Why do we do such strange things when it gets dark?

It was nearly 9 p.m., Christmas Eve, and I was in a car with my family in the Swiss countryside. Through a series of quieter and narrower roads, lit by yellow streetlamps in the villages, and completely black in the fields, we made our way to our destination, the village of Zevin.

The streets were completely silent. Not a soul was moving, and we wondered if we were in the right place. Then, as we pulled up the driveway to the church, we caught them in the headlights: men in tall black hats.

I was in Zeven in the last dark hours before Christmas, because that’s when the village lights go out, and silent men in hats as tall as the houses walk the streets. Each walker carries around his neck a heavy cow bell. At the head of the procession is a man with a white beard, holding a long rod with a soiled cloth at the end. The men’s hats, I had read online, had to be seen to be believed: based on what little information I was able to extract, they were strange constructions, strange stove pipes about 20 or 30 feet high.

Switzerland isn’t the only place where haunting rituals take place in the dark of winter. As the days shorten and night falls – and, it must be said, farmers find themselves with time on their hands – people wake up to strange things. in South Tyrol in December, the demonic Krampus– Neighbors dressed in elaborate, blood-curdling costumes – run through the streets. Between Christmas and January 6 in Germany, Hairy monsters parade through dark corridors. In late February – when the days are longer, but darkness still reigns – chaotic Carnival festivities, in which the usual order of things is upended, take place on the stage. Around the same time, huge costumed monsters appeared (Tschäggättä in Valais). In Switzerland they roam the villages, scaring children and perhaps a few adults.

What is the darkest time of the year that triggers this ritual? And what does it mean when someone wears a goat fur mask or a twenty-foot hat?

“We have a long, rich, dark history,” says Nick Dunne, professor of urban design at Lancaster University in the UK and author of the book. Dark matters. And while the absence of light has many negative connotations — it is, after all, a condition where human ancestors may have been more at risk of encountering nocturnal predators, and where, these days, you have a greater risk of stubbing your toe — negativity is an interpretation we place on it, too. “It is worth remembering that we are born with two innate fears: falling and loud noises,” he says. “We are not born with a fear of the dark.” In fact, it’s the contrast with darkness that makes light interesting, says Tim Edensor, a professor of social and cultural geography at Manchester Metropolitan University who worked with Dan.

Moreover, equating darkness with evil and good with light may be a relatively recent invention. Edensor links this to the rise of Christianity, a point echoed by Susan Greenwood, an anthropologist of magic at the University of Sussex. But even if you separate darkness from evil, darkness still has power, she says.

“There is a legend in much of northern Europe about the Wild Hunt, this ghostly procession that wanders through wild places,” says Greenwood. “They are led by a god, usually Odin or Woden, on horseback and accompanied by a large number of ferocious wild hounds or black dogs.

“When I was doing fieldwork, I was working with a group of pagan witches at one of the camps, and they set a challenge where you had to walk alone through the forest at night, summon a Wild Hunt, and summon a hound to get the right to the forest,” says Greenwood, who bravely walked through the dark forest alone. “It was very terrifying,” she recalls. “These myths and legends, whatever we call them, they are powerful.”

As we walked through the village of Zeven, we passed a group of hats. They were leaned against the barn wall, each mounted on a carrying frame like those used in a band to hold drums so that the weight fell on the wearer’s shoulders while the rim rested on the head. We took a wrong turn and found ourselves in complete darkness walking on a path between fields when more men dressed in black and carrying hats came in front of us. We stepped to the side and let them pass.

We headed to the gas station (closed, like everything else in the village on Christmas Eve). At this point we started to notice other people gathering. By now the streets were dead. But now there were nine or ten more, their faces dimly lit by the street lamps. As we waited, more and more shadowy shapes poured out of the city’s alleys. There were no vendors, no festive wine vendors, no noise to speak of, just low voices every now and then.

At nine o’clock in the evening, the clock struck in the church on the hill above. On the final stroke, the lights went out. The street was bathed in black. In the distance, a sudden noise arose, the incredible noise of countless bells. The march had begun.

For more than 200 years, the walk has followed the same route around the old heart of the village, says 87-year-old villager Franz Stöhler, an expert in the tradition in Zeven. Nünichlingler, as walkers are called, walk because in the past, villagers believed that on these shortest and darkest days of the year, a window opened in the earth to another world, and spirits escaped. The sound forces them to move back away from the village for another year.

The ringing of bells in the dark attracts me like a magnet. They were now moving through the streets of the old city, and I walked with increasing urgency towards the sound. Then, in the distance, a camera flash illuminated a hellish scene – swirling in the smoke from the village fires, a huge black organ, as tall as the houses on either side, swayed and rolled across the square. When the camera flash ended, we couldn’t see anything again, only heard the imaginary sound of bells. But they were coming.

As they passed me, illuminated again by the camera flash, I saw the tallest hats go at the front of the procession, and from behind, in rows of three, fewer and fewer hats came, until at last there were men in simple cowboy hats and long dark coats, ringing their bells. I ran side by side, hands over my ears, watching the undulating movement of the tallest hats, about three or four times the height of the wearer. They kept walking, heading toward the dark gas station, then off to the side roads, winding through the city. Our group had lost each other in the night amidst the cacophony – distracted by the strangeness – but miraculously found each other again.

The hats are an addition to the old tradition, but the rule is that the tallest ones walk first, Stoehler says. When he was a young man, after World War II, the tallest hats were only three feet or so high. Since then, they’ve grown and grown, though now they’re as tall as they’re likely to be, he thinks; The old road passes under power lines, which puts a natural limit on the height of the cap.

At some point, a car came driving down the street, clearly on its way to nearby Basel, and used this road as it was mostly intended to be used: as a modern highway. What were they thinking when hundreds of faces appeared from the shadows on the shoulders of the road, a woman waved at them furiously and made them turn off their lights, and then, out of the pitch blackness, a huge centipede of men in black hats and bells crawled out of the alley and across their view. They must have felt a wave of unease—here on Christmas Eve, perhaps on their way to Mass, a piece of the strange, ancient past had halted their progress.

On some level, these dark rituals are meant to keep people in line, Greenwood says. Krampus scares children to remind them of the wages of naughtiness. The man at the front of the Nünichlinglers carries a rag on a stick to attack anyone who might steal a look out their window. (These days, Stoehler notes, spectators are welcome, but the stick remains.) There are other rituals with similar morals. But it is also about the changing of the year, and the beginning of the end of the short days. “It’s about getting to the deepest, darkest point of winter and making the light come back,” says Greenwood. “And that goes right back to the Christian cradle.” “It’s the return of the light.”