Clusters of Creepy Clowns
If you follow the news, you've probably heard about the spate of creepy clown sightings in South Carolina and elsewhere. It's not just one or two, but many, and there's a clear pattern to the reports. I discuss this subject at length in my new book Bad Clowns of course, but here's a quick overview of the situation, and why these incidents seem to happen in clusters...
These incidents seem to happen in clusters for several reasons. For my book Bad Clowns I analyzed several years of these stalker clown reports, and there are three factors at play.
The first is the season: in each of the past three years there have been scary clown sightings in September, October, or both. The timing is of course not coincidental, but is tied to Halloween—a season when masked monsters are family fun and scaring people is part of the culture.
The second factor in the creepy clown clusters is the copycat effect: these creepy clown appearances feed and fuel each other. When one person makes the news for doing nothing more than dressing as a clown and standing on a streetcorner at night—and not just the local news but likely national news—it provides strong incentive for others to do the same, to pull their own stunt. It’s a low-risk, high yield prank that is virtually guaranteed to result in the creepy clown going viral all over the world (indeed, several of the scary clowns have turned out to be publicity stunts for exactly that reason). There’s very little chance of getting into trouble unless you actively harass or menace someone, since wearing a clown costume is not illegal.
The third factor has to do with social contagion—not mass hysteria exactly, but the psychological tendency for people to see what they expect to see, or are told to look for. In most of these cases we have proof that the sightings are of a real person in clown costume; it’s not a hallucination or optical illusion. But in a few cases, in the cases of the so-called “phantom clowns,” people (almost exclusively children) report or repeat rumors and myths, sometimes claiming to have personally seen scary clowns when they did not.
These incidents seem to happen in clusters for several reasons. For my book Bad Clowns I analyzed several years of these stalker clown reports, and there are three factors at play.
The first is the season: in each of the past three years there have been scary clown sightings in September, October, or both. The timing is of course not coincidental, but is tied to Halloween—a season when masked monsters are family fun and scaring people is part of the culture.
The second factor in the creepy clown clusters is the copycat effect: these creepy clown appearances feed and fuel each other. When one person makes the news for doing nothing more than dressing as a clown and standing on a streetcorner at night—and not just the local news but likely national news—it provides strong incentive for others to do the same, to pull their own stunt. It’s a low-risk, high yield prank that is virtually guaranteed to result in the creepy clown going viral all over the world (indeed, several of the scary clowns have turned out to be publicity stunts for exactly that reason). There’s very little chance of getting into trouble unless you actively harass or menace someone, since wearing a clown costume is not illegal.
The third factor has to do with social contagion—not mass hysteria exactly, but the psychological tendency for people to see what they expect to see, or are told to look for. In most of these cases we have proof that the sightings are of a real person in clown costume; it’s not a hallucination or optical illusion. But in a few cases, in the cases of the so-called “phantom clowns,” people (almost exclusively children) report or repeat rumors and myths, sometimes claiming to have personally seen scary clowns when they did not.
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Ben Radford's Blog of Booky Things
Hi there, and welcome to my GoodReads Blog of Booky Things. I have other blogs where I pontificate on various topics ranging from critical thinking to urban legends, ghosts to chupacabras, films to bo
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