With a candy-colored child sacrifice cult taking over every TV channel and burger joint, the thought of clowns prowling neighborhoods in vans for kids to steal sounds like a less remote possibility.
What you may not know is that phantom clowns have been plaguing the country in waves for decades.
Here’s a report that made national news in 2016:
The Greenville, South Carolina story is far from the first. Years earlier, a bogeyman notorious in my neck of the woods terrorized Chicagoland.
But in the fall of 1991, kids were afraid of something even worse. I was a fifth grader at Murphy elementary, and rumors circulated among my classmates for weeks, coming to a boil as Halloween approached. It wasn’t safe to walk home alone, he was in our neighborhood, someone had seen him cruise past in his van just the other day. We called him Homey the Clown, and if you’re a product of the Chicago schools old enough to buy beer but young enough to remember the ThunderCats, chances are you did too.
Homey the Clown, of course, was the name of a character played by Damon Wayans on the early-90s sketch-comedy show In Living Color. (Wayans is also slated to star in a 2007 movie named after Homey.) The character was an angry black ex-con who carried a sock for knocking bratty kids upside the head. His catchphrase, you might recall, was “Homey don’t play that.”
But the Homey we feared was a man dressed as a clown who’d supposedly been roaming the neighborhood and luring children into his white van–or maybe just snatching them and throwing them inside. No one at Murphy was too sure about the details.
Gen Y remembers.
But the child-predator-clown-in-a-van phenomenon goes back at least to the early 80s.
[Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman] traced the phenomenon to Massachusetts in 1981, when children reported evil clowns attempting to lure them into vans.
The clowns were never seen by adults.
“There were no arrests, no photographs, no evidence and no abductions,” Coleman told The Post.
Soon after, the “phantom clowns,” as Coleman calls them, turned up in Providence, RI, Kansas City, Mo., Omaha, Neb., Denver, and Pittsburgh.
At the time, Coleman was working as director of the Charlestown office of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. He wrote to 400 “fellow researchers and writers,” wondering if they had heard of the “unexplained phenomenon.”
The feedback revealed there had been similar reports in local papers. “That was the mystery. How do people in different parts of the country have the same experience? There was no internet or wire stories or national stories about this phenomenon,” said Coleman, who wrote about the sightings in his book “Mysterious America.”
To this day, the 1981 “phantom clowns” remain a “total mystery.”
As a rule, I’m hesitant to jump on pop- and evo-psych explanations for weird sightings like these.
Mass hysteria in particular is skeptics’ go-to method of hand waving away every mystery from alligators in the sewer to the Fatima apparitions.
But to my knowledge, mass hysteria has never been proven to have caused anything.
That’s always the problem with high strangeness. Accepting the debunkings always requires as much suspension of disbelief as taking the reports at face value.
But this time, in light of sick joke that Western society has devolved into, maybe the deboonkers are on to something.
Would it really be all that surprising if the phantom clowns turned out to be mass premonitions of the Clown World waiting just around the corner?
I was in grade school at the same time as the author of that Homey the Clown piece. And I remember stories like that making the rounds in the lunchroom. We denied it at the time, but in retrospect it’s hard to ignore the fact that everybody felt a sense of existential foreboding.
We were on easy street but couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that we were about to lose it all.
Maybe the specter of clowns appearing near schoolyards to prey on kids, only to vanish without a trace, were the heralds of what schools themselves would do to our children openly.
This post is getting heavier than I’d intended.
But you can’t argue that the systemwide abuse and indoctrination public schools are putting kids through isn’t orders of magnitude scarier than isolated jokers in panel vans.
Best to forget about it by reading about giant robot fights.
