Stop clowning around

As our circus-like presidential election season continues, our country appropriately enough has entered into a state of clown hysteria.

To learn more about this phenomenon, I did some creepy clown sighting research. There is a great deal of material.

A Google news search of “clown sightings” yielded more than a hundred thousand recent articles.

Creepy clown sightings are not a new thing. According to Vox, public scares of clowns have been documented including one dating back to May 1981 when Boston-area school administrators received a memo of caution from police after a group of school children reported seeing scary clowns in a black van.

The panic spread to multiple cities that summer. With no adults corroborating the sightings, the phenomenon gained the name “phantom clowns”.

Since then, “phantom clowns” caused scares in various cities in ‘85, ‘91, ‘94, ‘95, 2000, 2008, 2013, 2014, 2015 and earlier this year.

The recent funny business is unique in how widespread it is. It has spread nationwide with the ubiquity of social media playing a key role in that.

It seems to have begun with an early-August incident in Wisconsin when a clown in Green Bay named “Gags the Clown” stood on a corner holding a bunch of black balloons and just looking really creepy.

It turned out to be a marketing stunt for an independent horror short film.

Then around Aug. 20, police began receiving reports in Greenville, South Carolina of clowns trying to lure children into the woods.

Those sightings were never confirmed and things started to die down, then the reports in Greenville picked up again Aug. 29.

With that, the clown hysteria began spreading along the Eastern Seaboard to the middle states, then by late September and early October to the West Coast.

Much of the scare has been driven by threats made on social media, resulting in several school districts including Tuloso—Midway ISD ordering a lockdown due to clown-related scares.

According to Atlasobscura.com, which hosts an interactive map of reported clown sightings and subsequent arrests, the majority of clown sightings have been hoaxes. A few were pranks and the majority do not even involve actual clowns.

In an Oct. 8 write-up, Heavy.com outlines 47 clown-related arrests in 18 states since August. Several of those arrests are for making false reports. Some are for perpetrating hoaxes and issuing threats online.

Some states including South Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Florida and Georgia have a law making it illegal for anyone over the age of 16 to wear a mask concealing their identity. Those are all southern states and nearly all of their codes are worded “mask or hood” ... so you can make not too great a leap about how those got on the books.

There has been one death as a result of all of this. In a report from Pennsylvania, a 29-year-old man stabbed to death a 16-year-old boy with a clown mask sitting on his head, not covering his face.

There have been several reports of people firing warning shots at trespassing clowns. On Oct. 3, there was a clown-sighting-induced riot on the campus of Penn State.

So it turns out, like trespassing, acting like a scary clown can be a dangerous pastime.

With the exception of the states listed above, just wearing a clown mask is not a crime and Jacksboro Police Chief Terry McDaniel said local police have not received any reports of clown sightings.

With two weeks left until Halloween, I hope locally we can continue to rise above this hysteria.