SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
IT’S not safe to walk the Lötschental after dark. When the sun sets behind the mountains that rise over the valley, turning their jagged peaks pink in a last burst of defiance against the night, it’s best to scurry inside, lock the front door and hide beneath the bedcovers. The Tschäggä are coming.
The sound of bells announces them: a steady dong-dong-dong that drifts and builds down narrow streets, agitating the cows and sheep kept safe in village barns over winter.
If you hear the ringing, it’s already too late. The Tschäggä are upon you – 10 feet tall, with hideously disfigured faces, they push you to the ground, shove rough hands into your mouth and rub ice in your face. And then they are gone, and you are alone once more in the dark. You pick yourself up, slap the snow from your clothes and breathe a sigh of relief. But there it is again – the clang of approaching bells, and there’s nowhere yet to hide.
It seems unlikely that a festival with the principal aim of terrifying casual wanderers should sprout in the Lötschental. The four villages strung out along the valley, way up in the Swiss Alps, seem plucked from a particularly sentimental Christmas card. From November to May, their tightly-packed wooden houses squat under several metres of snow, icicles the length of swords dripping
