely rare and is almost always diagnosed post-mortem. However, by looking at the behavior of past confirmed victims of Santa Claus syndrome,

doctors have been able to determine a few telltale symptoms that appear to distinguish victims of the condition. Patients tend to display a prolonged manic episode lasting approximately one month, during which they will behave in an unusually cheerful manner. Descriptions of patients also note that there was an unusual redness in their faces while the condition was suspected to be alive. While the name Santa Claus Syndrome might imply some weight gain as well, the patients were actually noted to have lost weight after symptoms began to show. That said, given that many of the confirmed patients were not in the best shape to begin with, they were still quite robust by the time they died. Every confirmed patient was male, and between the ages of 45 and 70. There have been no confirmed instances of the disease afflicting women.

The disease is believed to have a one-month incubation period, where symptoms become apparent, followed by a prolonged manic episode that ends in the death of the patient. Autopsies of the suspected victims of Santa Claus syndrome have determined significant deterioration in the brain tissue, with the cause of death usually being attributed to a health. hemorrhage or abscess. Fatal complications from these are typically triggered during the manic episode, meaning that it typically ends with the patient abruptly collapsing dead after some sort of trauma.

The condition was first observed in December of 1994, when a man named Bernard King had a violent episode while working as a Mall Santa. eyewitnesses state that King had been sitting in his chair, meeting with children as Santa Claus, when a child in line had begun to act out. Seven-year-old Andrew Lee had an outburst over having to wait in line and had been vocally complaining about it. His complaining had gotten King's attention, and witnesses say that after letting one child go, he stood up and left the meet-and-greet area to go into the line. Witnesses stated that they expected that he was simply going to talk to the boy,

an attempt to calm him down. However, upon seeing him, Kane immediately grabbed Lee by the throat and ripped him away from his mother. He threw him to the ground and began to strike him, slamming his head against the ground over and over again, as well as repeatedly punching and kicking the boy. Witnesses attempted to pull King off Andrew. However, he continued to assault the boy

until several men in the crowd grabbed hold of King's arms and pulled him off Andrew Lee. King struggled against them the entire time, but reportedly did not utter a single word. He attempted to kick and bite at the men holding him back, and one of them eventually punched him in her. retaliation for biting him. It was after that that King stopped struggling and promptly lost consciousness. He had died of internal bleeding in his brain by the time the paramedics had arrived on scene.

Andrew Lee died in the hospital approximately three days later. Bernard Kenya had no history of violence or prior criminal record. Those who knew him described him as an even-tempered and sociable man. He had worked as a mall Santa for the past six years without incident. Outside of the considerable deterioration found in his brain after an autopsy, no other cause of his outburst was obvious. A second case was identified two years later in November of 1996, when 47-year-old Daniel Hogan died suddenly in a strip mall parking lot.

He had observed a couple arguing by their vehicle, and had then proceeded to get into his own car and ram them both, killing the man and severely injuring the woman. He died when his head struck the steering wheel upon impact with a nearby vehicle and caused internal bleeding. However, Santa Claus syndrome was not officially identified until 2000, when two new cases were recorded. Since then, there have been over 34 confirmed cases of Santa Claus syndrome

in the United States and Canada. The cause is still unknown. Still unknown. 25 years, 34 confirmed cases, and they don't know what causes it. That's wild, isn't it? You know, my dad was a good man. I remember when I was a kid,

he'd take every Wednesday off from work just so he'd go out to lunch with me. He took me to all the dumb kid movies I wanted to see. He brought me the loud, annoying toys for Christmas. He was a damn good father. He was the kind of man I always wanted to be. He was right there for almost 12 years as I studied to become a doctor. He was there at my wedding. He was in the waiting room when I had my first child. He did everything right. He did everything that a good father does right up in until three days ago. My wife and I wanted to have a date night by ourselves. We do that every now

and then. It keeps the romance alive. We go out, we have a nice dinner together, and then we go see a movie or go to a show, something we want to see that the kids wouldn't be interested in. It was nice. We can step away from our responsibilities and just enjoy ourselves, just like we were dating for the first time again. It makes everything feel so fresh. Of course, whenever we do date nights like that, my dad is always eager to watch the kids. He likes to spend time with them. He'll burn McDonald's over, put on some old cowboy movies, and they'll have a blast. My oldest son, Bradley, has a little cowboy hat he wears when my dad comes over. He always asks him to put on true grit. Not the new one, the original one with John Wayne, that's his favorite.

My youngest son, Sean, still doesn't quite get it yet, but he's just happy to see Grandpa and play with him. While Bradley pretends to ride a horse, Sean follows him grinning from ear to ear all the while. It's heartwarming to see them, and my dad connects so well. I know without a question in my mind that my dad loves Sean and Bradley with all his heart. He loved them, at least.

Do I need to explain what happened? You've probably figured it out by now. You can put two and two together. I came home the other night with my wife. The house was quiet, and dad was sitting on the couch. The TV was on, and the DVD menu of Rio Bravo was playing. but Dad wasn't watching it. He wasn't even moving. His head was slumped down against his chest. His eyes were half open. He didn't have a pulse. He hadn't been dead for long. Less than an hour, I think. He just sat down and died. Simple as that. That by itself was probably the worst thing that could have happened to me. It was, without a doubt, the most horrible thing I could have possibly come home to see. But it got worse. You know that it got worse.

My wife went upstairs to check on our kids. When I heard her scream of grief, shock, and horror, I knew immediately that something was horribly wrong. I sprinted down the hall, dreading what I'd see. And when I saw it, when I saw our two, sons lying bloody and broken on their beds. God. Our youngest, Sean, died first. Dad had beaten him so bad, he'd been dead before we came home. Bradley made it to the hospital, but he didn't survive the night. Just like that, my life was ruined.

Just like that, I'd lost everything. told me about the degradation in my dad's brain. He let me into the morgue to see it myself. Dad on that table, a Y incision in his chest. I've got a strong stomach. You need one to be a doctor. But that alone was almost too much for me. Add on to that, the black rotten hole I saw in my dad's head. The coroner had cut his skull open, but there was barely anything left in there. What brain my dad had was rotten and black. How he was even still alive, I've got no fucking idea. So much of his brain had rotted away that he should have just collapsed weeks ago. But when I'd spoken to him before I'd left that night, he seemed like the same man I'd known and loved for my entire life. He seemed a little bit

giddier, I suppose, but I chalked that up to him simply being excited to spend some time with his grandkids. The coroner told me about Rockwell disease, Santa Claus Syndrome. He told me that my dad almost certainly wasn't himself when he beat the life from my two children. Could have figured that part out by myself. He told me there was nothing I could have done that it comes out of nowhere, like a freak accident. There's no way of knowing it's coming and no way of stopping it when it comes. I don't know if I believe that, or maybe I just don't want to believe that. Maybe it's just stubbornness, a refusal to accept the truth that this is really something no one could have predicted. Maybe I'm wasting my time. I don't care. I've done all I can to learn about this

condition, what little there is to know, and I need to learn more. So I'm putting my experience out into the world. I want to pool resources. I want to know how to stop this from happening again. I want to find a cure, because the pain I feel right now is not something I would wish on my worst enemy. If you've had experience with this condition, please contact me. If you know something, please get in touch. I can't let this happen to anyone else. I won't. 25 years.

And we still barely know a thing about this condition. Let's change that. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please visit creepypod.com. You can also follow us at Creepad. creepy pod on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so through Creative Commons share-a-like licensing or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the

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