The very famous clown scare of 2016 started in the dog days of August when a young man was wandering the streets of Green Bay in gruesome black and white clown make up and carrying a black balloon. Few weeks later after this incident, children in a Greenville, S.C apartment complex told the police about clowns flashing green laser lights in nearby woods and was trying to lure them with cash.
These creepy clown sightings are not new. It started from at least May 1981, when the cryptozoologist Loren Coleman had coined the term "phantom clowns".
Reports spread to at least six cities in the span of just a month and waves of sightings recurred in 1985 and in 1991.
Folklorists call them "friend of a friend" stories and argue that they survive because they offer us lessons and morals that are often tied to concerns about our transition to a modern, depersonalized society. For instance, the classic yarn about the mother who dies after finding a rat in her family's KFC dinner is seen as a cautionary tale about the perils of eating out, while the babysitter who gets high and puts an infant in the microwave is a warning about not leaving your children with strangers.
The clowns we know today have more in common with the 19th-century London pantomime player Joseph Grimaldi. Andrew McConnell Stott, the author of "The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi," says Grimaldi is credited with adding garish makeup and exaggerated slapstick to the clown's repertoire. Grimaldi's personal life was racked by calamity and physical pain. He was known to joke, "I am grim all day, but I make you laugh at night." Grimaldi died in 1837, and Professor Stott says it was Charles Dickens's editing of Grimaldi's memoirs that created the public's idea of a clown who is happy on the surface but sad and self-destructive within.
Knowingly or not, the band is drawing on the history of the jester as tolerated critic, a near universal role that pops up in China, Africa, and India as well as medieval and Renaissance Europe. In "Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World," the scholar Beatrice K. Otto describes the court jester as the only person who could speak truth to power without consequences. He was "irreverent, libertine, self-indulgent, witty, clever, roguish" - "the fool as goad to the wise and challenge to the virtuous, the fool as critic of the world."
According to Dr. Brunvand, children most likely repeat phantom clown stories because they are genuinely afraid of clowns. Parents repeat them because of their guilt and anxiety about protecting their children. Social media spreads them because they go viral
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