EPISODE 4: CREEPY CLOWNS ON THE STREETS

Heather Hayes
Dec 6, 2016
2 min read

News broke out as the first sighting of scary clown appeared in Greenville, South Carolina for the first time in August this year. The sightings were first reported in South Carolina when a 9 year old boy told his mother that two males dressed up as clowns tried to lure him into the word. By mid-October sighting had been reported in nearly all states in America and 18 other countries. Sightings of the clown phenomenon began in the US since August spreading across the state then in early October first occurrences in the UK causing British communities to panic and placing pressure on police resources. Even though most incidents of involving these creepy clowns appeared to be harmless and just them watching people, a few have involved more dangerous actions leading to arrests. Arrested incidents were for making violent threats to schools and some involved stabbing, assaults and robberies on children and adults. Creepy clowns became known about due to numerous posts on the internet especially on social media of images and videos of clowns on streets or chasing people being shared and spread around leading it to become a viral topic. The repercussions/impact of the creepy clowns included McDonalds taking Ronald McDonald away from adverts, clowns costumes being banned for Halloween, warnings of clown scare, employees of theme parks being instructed to remove any horror costumes before leaving work and 2016 being names as a bad time to be a professional clown.

In this podcast I will be joined by guests Harry Jones, Emily Wilton and Tom Ainscow to talk about the creepy clowns phenomenon discussing the creepy clowns themselves, consider the reasons behind the scary clown craze and why it went viral, debating about whether we agree or disagree with what the news have been suggesting, idea of the use of clowns as the motif and society's connotations of clowns. As well hearing the opinions from our guests, we listen to the thoughts of the public and the reactions of people on how they have felt about this scary clowns craze to get. To cap it all off we talk about a hypothetical situation of what we would do if we encountered someone dressed as a clown on the streets and think about the future for the profession of clowns whether this will affect clowns who do this professionally and what has the scary clown craze done to the profession.