Clown in the Woods - Greenville, SC

[82_28]

Fantastic, identity. Saves me a night of looking up shit.

[identity]

from the book:

Judicial Review of Public Access Clown Self-Abuse.png

plate 18. Voir Dire Tragedy in One Act; Or, Judicial Review of Public Access
Clown Self-Abuse (2015). Artist’s interpretation of Crotchy the Clown’s obscen-
ity trial for public-access masturbation. Illustration by Celestia Ward of Two
Heads Studios.

Gacy’s self-portrait as Pogo ton the 1994 Acid Bath album When the Kite String Pops.png

plate 20. John Wayne Gacy’s self-portrait as Pogo the Clown appeared
on the 1994 Acid Bath album When the Kite String Pops

George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden as clowns of death and destruction.png

plate 21. George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden as clowns of death and
destruction. 2010.54.5275. Chuck Sperry, Machine Gun in the Clown’s Hand,
circa 2004. Offset lithograph, 16.625 x 23.5 in. Collection of the Oakland (CA)
Museum, All of Us or None Archive.

[Cordelia]

"Wrinkles" the Clown is still around.....

Deranged Clown Stalks Innocent 'Pokemon GO' Players in Florida

"For the past 2 years, people all over Southwest Florida have been spotting a creepy clown popping up in unusual places around the community. His name is Wrinkles The Clown, and if you haven’t heard of him yet you might be sleeping under a rock."
https://nowloading.co/posts/4023652

[elfismiles]

Monday, August 29, 2016
Phantom Clowns in Greenville: Updated


This is a sketch of one of the Phantom Clowns of Greenville by artist Andy Finkle. As fate would have it, Finkle lives a mere 15 minutes from the location of the eyewitness accounts. Spooky gets spookier when it is close to home! (Art courtesy of Andy Finkle ©2016.)

+++

In 1981, I coined the phrase "Phantom Clowns" to describe the brightly colored costumed individuals, seemingly escapees from a circus, wearing exaggerated makeup and driving vans, who attempted to kidnap children. I first devoted an article about Phantom Clowns in Fate Magazine, during the early 1980s, and then expanded my thoughts on these reports in 1983's first edition of Mysterious America.

In that book, I detail the United States of America's wave of shadowy 1981 sightings of clowns in vans who appeared to have tried to kidnap children, from Boston to Kansas City. It was years after I wrote about Phantom Clowns that Stephen King's IT was published, putting to rest that King's novel inspired the original Phantom Clown accounts.

The encounters began in May of 1981, in Boston, Brookline, and other Massachusetts communities. By the end of the month, the local newspapers in Kansas City were publishing warnings about "Killer Clowns," said to be after children at bus stops there.

I coined the term "Phantom Clowns" to describe them because they were (are) seen but never caught.

Sightings would come and go, and Phantom Clown encounters would continue. There has been a long history of Phantom Clown sightings since then, but 2008 seems significant because it was period of presidential campaigning.

READ MORE HERE:
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2016/ ... lowns.html

[82_28]

Anyone play Twisted Metal in the day?

There was/is a clown character named "Sweet Tooth" who drove an ice cream truck.

Sweet Tooth's original look featured him as a green haired, slim simple circus clown who had escaped from a mental institution.[10] The design was expanded upon in the second game in response to changes to the truck's design, notably due to the clown head adorning the truck now featuring a personality of its own.[11] The result gave Sweet Tooth the flaming head design seen on the character since. 989 Studios, who handled the next two games, put more emphasis on the clown design, redesigning his attire to that of a ringmaster in Twisted Metal 4; neither design was held in high regard by the developers, with David Jaffe stating his dislike of III's look.[12] As of Black and beyond, the design was modified heavily, giving him increased bulk and other features that would be called his "classic look" by Incog Inc.'s design team.[2]

The ice cream truck was actually designed well before the driver himself, and Black's incarnation took six months and many concept sketches to finalize. Labeled early on "DEMONIC ICE CREAM TRUCK", attention to details such as the head adorning the vehicle and the contents of the back of the truck were focused on during development.[13] Boss variants of the truck have also appeared regularly in the series starting with Dark Tooth in the second game (which was a re-textured version of the original Sweet Tooth vehicle). While the designs for the vehicles have progressed steadily, care has been emphasized to keep them rooted to the simple yet unique ice cream truck structure, something that has become harder and harder for the team as the games go on.

[identity]

The end of chapter 12 of Bad Clowns, The Phantom Clowns

From Where Come the Clowns?

The first clue to solving the riddle of the phantom clowns is noting that
only young children reported seeing them; adults almost never encoun-
tered them. According to a spokesman for the Boston Police Depart-
ment, “No adult or police officer has ever seen a clown. We’ve had calls
saying there was a clown. We’ve had calls saying that there was a clown
at a certain intersection and we happened to have police cars sitting
there, and the officers saw nothing. We’ve had over twenty calls on 911.
When the officers get there, no one tells them anything” (Taylor 1981).

Throughout the bad clown panic, no hard evidence was ever found, and
no children were actually abducted. This strongly suggests that some
form of social delusion or mass hysteria was at play. If the clowns were
real, why were they so invariably incompetent? Surely at least one of the
bad clowns would have succeeded. Any real clown could easily abduct
a child at a birthday party and spirit the victim off to a waiting van.
Despite the scary rumors, it seemed that the phantom clowns were as
harmless to children as Bigfoot or the Boogeyman—and for the same
reason.

Amid all the strange reports, police detectives, school counselors, psy-
chologists, and others were confounded by one simple basic question:
Whether they were real or not—and it was looking more and more like
they were not—where did these scary clowns come from? Why would
children in different places start reporting these phantom clowns?
With no arrest, no suspects—and perhaps most importantly, no chil-
dren actually abducted or harmed in any way—the police had nothing to
go on. Many parents and school officials wondered if some of the children
were simply describing creepy clowns they saw in films or on television—
though the film Killer Klowns from Outer Space wasn’t released until 1988
and thus could not have sparked or influenced any of the sightings before
then; similarly, the hugely influential TV miniseries It didn’t come out
until 1990. It’s possible that some of the reports during and after 1988 were
influenced by these media images—and a child need not have actually
seen the film to know and describe what a scary clown therein looked like
because of images of film posters, advertisements, and publicity photos
printed in newspapers and magazines.

Where police and others failed, folklorists such as Sandy Hobbs and
David Cornwell helped supply the answer: “How did this rumor of evil
clowns originate? Many of our informants suggest possible origins of the
clown story: parents, police, and the mass media are all cited. One stu-
dent reports that older children told the stories to frighten younger ones.
Others appear to assume that the story derives from an actual incident,
even though it may have become exaggerated in the telling” (Hobbs and
Cornwell 2001).

As for what triggered the sightings, various expla-
nations ranged from recent public safety messages featuring a clown to
rental vans owned by a local company, which were blue (as in many of
the bad clown reports) and featured a clownlike juggler logo on its side.
Furthermore some of those blue vans had recently been used by workers
in head-to-toe protective clothing that, though not distinctively clown-
like, is obviously adult men whose faces and bodies are covered—oddly
and perhaps menacingly to a small child’s eyes. Ultimately, Hobbs and
Cornwell conclude, “Searching for single causes in such cases seems
unlikely to be fruitful, especially as stories about threatening clowns are
older and more widespread than such explanations would suggest”
(Hobbs and Cornwell 2001).

Phantom clowns are best understood as part of a larger social phenom-
enon known as phantom attackers. These are mysterious figures, usually
male and dressed in some distinctive way, and who are seen and reported
as menacing ordinary citizens in public. Examples include the “Monkey
Man” panic in May 2001 in which residents of New Delhi, India, claimed
to have seen a sort of half-human, half-monkey creature that scared and
startled people before leaping away (for a firsthand account of the panic
see Edamaruku 2001); Spring-Heeled Jack, the mysterious dark-cloaked
figure reported threatening and scaring people (mostly women and chil-
dren) in London from the 1830s through the 1870s; the Phantom Slasher
of Taiwan, who was reported stalking the streets of Taipei in 1956 trying
to slash people (again, mostly women and children) with a razor; and the
Mad Gasser of Mattoon, claimed to have been seen in the small eastern
Illinois town in 1944 skulking outside of homes and spraying an unknown,
temporarily paralyzing gas on their occupants.

Though the details and descriptions vary in these cases, they have
much in common, including that they all had sincere eyewitnesses who
reported their encounters to police and other public safety officials; the
cases were reported in the local news and residents took action to protect
the public from further attempted “attacks”; the reports appeared in a
given community suddenly but soon faded away with no arrest or reso-
lution; the strange attackers were sighted but never caught, somehow
always escaping just before authorities arrived; and there was no hard
evidence that they ever existed in the first place—no photographs, no
videotapes, no item or piece of clothing left by these scary phantoms, no
nothing. In the end all these phantom attackers—like the phantom
clowns—were thoroughly investigated and eventually determined not to
have existed (although inevitably some mystery-mongering websites,
books, and TV shows insist that they were real and possibly related to
ghosts or Pennywise-like interdimensional entities).

There were several other possible sociological contributors to the
phantom-clown panic, including that much of it occurred a time when a
moral panic gripped America in the form of sensational (and later dis-
proven) child-abuse cases claimed to have been connected with Satanism
and satanic ritual abuse. At the Fells Acres Day Care Center in Malden,
Massachusetts, for example, at least one child reported that he and others
had been tortured by a “bad clown” in a “secret room.” Later investigation
revealed that in virtually all of the cases the abuse never actually hap-
pened. There was also a series of at least two dozen high-profile child
murders in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981 when the phantom-clown
reports first appeared; a serial killer named Wayne Bertram Williams was
later convicted of the crimes.

The phantom clowns, as folkloric entities, eventually appeared in
connection with other rumors and urban legends. As folklorist Gillian
Bennett notes, in the mid-1990s “people dressed as clowns were featured
in rumors and panics about children being abducted for their organs in
Central America; reports were circulating in Britain about bogus social
workers; in Belgium there were rumors of ‘phantom photographers’;
and in Italy rumors spread about gypsy women trying to catch children
and hide them under their skirts. But the ‘Killer Clowns’ panics were
not quite the same. What made them different was that they were
caused by an urban legend that circulated exclusively among children by
word of mouth” (Bennett and Smith 2007). Fortean Times (1996)
magazine reported on several cases of rumors of kidnapper clowns in
Latin America, including a story claiming that “on 2 November 1995,
60 clowns gathered in the capital of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Hondu-
ras, to burn their costumes in protest over reports of kidnappers dressed
as clowns bundling children into vans.” Phantom-clown reports reap-
peared in Kent, England, shortly before Halloween 2015 (see Radford
2015b) and the scare followed a similar pattern as previous episodes. It
seems likely that the world has not heard the last of the phantom
clowns—real or not.

[Burnt Hill]

Growing up in Brooklyn, I was scared of this clown everyday-





And yet every Halloween Mom made me up like this clown-




maybe explains a lot...

[Nordic]

"Sweet tooth" is such a great name for a villain or a gangster.

[Sounder]

It seems likely that the world has not heard the last of the phantom
clowns—real or not.

Our concepts regarding what is 'real or not' are in need of expansion.

The Buddhists say tulpas are illusory created thought forms. But then again they say our self is illusory also.

Tulpas require focus and will to create, just like our own more mundane lives. If they (tulpas, phantom clowns, bigfoot) are 'created' where do they come from or out of?

There is room here in this very space for 'many worlds'. Occasionally they intrude on each other, -so naturally the 'aliens' buzz military installations more than other places.

We are not only screwing our own world, we impact other layers of reality at the same time. It seems best that people do not know this because it could make humans more slovenly than they already are waiting for mr. fixit.

Young teens, usually young women have been known to cause objects to fly about, the fairly well accepted poltergeist phenomena. What moves the objects may be similar in nature to what causes certain 'apparitions' to have clear characteristics of being real..

[elfismiles]

Creepy Clown Sightings in South Carolina Cause a Frenzy
By KATIE ROGERSAUG. 30, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/31/us/cr ... .html?_r=0

[8bitagent]

August 4th 2016
"Creepy clown with black balloons wandering Wisconsin"
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... /88063684/


"Mysterious Clowns Terrorizing California City"
2014
http://abcnews.go.com/US/mysterious-clo ... d=26157014
"Residents of a California city are being terrorized by people dressed as clowns, some reportedly wielding machetes or baseball bats, police said. "



Oct 2014
"Creepy clowns pop up in Jacksonville"
http://www.news4jax.com/news/local/cree ... cksonville

Nov 2015
Wisconsin town terrorized by clown at night
http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015 ... -wisconsin

sept 2013
"Creepy Clown Terrorizing A Small Town "
http://thoughtcatalog.com/nico-lang/201 ... eep-again/

[Novem5er]

Good stuff, 8bitagent. I remember about the California clowns last year or so. Seems obviously a prank, but a disturbing one, hah.

Back at Greenville, it's still happening. Strange, though, nobody has snapped a cellphone picture of these clowns.

More sightings

There were sightings this week too, at a different apartment complex. Monday night someone called the police when they said they saw two people dressed as clowns in their backyard. And there was a sighting Tuesday night at the apartment’s playground area, said Franco. This time, the neighborhood kids said they chased the clowns into a vehicle, which drove off.

Franco said Greenville police are checking surveillance video from around the apartment complexes to see if anything pops up.

Since the sightings have spread from an apartment complex in Greenville County to one in the city of Greenville, the sheriff’s office and the police department are coordinating their efforts, Franco said.

“We’re working together to make sure we have the same leads and follow ups,” he said.

http://ktla.com/2016/08/31/authorities-receive-more-reports-of-clowns-trying-to-lure-kids-into-south-carolina-woods/

[seemslikeadream]

Horripilante Payaso

[Cordelia]

Sterling Hayden in Kubrick film 'The Killing'



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAe1CJWH_B8

[stillrobertpaulsen]

What the hell is going on? ‘Creepy clown’ panic spreads from South Carolina to Ohio
David Ferguson
02 Sep 2016 at 11:49 ET


Actor Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown from the film adaptation of Stephen King's 'It' (Castle Rock Entertainment)

More residents in South Carolina and now Ohio are reporting sightings of “creepy clowns” trying to lure children into the woods.

According to Fox 6 News, the sightings have been occurring since Aug. 23, with more and more residents of the Greenville and Spartanburg areas of South Carolina reporting seeing the ominous figures in the woods.

NBC News reported on Thursday night that a 14-year-old boy in Columbus, Ohio told police a knife-wielding man in a clown costume chased him on the way to the school bus stop.

Fox Carolina published a timeline of the sightings, which began Aug. 21 at Fleetwood Manner apartments in Greenville. A group of children saw a clown in the woods behind the basketball court.

“I thought my child was seeing things,” said resident Donna Arnold. “And then the next day I had about 30 kids come up to me and say, ‘Did you see the clown in the woods?’”

The Greenville County Sheriff’s Department and Greenville Police have launched a joint investigation into the sightings, which have continued through this week and spread to other complexes in the area.

Greenville County Master Deputy Sheriff Ryan Flood told reporters that police have found no evidence of any kind at this time of clowns or menacing activity, but said, “We’ve increased our patrols in the area just to be sure that if there are any clowns, we’ll address it and handle it accordingly.”

“This type of call in particular where people are alleging that the clowns are being used to lure children, of course we are going to take that seriously,” he said.

“But to this day,” Flood said, “nothing has been substantiated with any kind of evidence or video surveillance.”

The clowns have appeared in daytime and at night. They have been described as wearing circus attire with white-painted faces. In some instances they have displayed large sums of cash to the children in an effort to entice them into the woods.

On Tuesday night, a pair of clowns got chased by children through an apartment complex, but escaped in a car driven by a third person in clown makeup and clothes. On Wednesday, a boy named Evan saw a clown in a wooded area while walking home from school.

“My mama told me that she called the cops and I knew she wasn’t playing and I’m being serious about this,” the boy said. “I’m not gonna joke around about something like this. This is serious.”

WYFF Channel 4 said that the entire phenomenon may be a publicity stunt for the film 31 by musician turned movie director Rob Zombie.

In the meantime, police are urging parents to keep an eye on their children and not allow them to leave home unsupervised.

“We want to make sure parents are still remain vigilant and to make sure you keep track of your children playing, don’t leave them playing isolated,” said Officer Gilberto Franco with the Greenville Police Department.

Watch video about this story, embedded below:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOZSNgbaN2w