If you suffer from Coulrophobia, you might want to stop reading now.
You’ve probably heard it in the news, that a clown, or clowns, plural, is/are lurking in the woods around Greenville, South Carolina, trying to lure children into those same woods. Now there are reports of freaky clowns showing up in other places, too, like Ohio. This whole thing has sociological ramifications; it’s a case of mass hysteria; it’s an urban legend being birthed right before our eyes; it’s people hearing about these clown sightings and then “having” (notice the parenthesis) sightings of their own. Then there are the deliberate hoaxes. Then there’s the new Rob Zombie movie, 31, which is getting set to open—and features killer clowns, so the whole thing could be a publicity stunt. As we learned from the example of John Wayne Gacy, though, no one can afford to take this creepy clown stuff too lightly.
The explanations run the gamut from the mundane to the absurd. It could be a prank, just one dude in a clown suit and too much time on his hands, and the rest of it all the work of human psychology and crowd mentality. At the other pole, the north to the south, or south to the north, whichever, we have Pennywise, or some supernatural agency akin to Pennywise, a razor-toothed monster than feeds off fear and children. So far, if this beastie exists—and again, this is by far the least likely explanation, as it should go without saying—it has only feasted on the one, the fear. No children have been reported eaten as of the writing of this article.
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