October 30, 2019 • 49 mins
It began in August -- five photographs of what appeared to be a sinister figure dressed as a clown loitering in a Green Bay, Wisconsin parking lot went viral. Eight days later, a local filmmaker admitted this was just an attempt to garner PR for an upcoming indie film... but the clowns kept coming. In the space of just a few months numerous people around the world reported being attacked or stalked by clowns. So what exactly was going on?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:25):
to the show. My name is Matt. Who it's me?
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. It is the most
wonderful time of the year if you're listening to this
episode as it comes out today. Conspiracy Realist, Happy Halloween. Yes,
(00:48):
the spookables are all around you say that like lunchables.
That's what my son calls them. That's a that's a
great name, and it's a little bit I color. It
has a little bit more edge than something being simply spooky. Right,
you've probably heard that spooky Spooby. It's like cute spooky. Yeah,
(01:10):
he's into the real, real deal, legit spookable stuff. I
don't know if I told you guys. I've been watching
like R rated eighties horror movies with my ten year
old daughter. Um, it sounds like a good idea. Yeah, no,
it's fine. It's just like mainly that we watched the
first two Child's playing movies because they're just hilarious. Um,
they're only rated are because of some slightly bad language,
(01:32):
but like she kids at her school used those words
and she knows not to use them and mixed company.
But we've had a really good time. And last night
after she went to bed, I watched My Bloody Valentine.
Have you seen this? It's about a crazed miner in Ontario, Canada,
and it's the most Canadian horror movie I've ever seen
in my life, as in m like Minor Miners, Cole Miners.
(01:56):
And I actually get a conversation with with your wife
a few weeks or a month or so back where
I was thinking, I've got some books that I think
Matt's kid will love, and she the word I think
I told you this, U. She told me I was
worried that maybe because I don't know what kids read,
I was worried that maybe the books would be like
(02:18):
too scary, you know, like scary stories telling the dark.
Probably want to wait a few years on that one
or something or anfigory. But her reply was he already
has so many books. Yeah, certainly does well, let him know,
let him know when when you guys, let me know
when it is appropriate to send him the creepy stuff.
(02:39):
Because I think when we're kids, we all have this
fascination to one degree or another with things that scare us, right,
with things that make our heartbeat race, things that make
us mistake a pile of clothes in the dark for
an evil figure crouching closer to the bed. And one
of the one of the biggest, surprisingly common fears in
(03:02):
the Western world is something called colrophobia. That's a word
for the day that means the fear of clowns. This
is a pretty recent word. It comes about in the
nineteen nineties, but it describes a longstanding, arguably ancient unease
that is doubtlessly familiar to many of our fellow listeners.
(03:22):
Clowns are a little bit different here in the US
because we live in a post gay Cy environment. John
Wayne Gaycy, the notorious infamous serial murderer who also had
had a reputation or alternate identity as a clown. Uh.
This affected the cultural zeitgeist in a number of ways,
(03:46):
and it has consequences. Ripple effects that remain with us today. Matt,
you and I I believe were at was that the
Museum of Crime or Murder in d C. And actual
Poe Go the clown Suits, which was his alter ego.
Oh and at the Museum of Death and in Hollywood
they have several of his paintings that he did of
(04:09):
himself as a clown, and his shoes are there as well.
And this, this calls to mind another episode we did
on the controversy surrounding serial killer memorabilia and art, which
you know, I listened back to a while ago, and it's,
I gotta say, objectively, not that bad, not bad at all.
I I can't remember who I heard say this, Gosh,
(04:30):
and this is this. I think it's an interesting point though,
the idea that killers should not be publicized, their identity
should not be publicized, because then it allows them to
profit off of their crimes. I think that's an interesting concept,
especially in cases of terrorism where someone simply wants to
be a martyr for a cause. But but back to clowns.
(04:54):
So because at least partially because of John Wayne Gacy,
but probably because of some other longstanding hardwired psychological quirks
in our brains. Uh. People from all walks of life,
especially here in these United States, are pretty comfortable nowadays
being upfront and transparent about their fear of or distrust
(05:15):
of clowns. People have no problem saying I don't like clowns,
I'm not going to see it, etcetera, etcetera. This is
a cultural phenomenon. It's not necessarily a global attitude. And
a lot of other countries clowns are these beloved figures
of fun and festivity. Like in Central America, you know,
the parade is really popping when a gang of clowns
(05:37):
comes in. I don't know what the group name for
clowns is. You know how there's like a parliament of
owls and unkindness of ravens, murder of clowns, a murder
of clowns, a car of clowns, a honk of clowns,
like murder of clowns. So here in the US, the
fear of clowns eventually, not too long ago, reached a
(05:57):
boiling point. It became a national and then international panic.
Here are the facts. Our story today starts on August one,
in Green Bay, Wisconsin, five photos of what appeared to
be a creepy clown surfaced. This clown was wandering, literally
(06:20):
wandering around a parking lot under a bridge somewhere in
Green Bay, and this went viral thanks to the Internet.
We can only conjecture that it must have been a
slow news cycle because the pictures got national media attention.
Fox News was all over at USA, Today was all
over it. Eventually, The New York Times was writing about this.
(06:43):
Shortly after August five. A Facebook page pertaining to the
pictures are purporting to pertain to the pictures surface and
they said the name of this clown is Gags g
A G S. Yeah. Well yeah, And it wasn't just
any clown. It looked to be someone who was purposefully
(07:06):
trying to be creepy, right because the character, this this
person whoever, was wearing all of this makeup and everything.
It wasn't like your cutie clown makeup. There were some
there's an edge to it that appeared to be sinister
in some way. And I believe it was what the
character was holding balloons. Yeah, nah, not not your vibe. Hunh.
(07:32):
That's not a lick you're going for. Yeah, it's it's
a very good point that it was purposefully done. Up
like a scary Halloween clown, you know what I mean,
not like a fun welcome to McDonald's clown, which I
would argue was also still pretty creepy. Here's what happens.
Numerous pundits speculate on this story, and because there is
(07:55):
not very much in the way of solid factual well
reporting here, there aren't. There's just not much to the
story other than these five creepy pictures and a Facebook page.
At this point, uh, pundits are going wild. They're saying,
what's going on here? Is this a childish prank? Is
this alone unhinged lunatic? Is this part of something larger?
(08:21):
We'll get back to that, but first, here's Carol with
the weather that kind of stuff. Or is it an
attempt at guerrilla marketing? And it turned out it turned
out that our story gets sewed up in a in
a pretty I would say, relieving way. So eight days later,
a filmmaker by the name of Adam Krauss actually came
forward and revealed that this was nothing but a marketing stunt.
(08:44):
He and his crew were actually filming a short piece
called Gags the Clown and Bloody Disgusting, which is a
horror blog UM quoted Krauss as saying, we filmed the
short and secret and at least photos of the sightings
quote quote, because I wanted to convince my down that
there was a creepy clown wandering the streets late at night.
We released the pictures August first, sixteen, and it blew
(09:05):
up from that point on. It went viral very quickly.
I announced that it was just a short film eight
days later, but that didn't stop the craze from kicking
into high gear. Um, what do you guys think? Is
this a form of terrorism? Like? Is it should there
be some burden of responsibility on individual like this that
that is doing something that is legitimately terrorizing a town.
(09:26):
There's not a way to make it illegal. Yeah, I
was gonna say. According to Captain Kevin Warwick, w A
R y c. H of the Green Bay Police Department
where this was first occurring, where gags made the appearances
and the Facebook group started everything, he said, this person
is not breaking the law. He can walk in a
clown costume anywhere he wants. He can't call it like
(09:48):
menacing or something like that. Like, what what point does
something become menacing? That's a crime if someone's loitering, or
if someone is giving the reasonable uh, if there's reasonable
suspicion or that they would be about to commit a crime, right, so,
and that's tough to prosecute one. I don't want to
(10:08):
lose this part though, because Krauss did say this is
for my film after it whatever. Yeah, yeah, And it's
just like every time we see a red meat headline
in the news, only two see it corrected on like
page thirty two of the next issue of the paper,
(10:30):
or thrown in at the very end and find print
on a website for a broadcast news show. People just
don't care about their attractions and there we go. All's well,
that ends well, right. This wasn't the first time viral
marketing had fooled unsuspecting denizens of the Internet, where the
(10:50):
media shout out to Blair Witch Project, which I think
is one of the most famous recent examples. But those
clown sightings not stop in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In fact,
they escalated kind of the way that um, you know,
one of like one of my favorite songs in the
Hall of Mountain King escalates to to to And things
(11:13):
really did get weirder after that, because it inspired. Not
it inspired people, but it also made those creative juices
flow about what could I do that would be even creepier.
So we're going to pause here for our usual ad break. Uh,
this one is a little different today because Matt, you
and I were thinking about this. We're talking about this
(11:36):
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k e e p s dot com slash conspiracy. Now
let's get back to those clowns. Here's where it gets crazy.
That's right. Clowns sightings began to pop up all around
the country, and they were unrelated to the short film
(14:32):
from Wisconsin. The next widely reported creepy clown sightings occurred
in Greenville, South Carolina. Yeah, in August sixteen, there was
an alleged clown sighting in Greenville at the Fleetwood Manor
apartment complex and I was originally reading this, I was
really wishing it was at the Fleetwood Mac concert. That
would have been cool. Um, But no, in this complex,
(14:53):
children reported witnessing clowns or a group of clowns, a
murder of clowns, so that we decided on a guy
goal of clowns um attempting to whisper or talk to
the children. Now, that's got to be not cool, right,
that's come on, that's yeah, it's it's so it's so
strange because at this point the um, the image and
(15:17):
the role of a clown has been relegated to things
like children's parties. Still that that's where you will maybe
find a clown, or maybe at the circus or the rodeos,
maybe a swingers club by basement, but wherever it is.
The culturally, we've like flipped the script where now I
think people first and foremost think of clowns as creepy
(15:38):
demon child eaters as opposed to you know, friendly uh
child performers. We do. But again, like, if you you
can go online right now and hire a clown to
do a children's party, that is one of the main
things you can do. So if there are clowns out
in let's say an apartment complex somewhere talking to kids.
If you're not aware of some kids party that's happening,
(16:01):
maybe that's all it is. I'm just saying it's it's
it's tough because it also creeps me out personally, and
I wouldn't like it if my son was there and
saw some clowns. They were trying to whisper to him. Um. Well,
but here's the thing of what they were whispering. And
the children told their parts of the clowns, who, by
the way, we were set up with these flashing green
(16:23):
laser lights. Um. They told the children that they lived
in an abandoned house in the woods near a small lake.
Small talk conversation. Yeah, see, that's where it becomes terrifying.
And the police did investigate, and they did find a
trail in the nearby woods, and the trail did lead
(16:44):
to a house. There was a small lake by the house.
But at this point, no evidence of clowns nor any
evidence of clowns paraphernalia was ever found. So there wasn't
even a bottle of seltzer or anything that is so
funny to be. No evidence of clowns was discovered or paraphernal.
I love the notion of clown paraphernal, Like there's one
(17:07):
size sixteen shoe just just on the trail. And this
is strange because it's we we have to think of
the children and the complex, and then we have to
think of their families too. What do you do when
the police throw up their hands and say, well, um,
we we couldn't find any clowns or clown paraphernalia, you know,
(17:29):
but we will be patrolling. I guess for the next
couple of days. We'll keep an eye out. South Carolina, though,
is far from a unique case. Over the next few months,
reports of creepy, suspicious sketch clowns popped up in every
single US state and Puerto Rico as well. Uh. The
(17:49):
Guardian was following this story and they had some great
articles on this. Uh. They describe it thusly. They say
clowns began to terrorize children and sometimes attack people. While commentating,
you spoke of panic and hysteria. In Pennsylvania, teenager was
reported to have been murdered by someone in a clown mask,
although police later said it was the victim who had
(18:10):
the mask. So still in this time of panic, just
having a clown mask in play during the crime is
enough for this to be lumped into lumped into the
same phenomenon of reporting. Yeah, and you can see here
where if something goes viral enough anywhere in the world
and it gets shared enough on let's say international social
(18:34):
media or internationally accessible social media, it's kind of what
we were talking about. You can see where people will think, oh, well,
how do I make a post or something, or how
do I make something happen in my local town that's
also gonna get me or this famous um through my post,
because it really did go fully international after that. Yeah,
(18:55):
that's the thing. The spark was lit. All in all,
people in eighteen different countries other than the US started
reporting clown sightings over the course of sen and these
were you know, it's weird because we know the panic
in the US has a discreete start date it's August first,
(19:16):
but we also see some um preceding attacks. Are similar
instances in Europe. In twenty there was a creepy clown
sited in Northampton, England's and these these sightings occurred in
the town for two months September and October. They were
(19:36):
also the work of filmmakers. But the the stuff that
we see happening after the US panic catches fire internationally. Uh,
this stuff is genuine like crime in Ontario and Canada,
people dressed up as clowns and we're chasing children when
they got dismissed from school. And then someone dressed as
(20:00):
a clown was chasing down a group of people in
Chile with a baseball bat. People started using clown makeup
and clown mask as a go to disguise in their
criminal endeavors. Yeah, I was reading a story about in
Norway people were reporting that, uh, they would see weapon
(20:22):
wheel wielding clowns chasing cars and stuff. And apparently it
really did catch on in a couple of places in Scandinavia. Yeah,
in Sweden and October twelfth, there was someone dressed as
a clown who stabbed teenage boy with a knife, and
there were some other stabbings across the world. Luckily these
(20:42):
appeared to be isolated incidents. Here's the thing that the
international community reacted pretty strongly to this. There was a
protest held by professional clowns in a real Grande do
soul in Brazil. And here I believe it's time for
(21:02):
US to make a note, in the interest of fairness,
we have to say hashtag not all clowns. There's a
huge industry of people who work professionally as clowns, you know,
in circus trained, academy, delte trained. And these folks have
no interest in committing crimes, you know what I mean.
(21:23):
And they certainly don't want to be saddled with the
stereotype that they want to say. You know, it's a
job for them. They're they're not going to dress up
and wait in the woods to clown at children in
the dark. That would be like us waiting waiting into
the woods. And then podcast people hopefully less scary, way
more nerdy. Yeah, I mean, no, you're right, it's a
(21:45):
it's a profession and in a lot of times, in
a lot of cases of passion for for the the individual. Um.
And then there's a quote here from this article in
spot nik news dot com and it says, this trend
has a really unpleasant impact on us as professionals of
this art. I and my colleagues in this state appear
at various events, for example, at birthday celebrations and when
we go out in the street or arrive at these celebrations.
(22:07):
People are looking at us strangely. Um, and you can
imagine how that would affect you. And it goes on
to say this has started to affect me. Customers are
canceling work, replacing clowns with something else. This is one
of the oldest professions in the world. Our goal is
to bring joy to everybody, from babies to one year olds.
And this this is only one example of a larger
(22:32):
global response. On October twelfth, the Russian embassy in London
put out an official warning to u UK citizens and
Russians alike because of the clowns scare. So a country
state department said, Okay, if you're here in London, watch
out for clowns. Yeah, it's um, I'm trying to think
(22:55):
of when it's akin to like an orange alert watch
out for mog kind of thing, a clown watch the
terror watch that we have, like how many Hanks is it?
You know, watch out? London is a four honk city,
so out of context that that probably sounds very strange,
(23:16):
but it's it's a good question, you know. This reached
state actor level, and then also private industry responded. There
were shops in New Zealand that stopped selling clown costumes
or banned it. Many schools banned clown costumes or just
clown like stuff too. Right, Yeah, and this this also
(23:37):
remember this is so this occurs hand in hand with
public recognition of the music fan base. Right. The insane
clown posse fans known as juggalos, who also, by the way,
did not did not have a big part in this,
because again, hashtag not all clowns. So in October, though,
(24:02):
this starts to also hit one of the most popular
clowns in the United States, Ronald McDonald, is sent to
the bench by his fast food owners because the heat
got to him. He had to get a low profile.
Was too hot for ron so he left the public
eye for a little while because the last thing McDonald's
(24:23):
wanted to be associated with was, you know, being bad
in any way for children, other than, of course, the
food at McDonald's. Hey, they've changed their game a little bit.
Come on, and those fries still, man, they're great and honestly,
as weird as it sounds, those chicken mcnugs, I'm telling you.
(24:45):
Do you think it's nostalgia? No, it's not. It's not.
Part of you is still there now. I think they
up their game or something because we we were very
reticent to get writer. I'm not promoting McDonald's right now,
I promise you. I'm just saying we I tried one
of their chicken McNuggets to that I did remember as
a child not enjoying. But then, uh, they're much better now.
(25:07):
That's all I'm saying. Well, you know what, Matt, maybe
I should give it. I should give it another shot.
I read a really interesting essay about the shape of
those mc nuggets. They're you know, they're they're specific shapes
and how they're created. But I'll still try umph Also,
Target pulled clown mask from all their stores and from
their website, and people started to look at this in
(25:31):
a critical analytical way. They said, Okay, these were reports
don't actually have much in common. They're occurring in various
parts of the world that are very different from one another.
They're often not every time, but often it appears there's
no real law that was broken. It's just someone being creepy.
(25:52):
In most cases amounted to something like, hey, there's a
suspicious person or group of people dressed in a way
that may be uncomfortable. And another common trope was that
these clowns appeared to be as you said, no menacing people,
and in many cases, uh, they were reported as giving chase,
although sometimes the victims would change their story and say,
(26:15):
I thought this clown was gonna chase me. It was
just standing there. But there's a ton of YouTube prank
videos creepy clowns chasing people like a lot, and those
are for humor right there, for humor, but at the
time the person featured has to sign a release afterwards
or something like that to be featured, and several of
(26:38):
those the faces of the victims are out, so they
didn't get permission. I would just say that that's that
strikes me as illegal. That is a form of terrorism
in a way, if you're going to scare someone out
of their wits by dressing up as creepily as you can,
setting up a camera and then chasing somebody while they're
(26:59):
in year for their life. And some people can see
that as humorous, but we have to remember those folks
who were being chased, or those folks would be menaced,
are genuinely frightened. You know, they're terrified. And I would say,
if you find that funny, maybe do some reevaluating. That's all, well,
we can't emphasize this enough. There really were people dressed
(27:21):
as clowns, and they really were stalking and in some
cases attacking folks across the planet. By October, a little
more than three years ago, exactly now, as you're listening
to this news, pundits were we're so deep in this
story that they started reporting an alleged to get this
(27:44):
clown lead purge or large scale attacks set to take
place on Halloween. What's interesting about this kind of news
story is that it doesn't It really doesn't take much
for something to be alleged. It could be an anonymous
tip to the news station that has no follow up,
(28:06):
so we could literally be anyone calling it's incredibly unethical.
But it could also be someone from the news station
who was it was like, we need some hot for Saturday.
So luckily, there were no documented wide scale purges. However,
on October one, Halloween, a family in you guessed it, Florida,
(28:33):
was attacked in mass by a group of people dressed
as clowns wearing clown mask They were attacked by about
twenty people. That's insane. Allegedly, they were checking their car
right when this happened was like eleven pm at night.
Then all of a sudden, um, yea, these people show up. Yeah. Look,
(28:58):
you know we all have well have a pretty good
fortitude stats. You know, if we're D and D characters,
we don't scare particularly easy. But even for us, getting
run up on by twenty people dressed his clowns, that's
a lot. That's that's a lot, especially if they are uh,
(29:18):
if they are armed blades or with you know, blunt
objects or god forbid guns. Well, yeah, I mean one
of the one of the people. Okay, so let's just
talk about that. It was a It was a group
of people in the car. I think it was five
people in a car, maybe more. Um, and they like
hit something in the car right there in their truck.
(29:40):
They're in this big truck. They hit something in your truck.
They got out and check out what it was they got.
As they exited their vehicle to check on everything, they
get attacked by a bunch of people wearing masks, some
of them clown mass some of them appeared to be
what they would call purge masks. One of the victims
got stabbed in the head and another one got hit
in the head with a hockey stick. Um, it was
a real brutal attack. That is, this is just an
(30:02):
awful thing that occurred. Um. And apparently one of the
one of the victims, one of the people who got attacked,
recognized some team that was a part of the group,
right yet. Jeff Brown, who was one of the victims,
said that the group of clowns had a knife, hockey sticks, clubs, bats,
and he was He said they were probably just looking
(30:24):
for anyone who would get stopped at the light. And
he said they was able to lift one of the
masks of a team off in the struggle and recognize
the kid as a kid from his neighborhood. As far
as we know, no arrest were made at least at
the time of those stories reporting, so we don't know
(30:44):
what happened with that. But we bring this example here
to emphasize that unlikes the Unlike some other outbreaks of
hysteria or global panics, there were genuine crimes happening here.
There were people can biring to dress up as clowns
and attack maybe random people, maybe people that they had
(31:06):
their eye on for one reason or another. So these
sightings were real, but what exactly was happening will attempt
to answer that after a word from our sponsors. Okay,
so was the I'll say it, I'll take the bullet
(31:26):
on this one. Was this actually some sort of I
can't believe I'm saying this clown conspiracy to upset the
status quo in some way through random acts of violence? Yeah,
like a Project Mayhem type thing, but with clowns. Uh
maybe yeah? Maybe? I mean, was this perhaps some sort
(31:52):
of Juggalo esque protests? Again, as far as we know,
the Juggalo community was not involved with this panic, But
you know what I mean, Like, was it some sort
of thing that got spun into a different narrative by
the media, or was this just another example of mass
hysteria like the Satanic panic? You know, Like, as we
(32:13):
learned in our recent True True Detective episode, which is
still my either my least or my most favorite title recently,
as we learned there there's often more to the story
than we see reported in the news. To answer a
question about this phenomenon, it's actually best for us to
(32:34):
begin from a folklore angle. There's a guy named Benjamin
Radford go Benz who is the author of a book
called Bad Clowns, and in his work Radford bus some
myths that we have about clowning in the modern day. Specifically,
he writes, it is misleading to ask when clowns turned bad,
they were never really good, because although the word colophobia
(32:58):
comes about in the Indies, the thing is clowns have
been around forever in myth and folklore, in unrelated cultures.
People who had never met before they had things like clowns.
But they were often antagonistic. They were deceivers, they were tricksters.
They were associated with entering the edge of the edge
(33:21):
of civilization, speaking hidden truths. They were associated with infernal
powers at times. And let's also consider Alex Pentlands, the
author of a book called Social Physics, how good ideas spread.
He says, the clown phenomenon is in some ways just
the standard craze. He compares it actually to planking. You
(33:43):
guys remember planking. Yeah, that's when you lay flat on
a thing. Yeah. And I walked in our in our
old office one time, I walked into our wreck room,
and I learned about planking because as least as an exercise,
because I saw about fifteen or more of our colleagues,
(34:04):
not speaking, just laying on the floor propped on their elbows,
and I didn't know what to do. But I stood
there for a second. No one said anything, no one
looked at me, and so I decided the most prudent
move was to walk out backwards, and that's what I did.
Definitely keep an eye on everyone. There was a it
was a it was a like a flash mob type
phenomenon for a while wh people would like plank on
(34:26):
different things, like a cabinet or something and you'd walk in.
There was an episode of the Office about it. M hmm,
that's that's all I got on planking. Well, yeah, but
it just speaks to a larger thing. When it's kind
of what I was saying earlier, When there's a trending
phenomena like that, it is in our nature to want
to be a part of the group and you know,
(34:49):
glom onto it in a way or show your uniqueness
by doing this thing in a way that only you
would do or could do. Um. And you know, we're
we're just basically comparing that. It's kind of what Pentland
is doing here, um saying that this is what the
clown thing was. It was another uh ice bucket challenge,
(35:09):
right right. But he also said this fad. This clown
sighting craze also hit upon a deeply buried cultural meme.
He said, children are scared of clowns, so this gives
it more virility than another thing like an ice bucket challenge.
Uh not. You know, more people are probably terrified of
(35:31):
clowns than are of ice buckets. Did you hear that
the ice bucket challenge is a conspiracy theory about it?
I did? Yeah, yeah, yeah, what is it? There's just
thing I think it was just this one kind of
fringe e writer selling Owens on the World that Daily,
accusing it of being some sort of satanic ritual tricking
people into I don't know exactly what the logic is there,
but you can you can. You can call anything. Any
(35:52):
of these viral phenomenon could be construed as some sort
of mass ritual, right, I mean, that's sort of what
it is. As people glom onto it and they recreated,
like the flash mobs versus the creepy clowns versus the planking,
any of that kind of stuff you could look at
as as some sort of weird um collective unconscience kind
(36:12):
of like dance. Right. I don't know, anything can be
a ritual and anything could be a Satanic ritual, you know,
if you have the right attitude about it. Isn't magic
all about intentionality in theory, it's a call back to
uh do what what was that our magic debate harmon Town.
So with with this in mind, when we look at
(36:35):
it from a folklore perspective, we see another salient point.
Also from the Guardian again they covered this like four
or five different times, and they said they they also
attributed part of the panic to the ways in which
it was described by print and broadcast media. They said,
(36:57):
consider how charged the vocabulary of the reply worts will
be when you hear this on your evening news. They
don't say someone saw a clown. They refer to these
things as sightings in the same way you would say
someone cited, uh, there was a UFO sighting or a
lock Neest sighting, And it mythologizes these human beings when
(37:18):
really they're just people in costumes. Yeah, and they can
do it wherever they want as long as they're not
hurting anybody. And then the idea, Okay, so the mirror
over in the UK uh reports this. You know, in
the early days of the panic, spreading to the United Kingdom.
They say, quote uh in one of their headlines creepy
(37:41):
clowns approach girls walking to school and terrifying UK craze. Uh.
This was this was um variants of the first sentence
in the article, because the first sentence in the article
in the Mirror says to schoolgirls were approached by two
creepy clowns yesterday as the terror of fine American craze
(38:01):
hits the UK. It's true that it was already quote
American craze, but the headline calling it a terrifying UK
craze wasn't true because there had only been a couple
of incidents. How many incidents make a craze? Right? Like
when when does a hill become a mountain? Kind of question?
(38:22):
Right after it's a mole hill? Right, go straight from
mohill to mountain? And what's the size of a heap?
You know what I mean? Yeah, there's linguistic ambiguity there,
But it also could be kind of a self fulfilling
prophecy to call this thing a craze before it happens.
I mean, you know if Paul Mission Control Decan and
I go to Applebee's after this and then we start
(38:45):
calling it the new Applebee's craze that's sweeping the nation.
Would more people be likely to go because they want to?
To your point, Matt, be part of the conversation. I
think you're right. Um, I think you might have to
add in a few more people. If you've got like
five posts that said the new Applebee's craze, I think
(39:07):
you've got something going there. Not an advertisement for Applebee's, right,
McDonald's nor McDonald's. But in this case, what we see, um,
what we see very quickly is the clown stuff itself
is exactly as we described. It's sort of a viral
(39:28):
phenomenon that, to your point, in old people glommed onto,
sometimes to assist in the execution of crimes they were
already probably planning to do. In other cases it was
people who said, we want to prank some folks. Um.
But when we look into the psychological causes, the socio
political environment and soil in which this thing existing grows,
(39:53):
then we see there's more to the story. We've talked
about this before, and this is probably just my own
crippling cynicism. But anytime I see something that is not
terrible go viral, I assume that it's being pushed to
cover up some real horrific, terrible thing happening. I don't
think you're far off, Ben, you do think, no, No,
(40:16):
Although it is hard to predict virality, I will say
that you know the intentions it maybe that, but it's
like no one can guarantee a viral smash. Otherwise you
know they'd be hiring those people left and right. So
I've got a theory about this whole thing that i
want to present to you guys, all right, late on me. Okay,
here are the facts of Matt's theory. This h called
(40:39):
the section Matt's Facts. Yes, sure, this is These are
Mats facts. So we've got the gags, the clown incident
that occurs when is it October? Is it October or
is it September? Though, right, the first one occurs in
Green Bay, Wisconsin, August first, so that's August, early August twenties.
(41:02):
Then almost a year later, a year and a month later,
the remake of Stephen King's It comes out, a major
Hollywood production with massive marketing arms behind it. Okay, it
would be beneficial for the people making it to re
(41:25):
ignite people's fear of clowns. Well, you know about the
phony clown protest, right, The phony clown protest was, according
to Vanity Fair, a clown rally against the IT movie,
was actually a publicity stunt for the IT movie. Um,
the new adaptations were probably been causing some problems for
(41:45):
real life clowns, whose businesses have allegedly suffered as a
whole new generation of kids sour to bozos of the world,
So it was hardly surprised when clowns planned to gather
and rally against It in New York. It turns out, however,
that the rally was a fake, nothing more than a
public to the stunt in promotion of the very movie
it claimed to be raging against. See. So this is
what I'm saying, you guys. What if this entire thing,
(42:09):
starting with gags and the short film or whatever was occurring,
there was all a way to get clowns back into
our zeite guys, immediately the forefront of our minds, so
that it would come out and we would have to
go see it. That's interesting. I don't I'm honest. I'm
gonna be honest with you, man, I don't know if
I'm a percent on board with it, because it feels
like when real acts of violence started to occur, the
(42:33):
company or studio involved would want to distance themselves. Well,
that's why they never admitted to doing it. That's why
they never admitted to starting the whole craze. See, okay,
so there on, we didn't start the fire. Yeah, they went, oh,
somebody got stabbed in the head. We're out, and we're out.
Nobody say anything until the trailer releases. I mean maybe
(42:54):
maybe perhaps I will say, though, because I knew I'm
sounding a big conspiratorial here um, and it is just
my opinion, I will say that now more than ever,
to steal the line from Fox News. Yet again, it
is now more than ever. It is surprisingly easy for
some people to influence virility and to determine which stories
(43:18):
are seeing. If if anyone listening believes that Mark Zuckerberg
cannot literally ping someone at Facebook and say kill this
story and promote this one, then you are being offensively
naive like that. Because there's so few people who control
the faucets of information at this point, then clearly it
(43:40):
could happen. I'm not saying it does. I'm not saying
this is a case in which that occurs, but I'm
saying the reality is there, and to think otherwise is
at this point to be willfully ignorant of the reality. Yeah. No,
I would agree. There are a lot of levers to
be pulled within the realms of social media and places
where you can those things and then have them become viral.
(44:02):
Or what if? What if? Mett? What if? What if
you're right and you're you're even more right than the
original theory? What if this all dating back to arguably
was just one long viral lead up to the Yaching
Phoenix Joker philm Or maybe there's clown film collusion. Maybe
(44:25):
all of the studios that have on their slates of
content clown content, they've all gotten together to perpetrate this
conspiracy against the American public CFC Clown Film Collusion. Yeah, yeah,
I think it was Stephen King himself in the gags,
the clown costume. Now he doesn't leave his manner, and
(44:48):
then it was Joe Hill himself. And it's tough to
tell the difference. You know, if you just saw those
guys walking down the street, Joe Hill does look like
a young Stephen King I've never seen physically. Yeah, very
very much. That's unfortunate. Stephen King is a funny looking dude.
Always what you don't think? So? What a handsome devil?
(45:08):
Stephen King? You're kidding me? I don't, I don't. I
think Stephen King himself would acknoledge that he's a funny
looking dude. Have you seen creep Show? Or he plays
the weird guy? Yeah, but but I think he tells
great stories. Shout out to rob By the way, that's right,
shout out I just got a free trial to shut her.
(45:29):
Oh it's great, just so I can watch. Um, so
I can watch, and I'm very much excited to do so.
Report back if you can't listen when you think when
you see it. This leads us to a question that
we can't really answered today, A couple of questions, and
one of them is this, does the access to ubiquitous
information give us more of an ability to think critically
(45:51):
about things? Or does it give us more of an
opportunity to spread and transmit our own fears to other populations? Well,
it's both, right, depends on how you use it and
how you handle it, how you comport yourself in this
our internet age. And but which of those two I agree?
Which of those two. Uh, do we see happening more often? Yeah? Unfortunately,
(46:15):
I think it's the latter. Right, Yeah, I'm right there
with you. But we still have hope for the future, right. Uh.
And we know the outbreaks of widespread public hysteria are
surprisingly common in the historical record. We've got this great
book about it that I love around sometimes. And if
this odd story about the Great clown Panic of sixteen
(46:36):
is the Guardian called it, If this odd story leads
us to anything, it's one crucial question. What new panic
looms on the horizon. Is it going to be something
about birds? I'm sorry, no, I just had to put
that in there. Are you ever seen the movie Bird Demmick.
(46:56):
It's like a really bad B movie about like a
bird panic situation. It's my personal hell um. But unfortunately
it's so laughably made that it's not scary or anything.
But yeah, I know, birds are birds are bad news. Guys. Well,
here here's the deal. Uh. You may be listening to
this right now on the eve of Halloween or the
(47:20):
eve of Hallows All Hallows eve. Um, And maybe you've
got your headphones in and you're walking around. Maybe it's
a nighttime, maybe your trick or treating. I don't know
if any of you are actually trick or treating while
listening to this, but it's so lame that people that
people look as scance at you. If you do that
as an adult, it's like, come on, manh yeah, I
have a kid, so I get to pass. I guess.
But I question though, if Halloween is all Hallow's Eve,
(47:44):
is the next day all Hallows Day? Oh yeah, logically,
but no one really talks about that. It's not as fun, right, yeah. Also,
we want to hear from you. Do you think there
was anything more to this story? Do you think it
was just a public outbreak of panic? Is it Was
it more like an escape hatch or event for underlying
(48:07):
anxieties and fears? And if so, what were those anxieties
and fears? Also, this is a personal note. Don't feel obligated,
but if you have a kick ass Halloween costume, we'd
love to see it, go ahead and feel free to
post it on our community page. Here's where it gets crazy.
Some of the best mods in the business or posted
(48:28):
to us on Instagram or Twitter. We are some derivation
of conspiracy stuff on all three of those conspiracy stuff
show on on Instagram. If you want to call us
while you're out doing whatever it is you are doing
on all Hello's Eve, that could be fun. Uh, give
us a call. We are one eight three three std
(48:49):
w y t K. Leave a message and we will
hear it. Um. If you don't want to do any
of that stuff and you have something you want to
talk to us about or say, send us a good
old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com.
(49:23):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of i Heeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:25):
to the show. My name is Matt. Who it's me?
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. It is the most
wonderful time of the year if you're listening to this
episode as it comes out today. Conspiracy Realist, Happy Halloween. Yes,
(00:48):
the spookables are all around you say that like lunchables.
That's what my son calls them. That's a that's a
great name, and it's a little bit I color. It
has a little bit more edge than something being simply spooky. Right,
you've probably heard that spooky Spooby. It's like cute spooky. Yeah,
(01:10):
he's into the real, real deal, legit spookable stuff. I
don't know if I told you guys. I've been watching
like R rated eighties horror movies with my ten year
old daughter. Um, it sounds like a good idea. Yeah, no,
it's fine. It's just like mainly that we watched the
first two Child's playing movies because they're just hilarious. Um,
they're only rated are because of some slightly bad language,
(01:32):
but like she kids at her school used those words
and she knows not to use them and mixed company.
But we've had a really good time. And last night
after she went to bed, I watched My Bloody Valentine.
Have you seen this? It's about a crazed miner in Ontario, Canada,
and it's the most Canadian horror movie I've ever seen
in my life, as in m like Minor Miners, Cole Miners.
(01:56):
And I actually get a conversation with with your wife
a few weeks or a month or so back where
I was thinking, I've got some books that I think
Matt's kid will love, and she the word I think
I told you this, U. She told me I was
worried that maybe because I don't know what kids read,
I was worried that maybe the books would be like
(02:18):
too scary, you know, like scary stories telling the dark.
Probably want to wait a few years on that one
or something or anfigory. But her reply was he already
has so many books. Yeah, certainly does well, let him know,
let him know when when you guys, let me know
when it is appropriate to send him the creepy stuff.
(02:39):
Because I think when we're kids, we all have this
fascination to one degree or another with things that scare us, right,
with things that make our heartbeat race, things that make
us mistake a pile of clothes in the dark for
an evil figure crouching closer to the bed. And one
of the one of the biggest, surprisingly common fears in
(03:02):
the Western world is something called colrophobia. That's a word
for the day that means the fear of clowns. This
is a pretty recent word. It comes about in the
nineteen nineties, but it describes a longstanding, arguably ancient unease
that is doubtlessly familiar to many of our fellow listeners.
(03:22):
Clowns are a little bit different here in the US
because we live in a post gay Cy environment. John
Wayne Gaycy, the notorious infamous serial murderer who also had
had a reputation or alternate identity as a clown. Uh.
This affected the cultural zeitgeist in a number of ways,
(03:46):
and it has consequences. Ripple effects that remain with us today. Matt,
you and I I believe were at was that the
Museum of Crime or Murder in d C. And actual
Poe Go the clown Suits, which was his alter ego.
Oh and at the Museum of Death and in Hollywood
they have several of his paintings that he did of
(04:09):
himself as a clown, and his shoes are there as well.
And this, this calls to mind another episode we did
on the controversy surrounding serial killer memorabilia and art, which
you know, I listened back to a while ago, and it's,
I gotta say, objectively, not that bad, not bad at all.
I I can't remember who I heard say this, Gosh,
(04:30):
and this is this. I think it's an interesting point though,
the idea that killers should not be publicized, their identity
should not be publicized, because then it allows them to
profit off of their crimes. I think that's an interesting concept,
especially in cases of terrorism where someone simply wants to
be a martyr for a cause. But but back to clowns.
(04:54):
So because at least partially because of John Wayne Gacy,
but probably because of some other longstanding hardwired psychological quirks
in our brains. Uh. People from all walks of life,
especially here in these United States, are pretty comfortable nowadays
being upfront and transparent about their fear of or distrust
(05:15):
of clowns. People have no problem saying I don't like clowns,
I'm not going to see it, etcetera, etcetera. This is
a cultural phenomenon. It's not necessarily a global attitude. And
a lot of other countries clowns are these beloved figures
of fun and festivity. Like in Central America, you know,
the parade is really popping when a gang of clowns
(05:37):
comes in. I don't know what the group name for
clowns is. You know how there's like a parliament of
owls and unkindness of ravens, murder of clowns, a murder
of clowns, a car of clowns, a honk of clowns,
like murder of clowns. So here in the US, the
fear of clowns eventually, not too long ago, reached a
(05:57):
boiling point. It became a national and then international panic.
Here are the facts. Our story today starts on August one,
in Green Bay, Wisconsin, five photos of what appeared to
be a creepy clown surfaced. This clown was wandering, literally
(06:20):
wandering around a parking lot under a bridge somewhere in
Green Bay, and this went viral thanks to the Internet.
We can only conjecture that it must have been a
slow news cycle because the pictures got national media attention.
Fox News was all over at USA, Today was all
over it. Eventually, The New York Times was writing about this.
(06:43):
Shortly after August five. A Facebook page pertaining to the
pictures are purporting to pertain to the pictures surface and
they said the name of this clown is Gags g
A G S. Yeah. Well yeah, And it wasn't just
any clown. It looked to be someone who was purposefully
(07:06):
trying to be creepy, right because the character, this this
person whoever, was wearing all of this makeup and everything.
It wasn't like your cutie clown makeup. There were some
there's an edge to it that appeared to be sinister
in some way. And I believe it was what the
character was holding balloons. Yeah, nah, not not your vibe. Hunh.
(07:32):
That's not a lick you're going for. Yeah, it's it's
a very good point that it was purposefully done. Up
like a scary Halloween clown, you know what I mean,
not like a fun welcome to McDonald's clown, which I
would argue was also still pretty creepy. Here's what happens.
Numerous pundits speculate on this story, and because there is
(07:55):
not very much in the way of solid factual well
reporting here, there aren't. There's just not much to the
story other than these five creepy pictures and a Facebook page.
At this point, uh, pundits are going wild. They're saying,
what's going on here? Is this a childish prank? Is
this alone unhinged lunatic? Is this part of something larger?
(08:21):
We'll get back to that, but first, here's Carol with
the weather that kind of stuff. Or is it an
attempt at guerrilla marketing? And it turned out it turned
out that our story gets sewed up in a in
a pretty I would say, relieving way. So eight days later,
a filmmaker by the name of Adam Krauss actually came
forward and revealed that this was nothing but a marketing stunt.
(08:44):
He and his crew were actually filming a short piece
called Gags the Clown and Bloody Disgusting, which is a
horror blog UM quoted Krauss as saying, we filmed the
short and secret and at least photos of the sightings
quote quote, because I wanted to convince my down that
there was a creepy clown wandering the streets late at night.
We released the pictures August first, sixteen, and it blew
(09:05):
up from that point on. It went viral very quickly.
I announced that it was just a short film eight
days later, but that didn't stop the craze from kicking
into high gear. Um, what do you guys think? Is
this a form of terrorism? Like? Is it should there
be some burden of responsibility on individual like this that
that is doing something that is legitimately terrorizing a town.
(09:26):
There's not a way to make it illegal. Yeah, I
was gonna say. According to Captain Kevin Warwick, w A
R y c. H of the Green Bay Police Department
where this was first occurring, where gags made the appearances
and the Facebook group started everything, he said, this person
is not breaking the law. He can walk in a
clown costume anywhere he wants. He can't call it like
(09:48):
menacing or something like that. Like, what what point does
something become menacing? That's a crime if someone's loitering, or
if someone is giving the reasonable uh, if there's reasonable
suspicion or that they would be about to commit a crime, right, so,
and that's tough to prosecute one. I don't want to
(10:08):
lose this part though, because Krauss did say this is
for my film after it whatever. Yeah, yeah, And it's
just like every time we see a red meat headline
in the news, only two see it corrected on like
page thirty two of the next issue of the paper,
(10:30):
or thrown in at the very end and find print
on a website for a broadcast news show. People just
don't care about their attractions and there we go. All's well,
that ends well, right. This wasn't the first time viral
marketing had fooled unsuspecting denizens of the Internet, where the
(10:50):
media shout out to Blair Witch Project, which I think
is one of the most famous recent examples. But those
clown sightings not stop in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In fact,
they escalated kind of the way that um, you know,
one of like one of my favorite songs in the
Hall of Mountain King escalates to to to And things
(11:13):
really did get weirder after that, because it inspired. Not
it inspired people, but it also made those creative juices
flow about what could I do that would be even creepier.
So we're going to pause here for our usual ad break. Uh,
this one is a little different today because Matt, you
and I were thinking about this. We're talking about this
(11:36):
great clown panic, but one of today's sponsors is addressing
a more personal panic that occurs to a lot of
dudes around their thirties, right. You know, Ben, we've been
talking about people panicking about things that are out there
in the world that may or may not be real.
We're gonna explore it a little more as we continue
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(12:20):
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k e e p s dot com slash conspiracy. Now
let's get back to those clowns. Here's where it gets crazy.
That's right. Clowns sightings began to pop up all around
the country, and they were unrelated to the short film
(14:32):
from Wisconsin. The next widely reported creepy clown sightings occurred
in Greenville, South Carolina. Yeah, in August sixteen, there was
an alleged clown sighting in Greenville at the Fleetwood Manor
apartment complex and I was originally reading this, I was
really wishing it was at the Fleetwood Mac concert. That
would have been cool. Um, But no, in this complex,
(14:53):
children reported witnessing clowns or a group of clowns, a
murder of clowns, so that we decided on a guy
goal of clowns um attempting to whisper or talk to
the children. Now, that's got to be not cool, right,
that's come on, that's yeah, it's it's so it's so
strange because at this point the um, the image and
(15:17):
the role of a clown has been relegated to things
like children's parties. Still that that's where you will maybe
find a clown, or maybe at the circus or the rodeos,
maybe a swingers club by basement, but wherever it is.
The culturally, we've like flipped the script where now I
think people first and foremost think of clowns as creepy
(15:38):
demon child eaters as opposed to you know, friendly uh
child performers. We do. But again, like, if you you
can go online right now and hire a clown to
do a children's party, that is one of the main
things you can do. So if there are clowns out
in let's say an apartment complex somewhere talking to kids.
If you're not aware of some kids party that's happening,
(16:01):
maybe that's all it is. I'm just saying it's it's
it's tough because it also creeps me out personally, and
I wouldn't like it if my son was there and
saw some clowns. They were trying to whisper to him. Um. Well,
but here's the thing of what they were whispering. And
the children told their parts of the clowns, who, by
the way, we were set up with these flashing green
(16:23):
laser lights. Um. They told the children that they lived
in an abandoned house in the woods near a small lake.
Small talk conversation. Yeah, see, that's where it becomes terrifying.
And the police did investigate, and they did find a
trail in the nearby woods, and the trail did lead
(16:44):
to a house. There was a small lake by the house.
But at this point, no evidence of clowns nor any
evidence of clowns paraphernalia was ever found. So there wasn't
even a bottle of seltzer or anything that is so
funny to be. No evidence of clowns was discovered or paraphernal.
I love the notion of clown paraphernal, Like there's one
(17:07):
size sixteen shoe just just on the trail. And this
is strange because it's we we have to think of
the children and the complex, and then we have to
think of their families too. What do you do when
the police throw up their hands and say, well, um,
we we couldn't find any clowns or clown paraphernalia, you know,
(17:29):
but we will be patrolling. I guess for the next
couple of days. We'll keep an eye out. South Carolina, though,
is far from a unique case. Over the next few months,
reports of creepy, suspicious sketch clowns popped up in every
single US state and Puerto Rico as well. Uh. The
(17:49):
Guardian was following this story and they had some great
articles on this. Uh. They describe it thusly. They say
clowns began to terrorize children and sometimes attack people. While commentating,
you spoke of panic and hysteria. In Pennsylvania, teenager was
reported to have been murdered by someone in a clown mask,
although police later said it was the victim who had
(18:10):
the mask. So still in this time of panic, just
having a clown mask in play during the crime is
enough for this to be lumped into lumped into the
same phenomenon of reporting. Yeah, and you can see here
where if something goes viral enough anywhere in the world
and it gets shared enough on let's say international social
(18:34):
media or internationally accessible social media, it's kind of what
we were talking about. You can see where people will think, oh, well,
how do I make a post or something, or how
do I make something happen in my local town that's
also gonna get me or this famous um through my post,
because it really did go fully international after that. Yeah,
(18:55):
that's the thing. The spark was lit. All in all,
people in eighteen different countries other than the US started
reporting clown sightings over the course of sen and these
were you know, it's weird because we know the panic
in the US has a discreete start date it's August first,
(19:16):
but we also see some um preceding attacks. Are similar
instances in Europe. In twenty there was a creepy clown
sited in Northampton, England's and these these sightings occurred in
the town for two months September and October. They were
(19:36):
also the work of filmmakers. But the the stuff that
we see happening after the US panic catches fire internationally. Uh,
this stuff is genuine like crime in Ontario and Canada,
people dressed up as clowns and we're chasing children when
they got dismissed from school. And then someone dressed as
(20:00):
a clown was chasing down a group of people in
Chile with a baseball bat. People started using clown makeup
and clown mask as a go to disguise in their
criminal endeavors. Yeah, I was reading a story about in
Norway people were reporting that, uh, they would see weapon
(20:22):
wheel wielding clowns chasing cars and stuff. And apparently it
really did catch on in a couple of places in Scandinavia. Yeah,
in Sweden and October twelfth, there was someone dressed as
a clown who stabbed teenage boy with a knife, and
there were some other stabbings across the world. Luckily these
(20:42):
appeared to be isolated incidents. Here's the thing that the
international community reacted pretty strongly to this. There was a
protest held by professional clowns in a real Grande do
soul in Brazil. And here I believe it's time for
(21:02):
US to make a note, in the interest of fairness,
we have to say hashtag not all clowns. There's a
huge industry of people who work professionally as clowns, you know,
in circus trained, academy, delte trained. And these folks have
no interest in committing crimes, you know what I mean.
(21:23):
And they certainly don't want to be saddled with the
stereotype that they want to say. You know, it's a
job for them. They're they're not going to dress up
and wait in the woods to clown at children in
the dark. That would be like us waiting waiting into
the woods. And then podcast people hopefully less scary, way
more nerdy. Yeah, I mean, no, you're right, it's a
(21:45):
it's a profession and in a lot of times, in
a lot of cases of passion for for the the individual. Um.
And then there's a quote here from this article in
spot nik news dot com and it says, this trend
has a really unpleasant impact on us as professionals of
this art. I and my colleagues in this state appear
at various events, for example, at birthday celebrations and when
we go out in the street or arrive at these celebrations.
(22:07):
People are looking at us strangely. Um, and you can
imagine how that would affect you. And it goes on
to say this has started to affect me. Customers are
canceling work, replacing clowns with something else. This is one
of the oldest professions in the world. Our goal is
to bring joy to everybody, from babies to one year olds.
And this this is only one example of a larger
(22:32):
global response. On October twelfth, the Russian embassy in London
put out an official warning to u UK citizens and
Russians alike because of the clowns scare. So a country
state department said, Okay, if you're here in London, watch
out for clowns. Yeah, it's um, I'm trying to think
(22:55):
of when it's akin to like an orange alert watch
out for mog kind of thing, a clown watch the
terror watch that we have, like how many Hanks is it?
You know, watch out? London is a four honk city,
so out of context that that probably sounds very strange,
(23:16):
but it's it's a good question, you know. This reached
state actor level, and then also private industry responded. There
were shops in New Zealand that stopped selling clown costumes
or banned it. Many schools banned clown costumes or just
clown like stuff too. Right, Yeah, and this this also
(23:37):
remember this is so this occurs hand in hand with
public recognition of the music fan base. Right. The insane
clown posse fans known as juggalos, who also, by the way,
did not did not have a big part in this,
because again, hashtag not all clowns. So in October, though,
(24:02):
this starts to also hit one of the most popular
clowns in the United States, Ronald McDonald, is sent to
the bench by his fast food owners because the heat
got to him. He had to get a low profile.
Was too hot for ron so he left the public
eye for a little while because the last thing McDonald's
(24:23):
wanted to be associated with was, you know, being bad
in any way for children, other than, of course, the
food at McDonald's. Hey, they've changed their game a little bit.
Come on, and those fries still, man, they're great and honestly,
as weird as it sounds, those chicken mcnugs, I'm telling you.
(24:45):
Do you think it's nostalgia? No, it's not. It's not.
Part of you is still there now. I think they
up their game or something because we we were very
reticent to get writer. I'm not promoting McDonald's right now,
I promise you. I'm just saying we I tried one
of their chicken McNuggets to that I did remember as
a child not enjoying. But then, uh, they're much better now.
(25:07):
That's all I'm saying. Well, you know what, Matt, maybe
I should give it. I should give it another shot.
I read a really interesting essay about the shape of
those mc nuggets. They're you know, they're they're specific shapes
and how they're created. But I'll still try umph Also,
Target pulled clown mask from all their stores and from
their website, and people started to look at this in
(25:31):
a critical analytical way. They said, Okay, these were reports
don't actually have much in common. They're occurring in various
parts of the world that are very different from one another.
They're often not every time, but often it appears there's
no real law that was broken. It's just someone being creepy.
(25:52):
In most cases amounted to something like, hey, there's a
suspicious person or group of people dressed in a way
that may be uncomfortable. And another common trope was that
these clowns appeared to be as you said, no menacing people,
and in many cases, uh, they were reported as giving chase,
although sometimes the victims would change their story and say,
(26:15):
I thought this clown was gonna chase me. It was
just standing there. But there's a ton of YouTube prank
videos creepy clowns chasing people like a lot, and those
are for humor right there, for humor, but at the
time the person featured has to sign a release afterwards
or something like that to be featured, and several of
(26:38):
those the faces of the victims are out, so they
didn't get permission. I would just say that that's that
strikes me as illegal. That is a form of terrorism
in a way, if you're going to scare someone out
of their wits by dressing up as creepily as you can,
setting up a camera and then chasing somebody while they're
(26:59):
in year for their life. And some people can see
that as humorous, but we have to remember those folks
who were being chased, or those folks would be menaced,
are genuinely frightened. You know, they're terrified. And I would say,
if you find that funny, maybe do some reevaluating. That's all, well,
we can't emphasize this enough. There really were people dressed
(27:21):
as clowns, and they really were stalking and in some
cases attacking folks across the planet. By October, a little
more than three years ago, exactly now, as you're listening
to this news, pundits were we're so deep in this
story that they started reporting an alleged to get this
(27:44):
clown lead purge or large scale attacks set to take
place on Halloween. What's interesting about this kind of news
story is that it doesn't It really doesn't take much
for something to be alleged. It could be an anonymous
tip to the news station that has no follow up,
(28:06):
so we could literally be anyone calling it's incredibly unethical.
But it could also be someone from the news station
who was it was like, we need some hot for Saturday.
So luckily, there were no documented wide scale purges. However,
on October one, Halloween, a family in you guessed it, Florida,
(28:33):
was attacked in mass by a group of people dressed
as clowns wearing clown mask They were attacked by about
twenty people. That's insane. Allegedly, they were checking their car
right when this happened was like eleven pm at night.
Then all of a sudden, um, yea, these people show up. Yeah. Look,
(28:58):
you know we all have well have a pretty good
fortitude stats. You know, if we're D and D characters,
we don't scare particularly easy. But even for us, getting
run up on by twenty people dressed his clowns, that's
a lot. That's that's a lot, especially if they are uh,
(29:18):
if they are armed blades or with you know, blunt
objects or god forbid guns. Well, yeah, I mean one
of the one of the people. Okay, so let's just
talk about that. It was a It was a group
of people in the car. I think it was five
people in a car, maybe more. Um, and they like
hit something in the car right there in their truck.
(29:40):
They're in this big truck. They hit something in your truck.
They got out and check out what it was they got.
As they exited their vehicle to check on everything, they
get attacked by a bunch of people wearing masks, some
of them clown mass some of them appeared to be
what they would call purge masks. One of the victims
got stabbed in the head and another one got hit
in the head with a hockey stick. Um, it was
a real brutal attack. That is, this is just an
(30:02):
awful thing that occurred. Um. And apparently one of the
one of the victims, one of the people who got attacked,
recognized some team that was a part of the group,
right yet. Jeff Brown, who was one of the victims,
said that the group of clowns had a knife, hockey sticks, clubs, bats,
and he was He said they were probably just looking
(30:24):
for anyone who would get stopped at the light. And
he said they was able to lift one of the
masks of a team off in the struggle and recognize
the kid as a kid from his neighborhood. As far
as we know, no arrest were made at least at
the time of those stories reporting, so we don't know
(30:44):
what happened with that. But we bring this example here
to emphasize that unlikes the Unlike some other outbreaks of
hysteria or global panics, there were genuine crimes happening here.
There were people can biring to dress up as clowns
and attack maybe random people, maybe people that they had
(31:06):
their eye on for one reason or another. So these
sightings were real, but what exactly was happening will attempt
to answer that after a word from our sponsors. Okay,
so was the I'll say it, I'll take the bullet
(31:26):
on this one. Was this actually some sort of I
can't believe I'm saying this clown conspiracy to upset the
status quo in some way through random acts of violence? Yeah,
like a Project Mayhem type thing, but with clowns. Uh
maybe yeah? Maybe? I mean, was this perhaps some sort
(31:52):
of Juggalo esque protests? Again, as far as we know,
the Juggalo community was not involved with this panic, But
you know what I mean, Like, was it some sort
of thing that got spun into a different narrative by
the media, or was this just another example of mass
hysteria like the Satanic panic? You know, Like, as we
(32:13):
learned in our recent True True Detective episode, which is
still my either my least or my most favorite title recently,
as we learned there there's often more to the story
than we see reported in the news. To answer a
question about this phenomenon, it's actually best for us to
(32:34):
begin from a folklore angle. There's a guy named Benjamin
Radford go Benz who is the author of a book
called Bad Clowns, and in his work Radford bus some
myths that we have about clowning in the modern day. Specifically,
he writes, it is misleading to ask when clowns turned bad,
they were never really good, because although the word colophobia
(32:58):
comes about in the Indies, the thing is clowns have
been around forever in myth and folklore, in unrelated cultures.
People who had never met before they had things like clowns.
But they were often antagonistic. They were deceivers, they were tricksters.
They were associated with entering the edge of the edge
(33:21):
of civilization, speaking hidden truths. They were associated with infernal
powers at times. And let's also consider Alex Pentlands, the
author of a book called Social Physics, how good ideas spread.
He says, the clown phenomenon is in some ways just
the standard craze. He compares it actually to planking. You
(33:43):
guys remember planking. Yeah, that's when you lay flat on
a thing. Yeah. And I walked in our in our
old office one time, I walked into our wreck room,
and I learned about planking because as least as an exercise,
because I saw about fifteen or more of our colleagues,
(34:04):
not speaking, just laying on the floor propped on their elbows,
and I didn't know what to do. But I stood
there for a second. No one said anything, no one
looked at me, and so I decided the most prudent
move was to walk out backwards, and that's what I did.
Definitely keep an eye on everyone. There was a it
was a it was a like a flash mob type
phenomenon for a while wh people would like plank on
(34:26):
different things, like a cabinet or something and you'd walk in.
There was an episode of the Office about it. M hmm,
that's that's all I got on planking. Well, yeah, but
it just speaks to a larger thing. When it's kind
of what I was saying earlier, When there's a trending
phenomena like that, it is in our nature to want
to be a part of the group and you know,
(34:49):
glom onto it in a way or show your uniqueness
by doing this thing in a way that only you
would do or could do. Um. And you know, we're
we're just basically comparing that. It's kind of what Pentland
is doing here, um saying that this is what the
clown thing was. It was another uh ice bucket challenge,
(35:09):
right right. But he also said this fad. This clown
sighting craze also hit upon a deeply buried cultural meme.
He said, children are scared of clowns, so this gives
it more virility than another thing like an ice bucket challenge.
Uh not. You know, more people are probably terrified of
(35:31):
clowns than are of ice buckets. Did you hear that
the ice bucket challenge is a conspiracy theory about it?
I did? Yeah, yeah, yeah, what is it? There's just
thing I think it was just this one kind of
fringe e writer selling Owens on the World that Daily,
accusing it of being some sort of satanic ritual tricking
people into I don't know exactly what the logic is there,
but you can you can. You can call anything. Any
(35:52):
of these viral phenomenon could be construed as some sort
of mass ritual, right, I mean, that's sort of what
it is. As people glom onto it and they recreated,
like the flash mobs versus the creepy clowns versus the planking,
any of that kind of stuff you could look at
as as some sort of weird um collective unconscience kind
(36:12):
of like dance. Right. I don't know, anything can be
a ritual and anything could be a Satanic ritual, you know,
if you have the right attitude about it. Isn't magic
all about intentionality in theory, it's a call back to
uh do what what was that our magic debate harmon Town.
So with with this in mind, when we look at
(36:35):
it from a folklore perspective, we see another salient point.
Also from the Guardian again they covered this like four
or five different times, and they said they they also
attributed part of the panic to the ways in which
it was described by print and broadcast media. They said,
(36:57):
consider how charged the vocabulary of the reply worts will
be when you hear this on your evening news. They
don't say someone saw a clown. They refer to these
things as sightings in the same way you would say
someone cited, uh, there was a UFO sighting or a
lock Neest sighting, And it mythologizes these human beings when
(37:18):
really they're just people in costumes. Yeah, and they can
do it wherever they want as long as they're not
hurting anybody. And then the idea, Okay, so the mirror
over in the UK uh reports this. You know, in
the early days of the panic, spreading to the United Kingdom.
They say, quote uh in one of their headlines creepy
(37:41):
clowns approach girls walking to school and terrifying UK craze. Uh.
This was this was um variants of the first sentence
in the article, because the first sentence in the article
in the Mirror says to schoolgirls were approached by two
creepy clowns yesterday as the terror of fine American craze
(38:01):
hits the UK. It's true that it was already quote
American craze, but the headline calling it a terrifying UK
craze wasn't true because there had only been a couple
of incidents. How many incidents make a craze? Right? Like
when when does a hill become a mountain? Kind of question?
(38:22):
Right after it's a mole hill? Right, go straight from
mohill to mountain? And what's the size of a heap?
You know what I mean? Yeah, there's linguistic ambiguity there,
But it also could be kind of a self fulfilling
prophecy to call this thing a craze before it happens.
I mean, you know if Paul Mission Control Decan and
I go to Applebee's after this and then we start
(38:45):
calling it the new Applebee's craze that's sweeping the nation.
Would more people be likely to go because they want to?
To your point, Matt, be part of the conversation. I
think you're right. Um, I think you might have to
add in a few more people. If you've got like
five posts that said the new Applebee's craze, I think
(39:07):
you've got something going there. Not an advertisement for Applebee's, right,
McDonald's nor McDonald's. But in this case, what we see, um,
what we see very quickly is the clown stuff itself
is exactly as we described. It's sort of a viral
(39:28):
phenomenon that, to your point, in old people glommed onto,
sometimes to assist in the execution of crimes they were
already probably planning to do. In other cases it was
people who said, we want to prank some folks. Um.
But when we look into the psychological causes, the socio
political environment and soil in which this thing existing grows,
(39:53):
then we see there's more to the story. We've talked
about this before, and this is probably just my own
crippling cynicism. But anytime I see something that is not
terrible go viral, I assume that it's being pushed to
cover up some real horrific, terrible thing happening. I don't
think you're far off, Ben, you do think, no, No,
(40:16):
Although it is hard to predict virality, I will say
that you know the intentions it maybe that, but it's
like no one can guarantee a viral smash. Otherwise you
know they'd be hiring those people left and right. So
I've got a theory about this whole thing that i
want to present to you guys, all right, late on me. Okay,
here are the facts of Matt's theory. This h called
(40:39):
the section Matt's Facts. Yes, sure, this is These are
Mats facts. So we've got the gags, the clown incident
that occurs when is it October? Is it October or
is it September? Though, right, the first one occurs in
Green Bay, Wisconsin, August first, so that's August, early August twenties.
(41:02):
Then almost a year later, a year and a month later,
the remake of Stephen King's It comes out, a major
Hollywood production with massive marketing arms behind it. Okay, it
would be beneficial for the people making it to re
(41:25):
ignite people's fear of clowns. Well, you know about the
phony clown protest, right, The phony clown protest was, according
to Vanity Fair, a clown rally against the IT movie,
was actually a publicity stunt for the IT movie. Um,
the new adaptations were probably been causing some problems for
(41:45):
real life clowns, whose businesses have allegedly suffered as a
whole new generation of kids sour to bozos of the world,
So it was hardly surprised when clowns planned to gather
and rally against It in New York. It turns out, however,
that the rally was a fake, nothing more than a
public to the stunt in promotion of the very movie
it claimed to be raging against. See. So this is
what I'm saying, you guys. What if this entire thing,
(42:09):
starting with gags and the short film or whatever was occurring,
there was all a way to get clowns back into
our zeite guys, immediately the forefront of our minds, so
that it would come out and we would have to
go see it. That's interesting. I don't I'm honest. I'm
gonna be honest with you, man, I don't know if
I'm a percent on board with it, because it feels
like when real acts of violence started to occur, the
(42:33):
company or studio involved would want to distance themselves. Well,
that's why they never admitted to doing it. That's why
they never admitted to starting the whole craze. See, okay,
so there on, we didn't start the fire. Yeah, they went, oh,
somebody got stabbed in the head. We're out, and we're out.
Nobody say anything until the trailer releases. I mean maybe
(42:54):
maybe perhaps I will say, though, because I knew I'm
sounding a big conspiratorial here um, and it is just
my opinion, I will say that now more than ever,
to steal the line from Fox News. Yet again, it
is now more than ever. It is surprisingly easy for
some people to influence virility and to determine which stories
(43:18):
are seeing. If if anyone listening believes that Mark Zuckerberg
cannot literally ping someone at Facebook and say kill this
story and promote this one, then you are being offensively
naive like that. Because there's so few people who control
the faucets of information at this point, then clearly it
(43:40):
could happen. I'm not saying it does. I'm not saying
this is a case in which that occurs, but I'm
saying the reality is there, and to think otherwise is
at this point to be willfully ignorant of the reality. Yeah. No,
I would agree. There are a lot of levers to
be pulled within the realms of social media and places
where you can those things and then have them become viral.
(44:02):
Or what if? What if? Mett? What if? What if
you're right and you're you're even more right than the
original theory? What if this all dating back to arguably
was just one long viral lead up to the Yaching
Phoenix Joker philm Or maybe there's clown film collusion. Maybe
(44:25):
all of the studios that have on their slates of
content clown content, they've all gotten together to perpetrate this
conspiracy against the American public CFC Clown Film Collusion. Yeah, yeah,
I think it was Stephen King himself in the gags,
the clown costume. Now he doesn't leave his manner, and
(44:48):
then it was Joe Hill himself. And it's tough to
tell the difference. You know, if you just saw those
guys walking down the street, Joe Hill does look like
a young Stephen King I've never seen physically. Yeah, very
very much. That's unfortunate. Stephen King is a funny looking dude.
Always what you don't think? So? What a handsome devil?
(45:08):
Stephen King? You're kidding me? I don't, I don't. I
think Stephen King himself would acknoledge that he's a funny
looking dude. Have you seen creep Show? Or he plays
the weird guy? Yeah, but but I think he tells
great stories. Shout out to rob By the way, that's right,
shout out I just got a free trial to shut her.
(45:29):
Oh it's great, just so I can watch. Um, so
I can watch, and I'm very much excited to do so.
Report back if you can't listen when you think when
you see it. This leads us to a question that
we can't really answered today, A couple of questions, and
one of them is this, does the access to ubiquitous
information give us more of an ability to think critically
(45:51):
about things? Or does it give us more of an
opportunity to spread and transmit our own fears to other populations? Well,
it's both, right, depends on how you use it and
how you handle it, how you comport yourself in this
our internet age. And but which of those two I agree?
Which of those two. Uh, do we see happening more often? Yeah? Unfortunately,
(46:15):
I think it's the latter. Right, Yeah, I'm right there
with you. But we still have hope for the future, right. Uh.
And we know the outbreaks of widespread public hysteria are
surprisingly common in the historical record. We've got this great
book about it that I love around sometimes. And if
this odd story about the Great clown Panic of sixteen
(46:36):
is the Guardian called it, If this odd story leads
us to anything, it's one crucial question. What new panic
looms on the horizon. Is it going to be something
about birds? I'm sorry, no, I just had to put
that in there. Are you ever seen the movie Bird Demmick.
(46:56):
It's like a really bad B movie about like a
bird panic situation. It's my personal hell um. But unfortunately
it's so laughably made that it's not scary or anything.
But yeah, I know, birds are birds are bad news. Guys. Well,
here here's the deal. Uh. You may be listening to
this right now on the eve of Halloween or the
(47:20):
eve of Hallows All Hallows eve. Um, And maybe you've
got your headphones in and you're walking around. Maybe it's
a nighttime, maybe your trick or treating. I don't know
if any of you are actually trick or treating while
listening to this, but it's so lame that people that
people look as scance at you. If you do that
as an adult, it's like, come on, manh yeah, I
have a kid, so I get to pass. I guess.
But I question though, if Halloween is all Hallow's Eve,
(47:44):
is the next day all Hallows Day? Oh yeah, logically,
but no one really talks about that. It's not as fun, right, yeah. Also,
we want to hear from you. Do you think there
was anything more to this story? Do you think it
was just a public outbreak of panic? Is it Was
it more like an escape hatch or event for underlying
(48:07):
anxieties and fears? And if so, what were those anxieties
and fears? Also, this is a personal note. Don't feel obligated,
but if you have a kick ass Halloween costume, we'd
love to see it, go ahead and feel free to
post it on our community page. Here's where it gets crazy.
Some of the best mods in the business or posted
(48:28):
to us on Instagram or Twitter. We are some derivation
of conspiracy stuff on all three of those conspiracy stuff
show on on Instagram. If you want to call us
while you're out doing whatever it is you are doing
on all Hello's Eve, that could be fun. Uh, give
us a call. We are one eight three three std
(48:49):
w y t K. Leave a message and we will
hear it. Um. If you don't want to do any
of that stuff and you have something you want to
talk to us about or say, send us a good
old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com.
(49:23):
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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