ITEM: British tabloids have crossed the streams of coulrophobia and coulrophilia, yielding not only an epic demonstration of Rule 34 but also dragging child predation fear into the daylight, with a side order of sex panic:
The basic premise of the story is that some men get off on women dressed as creepy clowns, they're causing a spike in clown-porn searches and clown-fetish requests at escort services, and soon their "sick fetish" may lead them to commit real-world sexual assaults "as the adrenaline junkies seek more 'extreme thrills'."
ITEM: a BBC piece from earlier this week does a good job of summarizing British stories. It also adds some analysis and nice images, like so:
A contributor to the Spotted: Loughborough Facebook page said: "I was walking through Shelthorpe cemetery via the footpath next to the school. I was approached by what can only be described as a clown with an axe. I have never been so terrified in my life."
ITEM: a conspiracy theory - sorry, clownspiracy - claims that people are using clowns to normalize demons, or something like that.
Clown sightings have been reported throughout the Bay Area all week, most menacingly in Concord, where a mother reported a "creepy clown" tried to kidnap her 1-year-old child on Wednesday afternoon.
The woman kicked the clown in the shin and the person fled. No suspects had been located as of today, according to Concord police.
The Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety said on Friday tthat officers have responded to nine clown sightings in the last three days, though nothing criminal is suspected. Sonoma State University has responded to clown sightings as well as an unrelated person in a gorilla suit, according to Rohnert Park police.
(That's the second time there's been a clown-gorilla connection; here's the first.)
Speaking of helpful entities, Altas Obscura offers a new map of American clown sightings.
Two men, ages 29 and 20, were reported roaming the streets in clown garb and chasing vehicles in the early hours of Friday in this town near Green Bay...
Two days later in the neighboring town of Kimberly, police responded to reports of armed clowns in a park, one brandishing a knife, which turned out to be real, and the other a sledgehammer, which was a plastic prop. The matter was being “addressed,” the police said.
Like so:
A Minnesota soccer coach put on a clown mask as a joke. Because of the clown panic, he was fired.
He wouldn’t have done it if the gorilla costume he normally wears for some annual team tradition hadn’t been damaged.
His team took a picture of him and everything seemed fine until — you’ll want to sit down for this — it got posted on social media.
The student who made the initial report to the superintendent tells Fox 9 she was “appalled” that an adult would wear a clown mask, in light of the reports of scary clown sightings across the country. She says when she found out the person wearing the mask was the school’s soccer coach, she reached out to the superintendent.
Independent School District 15 Superintendent Troy Ferguson defends the decision to discontinue Hildre’s services.
“We all make mistakes and this was a big one,” said Ferguson. “Kids are scared and it’s not okay for adults to be part of that to make kids scared.”
The reported sighting follows a similar incident in Gravesend where a mother described how two children were taken and "tied up in a van" and "dumped in an alleyway."...
A cyclist was chased through The University of Kent's Canterbury campus by a pack of 'killer' clowns in a Ford Fiesta.
Zeph Fenn, former Criminology and Cultural Studies student at the university, says he was chased across the campus by the car at around 10pm yesterday night (October 9).
The 'killer clown' trend, which first started in America, has been sweeping the country this week. There have been several incidents of sinister looking clowns appearing across Kent, menacing, hounding, stalking and intimidating their targets.
Do we have any information about the demographics of alleged creepy clowns in Britain?
(thanks to Steven Kate, Tim Pendry, and Neurovagrant)
Around 11 p.m. Thursday a man said he was confronted by a person dressed as clown in the alley behind his home in the first block of East High Street, police said.
The clown made a “jolting movement” toward the man causing him to run away in fear, according to police.
According to police, the clown never struck, hit, touched or spoke to the man.
The clown is described as approximately 5 foot 11 inches tall of an unknown race wearing a clown mask with red or yellow hair and a green or black shirt with camouflage triangles on it, police said.
the ominous warning “We are coming to LA tomorrow! We will be invading Los Angeles, Carson, Culver City, Torrance, Crenshaw, Inglewood, Pasadena, Compton, Lakewood, Palmdale etc. !!” and 11 posts of frightening clowns hanging out in various locations.
(Has anyone assembled a portfolio of the most-recycled clown photos yet?)
And yet, as Jesse Walker observes, there's nothing here. There is no clown movement. There aren't actually any clown crimes.
Are there any other solid crimes to report? Well, some clown-scare roundups have also included a stabbing in Reading, Pennsylvania. That incident doesn't seem to have much in common with the larger clown rumors either; details are hazy, but it appears to have been a fight over a clown mask. The mask was being worn (on top of his head, not over his face) by the victim, not the stabber.
So no, we're not in the middle of a wave of clown attacks. There's just one clown-related crime that has seriously taken off in the last couple of months, and that's the crime of filing a false police report.
Now to find time to synthesize all of these stories, or at least tag the reports.
[A]uthorities in Wayne say a female caller reported a person wearing clown mask or clown makeup around 9:30 p.m. Wednesday.
The woman said she spotted a suspicious man staring at her from the woods with his hands in his pockets wearing what she believed looks like a clown mask.
The incident happened on Willowbrook Boulevard near office buildings and a technical school in what is mostly an industrial area.
Non-robbery- and stalking-inclined clowns are responding by complaining to the press. Some are even organizing a Clown Lives Matter march, scheduled for next weekend.
Finally the story enters political satire, as a conservative site offers a satirical piece about the march.
"Everyone took this as a joke but it's really become serious now, and I just want all these teenagers to know that it's not a game anymore," Jones told Fox 43. "You're ruining my job and other actors around the world."
Jones works at Screamland Farms in Frederick, Md., and told the TV station that his family is afraid for his safety due to profiling in response to the frequent clown sightings.
On the other side of the country, a group of clowns plan to take to the streets next weekend in order to show people that they mean no harm.
The goal is to show people that professional clowns are not actually trying to kill them.
Along with satire, there are also stories generated by spoof news sites, which then enter urban legend territory. Snopes has a bunch, like this one:
Following the scare of random clowns appearing at night and threatening lives, congress has passed a new law in an attempt to put a stop to the madness.
Anyone who is caught wearing a clown mask publicly can be charged $50,000 and be jailed for a maximum of 1 year. Authorities are calling these masked individuals “terrorists”.
“We don’t know where they come from or what they want” said president Barack Obama, “but they have to be stopped”. Even on Halloween, clown costumes and masks will be prohibited from public wear. “I don’t care who you are, if you’re wearing a clown mask, your going to jail and will be fined. Even if you’re Donald Trump, we don’t care, we will taser you and arrest you”, said NYPD police officer Jan Hughes.
According to Chief of Police Chad Duensing, a student came across an image of a clown on her Instagram account from “bob_the_clown_666” stating “I’m coming to keystone high today.”
“There was no real threat,” Duensing said. “We were made aware of a post concerning a clown. We had officers, along with our SRO (school resource officer) conduct extra patrol.”
Two students told a police officer assigned to Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans they had received text messages from someone identifying themselves as "Clide Daklowns." The texts indicated that clowns were coming to scare BFA and Missisquoi Valley Union school students this Friday, according to a police statement.
New York police are investigating a story straight out of Gothic horror: the appearance of a roving clown with a gun.
It may be the best image of October 2016:
There's also a quieter, darker photo:
Details are as fuzzy as a homicidal clown's wig:
City of Newburgh Police agree, the photos appear to be taken on the City of Newburgh New Windsor border. A police spokesperson told Hudson Valley Post they investigated the area and are continuing their investigation.
New Windsor Police confirmed that there was an incident on the bridge Saturday. They told Hudson Valley Post that no arrests have been made, and at this time they don’t know who it was.
Maybe this was a stunt, a bold person trawling for exactly this kind of reaction.
The rumor mill spread quickly, causing dozens of students searching for a clown to turn into hundreds. Police were inundated by phone calls about students gathering in places across the downtown area and on campus...
Nelson said that there were no real sightings of clowns known to authorities. That didn’t stop at least 500 students — [Penn State police Sgt. Mike] Nelson’s minimum estimate — from latching onto the idea that there was one on the loose in the borough.
Once again, social media gets blamed. And once again, there was no clown that anyone could find: "according to the police at Penn State, no clowns were spotted, but officers were flooded with calls about students anticipating clowns in the downtown area and on the campus." "The only real clown sighting, Nelson said, was a screen shot of a clown projected onto Beaver Hill apartments."
Does anyone have a sense of the clown panic's demographics? Many of these stories seem to involve young people (teens). Could this be one of the first signs of Generation Z's cultural outlines?
According to WAVY, a publication in Hampton, Virginia, a 13-year-old student at Davis Middle School allegedly contacted a person on social media using a clown image as their profile picture and alias. Why? Oh, just to ask them to murder her teacher.
WAVY reports that
Police say the person she contacted was using a clown image as their profile picture. She allegedly reached out to this person to murder a teacher at Davis Middle School.
“The profile that she contacted actually was using a clown as a profile picture and so using a clown related alias,” Officer Ashley Jenrette of Hampton Police said.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, a student threatened a school with clown-related violence, apparently:
A 14-year old female student from Airline High School has been arrested and charged with terrorizing by detectives with the Bossier Sheriff's Office. She set up a fake Instagram account in which she made serious threats to the school.
In the fake account, she used a fictitious name that included the word “clown,” in keeping with a current fashion involving the depiction of depraved, vicious clowns.
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