Armed Man Targets Santa Claus House in Alaska’s Christmas Town — Rifle, Surveillance Footage, and a Terrified Worker

Armed Man Targets Santa Claus House in Alaska’s Christmas Town — Rifle, Surveillance Footage, and a Terrified Worker

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Armed Man Targets Santa Claus House in Alaska’s Christmas Town — Rifle, Surveillance Footage, and a Terrified Worker

A 25-year-old man with a scoped rifle spent hours prowling one of America’s most beloved Christmas landmarks, pointing his weapon at security cameras, the highway, and a terrified grocery store worker in a town where even the street lights are candy canes.

Terror at the North Pole

There’s a town in Alaska where it’s Christmas year-round. The street lights are painted like candy canes. The main road is called Santa Claus Lane. The fire trucks are red, the police cars are green and white, and a city council member legally changed his name to Santa Claus. It’s an aggressively cheerful place by design. But early one Tuesday morning in November 2025, this town that bills itself as “where the spirit of Christmas lives year-round” became the setting for something no one anticipated — a man with a rifle, a security camera, and hours of inexplicable behavior captured on surveillance footage.

A Town Built on Christmas Magic

North Pole, Alaska, exists because of a real estate scheme and a man in a Santa suit.

In 1944, Bon and Bernice Davis homesteaded 160 acres along the Richardson Highway, about 14 miles southeast of Fairbanks. The Alaska Railroad established a siding on their property, and for a while, the settlement was simply called Davis. In 1952, the Dahl and Gaske Development Company purchased the land with a grand vision: rename it “North Pole” and toy manufacturers would flock from far and wide to print that magical name on their merchandise.

The Davises thought the idea was “far-fetched” but went along with it. No toy factories ever materialized. The location was simply too remote.

What did take shape was something stranger. Con Miller, a former military man, had become a merchant and fur trader in Alaska’s interior villages. He owned an old red Santa suit — acquired from a store going out of business — and he’d wear it on his trading trips. To the children in those remote communities, he was the first Santa Claus they had ever seen.

When the Millers arrived in Fairbanks in 1949, they had $1.40 in cash and two hungry kids. By 1952, they decided to build a trading post in this newly-christened North Pole. One day, while Con was working on the building, a young boy who had seen him dressed as Santa drove by and called out, “Hello, Santa Claus! Are you building a new house?”

The name stuck. Santa Claus House was born.

The store started as a general store typical of post-World War II Alaska, selling dry goods to people driving the Richardson Highway and soldiers stationed at nearby military bases. It had a soda fountain. It served as North Pole’s post office from its founding through the early 1970s. Con Miller went on to serve as mayor of North Pole for 19 years — the city’s longest-serving mayor — while Nellie became Marriage Commissioner, marrying thousands of couples inside Santa Claus House.

In the 1960s, they added a 42-foot tall, 900-pound, three-dimensional Santa Claus statue, built by Wes Stanley of Stanley Plastics in Enumclaw, Washington. It was originally a prototype for seasonal mall displays. After serving at the Westlake Mall in Seattle and the Federal Building in Anchorage, Con Miller purchased the giant Santa in 1978 for $4,500. It arrived in North Pole by truck, cut into four pieces so it could fit underneath highway overpasses.

Since 1952, Santa Claus House has sent nearly two million Santa letters worldwide. The North Pole Post Office receives more than 400,000 pieces of mail annually addressed simply to “Santa Claus, North Pole, Alaska.”

The whole town embraced its identity. The streets have names like Santa Claus Lane, Kris Kringle Drive, St. Nicholas Drive, Snowman Lane, and Mistletoe Lane. Street lights throughout the city are decorated in a candy cane motif, and local businesses follow suit with similar decorations. The 2020 census counted 2,243 residents living in what might be America’s most aggressively cheerful community.

Despite being about 1,700 miles south of Earth’s actual geographic North Pole, the town has made its name work. In 2019, a man who legally changed his name to Santa Claus won a seat on the city council.

Midnight at Santa Claus House

The incident began just after midnight on Tuesday, November 18, 2025.

Security cameras at Santa Claus House captured a maroon SUV doing “brodies” around the property — spinning in tight circles, circling the giant Santa statue, knocking over parking barriers. The driver was 25-year-old Nathaniel J. Caole from Palmer, Alaska.

Caole drove into the Santa Claus House entryway, exited his vehicle, and retrieved a scoped rifle. He pointed the rifle directly at the security camera twice while giving the finger.

The camera captured Caole appearing to chamber a round before climbing on top of his vehicle. He paced on the roof. He sat. For approximately 10 minutes, he remained on top of the SUV with the rifle.

He then got down, pointed the rifle at the highway several times, and drove away.

The manager of Santa Claus House reviewed the surveillance footage and contacted the North Pole Police Department. According to charging documents, the manager believed Caole was trying to attract attention to himself and was making threats to shoot or kill responding officers, employees, and customers of the Santa Claus House through the surveillance video — and that he would come back.

Three Bears

Caole didn’t return to Santa Claus House. He went somewhere else.

At about 3:30 a.m., the Three Bears Alaska store surveillance camera recorded a maroon SUV entering the store parking lot. Three Bears is a grocery store chain with locations throughout Alaska. The North Pole store sits along the same stretch of the Richardson Highway, not far from Santa Claus House.

Caole reportedly exited his vehicle and paced the parking lot with a rifle for more than an hour.

The surveillance footage from Three Bears shows him walking back and forth, carrying the weapon, for over sixty minutes in the parking lot of a grocery store in the middle of the night.

At around 4:45 a.m., a Three Bears employee called the North Pole Police Department. A man had approached her vehicle with a rifle. She believed he was going to shoot her.

The employee fled the scene, called 911, and warned other employees to stay away.

Pursuit on North Santa Claus Lane

When officers arrived at Three Bears, Caole didn’t surrender.

According to the North Pole Police Department, Caole fled the scene as officers arrived, discarding the rifle in the process. A search of the SUV discovered a shotgun. He had brought two firearms with him that night.

North Pole Police Department officers, with the assistance of Fairbanks police and Alaska State Troopers, later arrested Caole after he approached a trooper vehicle with a large stick, struck it, and then fled on foot toward North Santa Claus Lane.

A man fleeing police with a large stick, bashing a trooper’s vehicle, running down a street named after the patron saint of Christmas. The combined forces of the North Pole Police Department and Alaska State Troopers finally apprehended him.

The Recordings

When investigators began piecing together the case, a family member came forward with information.

According to the North Pole Police Department, a family member of Caole reported that he suffers from “significant mental health issues.” The family member provided three audio recordings of Caole allegedly “making strange and alarming statements while playing video games.”

In the audio clips, Caole allegedly discusses suicide, including “suicide by cop or gaining access to a military base to shoot military members.”

According to court records, Caole was already on release while facing charges for a September 21 arrest for criminal mischief in Palmer for damaging his mother’s home with a hammer. At the time, Caole’s mother told officers he had stopped taking his medication.

Two months later, he showed up at Santa Claus House with a scoped rifle.

Charges and What Comes Next

The legal consequences accumulated quickly.

On Thursday, November 20, a Fairbanks grand jury returned an indictment against Caole, charging him with one count of felony third-degree assault and two counts of second-degree terroristic threatening.

By Friday, November 21, two additional misdemeanor charges were added: disorderly conduct and violation of conditions of release. The violation of conditions of release stems from the September hammer incident — he was supposed to be following certain restrictions while awaiting resolution of that case.

A bail hearing was scheduled for November 24. His arraignment is scheduled for today, November 26.

The Town That Stays Christmas

The Santa Claus House remains open. The giant Santa still stands at its post along the Richardson Highway, welcoming travelers as it has for decades. The reindeer still live in their pen at Antler Academy next door. The shop opens at 10 a.m. daily.

North Pole experiences some of Alaska’s most extreme temperatures — from a record high of 95°F in summer to a record low of -78°F in winter. The giant Santa was built so his arms could move, but not at 50 below zero.

Some visitors show up in July expecting ice and snow, and find 22 hours of daylight at a balmy 80 degrees. Others arrive in the dead of winter, braving temperatures that can stay at 50 below for a week straight.

The Santa Claus House is known for the world’s largest Santa statue and its “Letters from Santa” — a tradition that has persisted for over seven decades, through highway relocations and the deaths of its founders.

Con and Nellie Miller are gone, but their family still runs the operation. Paul Brown, who married the Millers’ granddaughter Carissa, now handles operations. The shop sits only 125 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a town that chose to be something it isn’t — and made it work anyway.

The security cameras at Santa Claus House captured about 10 minutes of a man with a rifle on a November night. The cameras at Three Bears captured over an hour more. The woman who fled her vehicle in the early morning darkness believed she was about to die. Somewhere in the background of all of this, a family had been trying to get help for someone who had stopped taking his medication.

The streets of North Pole are still named after reindeer and Christmas spirits. The lampposts are still painted like candy canes. And when travelers drive down the Richardson Highway past Fairbanks, they still see a giant Santa with his arm raised in greeting — standing where Con Miller put him nearly half a century ago.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

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