January 6, 2025
Introduction: In this article, with the Christmas season wrapping up today, James Pylant will surprise you with some unusual Santa Claus stories. James is an editor at GenealogyMagazine.com and author for JacobusBooks.com, is an award-winning historical true-crime writer, and authorized celebrity biographer.
Here are some unusual Santa Claus stories as we wind down the Christmas season.
Three-Year-Old Girl Hears Santa Claus
’Twas the night before Christmas 1905, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…
…Until three-year-old May Bauer heard a downstairs window raise.
The Bronx toddler lay perfectly still in her bed, remembering that her father told her that Santa Claus might take off without leaving presents if he were disturbed. As she waited, the stillness made her nervous. May quietly crept into her father’s bedroom and awakened him.
“Papa, Santa Claus is downstairs; I heard him raise the window,” she whispered.
Alfred Bauer leaped from his slumber and told the girl to crawl into bed. He hurried to a telephone and called the police station. Bauer heard rustling downstairs, looked out a window, and saw two men fleeing his house. Neither were Santa Claus.
Minutes later, police officers arrived to surround and search the house, but they were too late. At daylight, the hunt ended without discovery.
The next morning, May told her father: “I am so glad I didn’t make a noise, Papa, ’cause Santa Claus wouldn’t have left me all these pretty presents.”
Santa Burglar Leaves Behind Silverware
Two years later, another New Yorker, John Distler, heard a noise from the dining room below his bedroom the night before Christmas, “and he at once decided that there was a burglar in the house.”
This article reports:
Rather than take chances of being shot at, Distler made a great noise in his room for the purpose of scaring the burglar away. He was successful in this, and when he went down stairs he found that none of the family silver had been stolen.
On the contrary, he found on the table in the dining room a large quantity of silverware which he never had seen before. He believes the burglar had taken it from other houses and being scared by the noise fled, leaving it behind.
Thirteen-Year-Old Boy Scares Off Santa Burglar
In a second-floor apartment in Cleveland, Ohio, on Christmas Eve night in 1912, 13-year-old Raymond Landry was awakened by a tinkling sound. He lay still for a moment and then heard it again. Raymond sat up straight, and in the darkness, he could see the figure of a man.
The groggy teen realized he wasn’t hearing jingle bells, nor was the man sporting long white whiskers. And no cheery yuletide greeting came with the hurtling shining object that grazed Raymond’s head before jarringly crashing into a brass flowerbox.
“Burglars! Burglars!” Raymond shouted, calling for his parents. He heard the intruders run through the adjoining dining room. The boy rushed to his bedroom door and shouted, “Get out of here! Get out of here!”
Raymond’s father grabbed a potato masher (the only weapon he could find) and chased after the prowlers, but the men had already made their exit through a fire escape. From a window, Raymond saw three men jump into a car parked on a side street and drive off into the night.
The Landrys found rolls of silverware wrapped in napkins on the dining room floor. One large silver pitcher sat on the floor, partially hidden by a cloth bag left behind by the bungling burglars.
Santa Burglar Used Taxi
Meanwhile, in Seattle, Washington, that same night, Santa Claus dispensed with his usual sleigh-and-reindeer delivery and took a taxicab. As he explained to driver Oscar Hemptner, he wanted to distribute some Christmas gifts “in a quiet way.”
He was a smooth-shaven young man in ordinary dark clothes when he crawled into Hemptner’s cab, toting two sacks. This article reports:
Well out on Fifteenth Avenue south he had the chauffeur [taxi driver] drive one block east from the car line, and, leaving the cab, told Hemptner to wait for him. Taking both bundles, he disappeared around the corner and was gone for fifteen or twenty minutes. He returned with both bundles and was driven across town… where the same performance was repeated… In each case, the passenger picked out a corner and told Hemptner to stop there and wait for him.
Stops were made in several neighborhoods where Santa toted the bundles up alleyways. After the trips ended, the passenger paid the cab driver and left with a sack that seemed just as full as when he started. Hemptner found his passenger had left behind a large pile of wastepaper and a Santa Claus disguise: a cotton beard and an unhemmed, crudely cut, and roughly sewn suit.
The cab driver gave it no more thought until reading newspaper accounts of burglaries in the neighborhoods where he had taken his passenger.
Brotherly Reunion Goes Terribly Wrong
Yet another bogus St. Nick was on the prowl in 1912, but he didn’t nick gifts. He was no thief – his motive was pure. But things didn’t turn out well.
This article reports:
Tom Coyle is a good sailor but he had no luck in his imitation of Santa Claus. For a shipmate, Mike Feeney, he agreed to play the part and by dropping down the chimney of an old farmhouse on the Hamburg turnpike he proposed to surprise Feeney’s only brother and effect a reconciliation between the boys, as they had been estranged for years.
It was a big, old-fashioned chimney and the agile Coyle dropped down with ease, but at the bottom it had been papered over as it was out of use. He popped through the paper like a circus clown, bringing with him a shower of bricks and soot.
He had lost his Santa Claus whiskers, forgotten the speech he was to make, and was naturally mistaken for a burglar. He was beaten badly by Feeney’s brother but the latter allowed him to escape with his life. Coyle rejoined [Mike] Feeney on the outside and both fled.
We hope your Christmas did not have any Santa Claus mishaps!
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Note on the header image: a burning Yule log. Credit: Joe Malzone; Wikimedia Commons.