South Carolina Residents Terrorized by Clowns

[JamesG]

Creepy Clown Sightings in South Carolina Cause a Frenzy
by Katie Rogers
8/30/16


At the edge of dark, dark woods in South Carolina, children have been telling adults that a group of clowns have been trying to lure them into the cluster of trees. They say the clowns live deep in the woods, near a house by a pond.

This tale sounds like a mishmash of newspaper clippings and pages ripped from Stephen King novels, but these are actually details taken from a report filed by the sheriff’s office in Greenville County, S.C., last week, after several residents at an apartment complex there said that people in clown makeup had been terrorizing both children and adults.

Several children said that clowns were offering them money to follow them into the woods, close to the house by the pond. (The police say they have found no evidence of clown paraphernalia at the house.)





A woman walking home late one night said she had seen a “large-figured” clown waving at her from under a streetlight, the police said. (She waved back.) And another woman said her son had heard clanging chains and a banging noise at his front door. In these cases, people who reported clown sightings refused to give their names to the police.

The police don’t know whether the stories are coming from the imaginations of children or something sinister is afoot, but panicked residents seemed to be taking the law into their own hands: The Greenville sheriff’s office investigated reports that residents of the apartment complex may have fired shots in the direction of the wooded area.





Master Deputy Sheriff Ryan Flood said Tuesday that the authorities had not confirmed any of these sightings but said that extra deputies were patrolling the apartment complex. Property managers were also distributing fliers that warn children against walking in the woods alone at night.

And the calls to the police continue: On Monday, a child at a different complex phoned the police to report another clown sighting.

The pranksters, viral marketers or criminals may be taking advantage of a cultural fear of clowns, with examples including Stephen King’s It, and John Wayne Gacy, a serial killer who dressed as a clown.








But Steven Schlozman, a child psychiatrist who teaches a course on the psychology of horror films at Harvard University, suggests that something more primal could be at work.

Humans are built to recognize patterns from an early age, and a clown’s exaggerated human features set off a primal warning bell from within our “crocodile brains,” Dr. Schlozman said in an interview on Tuesday.

“It has this kind of capacity to grab you emotionally before it grabs you cognitively,” Dr. Schlozman said. “That’s the key to making something viral online actually: to make people emotionally engaged before they’re intellectually engaged.”





In his years researching the things that scare us, Dr. Schlozman has also uncovered another truism: Horror is almost never about the thing that’s scary. The horror unravels once terrified people respond.

When the locals take their guns out and fire into the woods, it’s not that different from people going with their pitchforks into the woods after Frankenstein’s monster, he said, adding: “It never ends well.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/31/us...enzy.html?_r=0

[mets82]

Arrest those scumbags!!

[Bonniegirl]

If he came to my neighborhood, nobody would even know the difference that he was strange!!! So many colorful characters out and about here in Los Angeles!

[Penny Lane]

I knew clowns were evil!

[JamesG]

Some of the theories people have about this are:


- These are harmless pranksters looking for viral attention.

- It's some sort of marketing campaign as this hasn't been the first one involving clowns in random neighborhoods.

- It's being done to promote the upcoming remake of Stephen King's IT, which I think is odd for some random South Carolina town.

[Torgo]

- It's being done to promote the upcoming remake of Stephen King's IT, which I think is odd for some random South Carolina town.

Yeah, would've made sense if it was in Maine.

Being as there's so many Indie clown themed horror movies getting made could almost be promotion for one of those. Sort of sounds like something out of a found footage movie.

[Torgo]

The police say they have found no evidence of clown paraphernalia at the house

"If we find one red nose, or pair of clown shoes, were calling for backup."

[JamesG]

We Asked Stephen King To Weigh In on the Creepy South Carolina Clown Sightings


While clowns struck some people as creepy before the 1986 publication of Stephen King’s IT, the author’s book about a supernatural being that takes the form of a terrifying clown undoubtedly did not boost positive feelings toward clowns.

Whole generations have grown up associating red noses, oversized shoes and white face paint with otherworldly horror and serial killers. And now, some clowns are playing on people’s fears in South Carolina, where police are investigating sightings of people dressed as clowns wearing scary Halloween masks.

Scary clowns have been reported in a sort of “harlequin triangle” in the Greenville, Greensboro, Winston-Salem section of the Tarheel State. Although there’s nothing illegal in those municipalities about wearing masks or dressing up as a menacing clown, Greenville police have said anyone found terrorizing the public will face arrest.





The Bangor Daily News decided to ask Bangor’s resident clown expert, Stephen King, about why people find clowns scary. If anyone would know, he would.

“When I wrote my novel IT, I set it in Bangor, because it’s a town with a tough and violent history. I chose Pennywise the Clown as the face which the monster originally shows the kiddies because kids love clowns, but they also fear them; clowns with their white faces and red lips are so different and so grotesque compared to ‘normal’ people.

Take a little kid to the circus and show him a clown, he’s more apt to scream with fear than laugh.”



“I suspect it’s a kind of low-level hysteria, like Slender Man, or the so-called Bunny Man, who purportedly lurked in Fairfax County, Virginia, wearing a white hood with long ears and attacking people with a hatchet or an axe,” King said.

“The clown furor will pass, as these things do, but it will come back, because under the right circumstances, clowns really can be terrifying.”





Although King has helped give clowns a bad name, fear of clowns does pre-date IT. The Joker from the Batman comics is a kind of deformed, psychotic clown. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who murdered 33 people in Illinois in the 1970s, had a day job performing as a clown at children’s birthday parties and at fundraisers.

Fear of clowns even has an unofficial Latin name — “coulrophobia,” which, while not listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 listing of mental illnesses, is certainly a real fear for some folks in South Carolina right now, as well as for any 5-year-old that bursts into tears when a circus clown approaches.



“Actor Lon Chaney said, ‘There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.’ Meaning, I suppose, a clown seen outside of its normal milieu, in the circus or at the fair,” King said. “If I saw a clown lurking under a lonely bridge (or peering up at me from a sewer grate, with or without balloons), I’d be scared, too.”

In other words, clowns on the lam are no laughing matter.

http://bangordailynews.com/2016/09/0...arolina-scare/

[Walter White]

Originally Posted by JamesG

We Asked Stephen King To Weigh In on the Creepy South Carolina Clown Sightings


While clowns struck some people as creepy before the 1986 publication of Stephen King’s IT, the author’s book about a supernatural being that takes the form of a terrifying clown undoubtedly did not boost positive feelings toward clowns.

Whole generations have grown up associating red noses, oversized shoes and white face paint with otherworldly horror and serial killers. And now, some clowns are playing on people’s fears in South Carolina, where police are investigating sightings of people dressed as clowns wearing scary Halloween masks.

Scary clowns have been reported in a sort of “harlequin triangle” in the Greenville, Greensboro, Winston-Salem section of the Tarheel State. Although there’s nothing illegal in those municipalities about wearing masks or dressing up as a menacing clown, Greenville police have said anyone found terrorizing the public will face arrest.





The Bangor Daily News decided to ask Bangor’s resident clown expert, Stephen King, about why people find clowns scary. If anyone would know, he would.

“When I wrote my novel IT, I set it in Bangor, because it’s a town with a tough and violent history. I chose Pennywise the Clown as the face which the monster originally shows the kiddies because kids love clowns, but they also fear them; clowns with their white faces and red lips are so different and so grotesque compared to ‘normal’ people.

Take a little kid to the circus and show him a clown, he’s more apt to scream with fear than laugh.”



“I suspect it’s a kind of low-level hysteria, like Slender Man, or the so-called Bunny Man, who purportedly lurked in Fairfax County, Virginia, wearing a white hood with long ears and attacking people with a hatchet or an axe,” King said.

“The clown furor will pass, as these things do, but it will come back, because under the right circumstances, clowns really can be terrifying.”





Although King has helped give clowns a bad name, fear of clowns does pre-date IT. The Joker from the Batman comics is a kind of deformed, psychotic clown. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who murdered 33 people in Illinois in the 1970s, had a day job performing as a clown at children’s birthday parties and at fundraisers.

Fear of clowns even has an unofficial Latin name — “coulrophobia,” which, while not listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 listing of mental illnesses, is certainly a real fear for some folks in South Carolina right now, as well as for any 5-year-old that bursts into tears when a circus clown approaches.



“Actor Lon Chaney said, ‘There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.’ Meaning, I suppose, a clown seen outside of its normal milieu, in the circus or at the fair,” King said. “If I saw a clown lurking under a lonely bridge (or peering up at me from a sewer grate, with or without balloons), I’d be scared, too.”

In other words, clowns on the lam are no laughing matter.

http://bangordailynews.com/2016/09/0...arolina-scare/

I think I'd be scared if I saw anyone peering up at me from a sewer grate, clown or no clown.