Horror/Paranormal/Urban Legend/Murder Cases

Ch. 8 The clown statue

If you get easily frightened then I advise you not to read this story. This will give you nightmare and you will be frightened in the end.

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Clowns. Some people love 'em, others are scared silly by them. The urban legend of the clown statue falls into the scary category and has been making the internet rounds for at least a decade. And even though this tale has never been proven real, stories of killer clowns are based in fact.

This creepy or what?

A few years ago a mother and a father decided they needed a break, so they wanted to head out for a night on the town. So they called their most trusted babysitter. When the babysitter arrived the two children were already fast asleep in bed. So the babysitter just got to sit around and make sure everything was okay with the children.

Later in the night, the babysitter got bored and so she wanted to watch tv but she couldn't watch it downstairs because they didn't have cable downstairs so she called them and asked them if she could watch cable tv in the parents room. Of course the parents said it was ok, but the babysitter had one final request. She asked if she could cover up the large clown statue in their bedroom with a blanket or cloth, because it made her nervous. The phone line was silent for a moment, and the father (who was talking to the babysitter at the time) said...take the children and get out of the house...we'll call the police...we don't have a clown statue...the children and the babysitter got murdered by the clown. It turned out to be that the clown was a killer that escaped from jail. In other versions of this story, the clown is actually a midget who has escaped from a local jail. He hides in the house to avoid capture and poses like a statue to avoid detection. In other versions, the intruder is a murderous sex offender with designs on the babysitter.

ANALYSIS

Like "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs," this urban legend pits a lone teenage babysitter against a male intruder who has surreptitiously entered the house. It's disturbing on many counts, not least the hint of pedophilia in the revelation that the "midget disguised as a clown" has been spying on or playing with someone's children before his presence in the house is discovered.

It may be that an urban legend like this one is inspired by real-life events in the 1970s, '80s, and later. The best known is John Wayne Gacy, who during the mid-1970s murdered 33 young men and buried their bodies under his Chicago home. The media christened him the "killer clown" because he was known for hosting neighborhood parties at which he dressed up as a clown. Gacy was eventually convicted and put to death for his crimes in 1994, but his legend lives on in documentaries, books, even clown-themed artwork Gacy painted while in prison.

It was probably the Gacy case and the publicity surrounding it that sparked a wave of phantom clown sightings in 1981. The phenomenon, as documented by Loren Coleman in "Mysterious America" (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983), originated in Boston with unconfirmed reports of men dressed as clowns trying to lure children into vans. Eventually, sightings were reported in 10 other states. In 1990, a West Palm Beach, Florida, woman was shot and killed on her doorstep by a clown sporting a bright orange wig.

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