In late August this year, a concerned mother in Greenville, South Carolina reported to the police that her son had seen clowns in the woods moaning and making other strange noises.  The young boy said that the clowns were trying to lure him to come further into the woods with them. However, this was not an isolated incident. Since this first report, clowns have been spotted in over 2 dozen states.

 In some cases, it seems that many people have just jumped on the bandwagon of dressing up as clowns to try and actually scare people, go viral on social media, or for a joke. A video of a clown sighting can instantly get thousands of likes or retweets on a social media platform such as Twitter. Sadly, this is not a laughing matter. Seven people in Alabama were arrested and charged with making a terrorist threat connected to clown-related activity. A school district in Connecticut banned clown costumes because they were considered a symbols of terror. Also, a college in Massachusetts had to go under a lockdown when a group of armed clowns came into the area and terrorized people on the street.

 People everywhere, young and old, have been participating in a new activity called “clown hunting.” Most of the time, no clowns are found, but there are always a few cases where people came face to face with one of them. These clowns are being spotted in the Raleigh area as well. Junior Summer Bitleris said, “I went out with my friends one night to see if we could find any clowns. We didn’t actually think we would see anything, but when we were driving through the neighborhood, this guy was just in a clown costume over by some trees. It was pretty creepy.” In addition to being a craze along the east coast, there have been many reports of clown sightings in California, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado.

 It is unclear why these people are dressing up as evil clowns in their free time. Because of the first incident in Greenville, people thought that they were trying to lure children into the forest to harm them. Thankfully, there have been no reports of anyone being physically hurt by one of these clowns so far. No one knows how far this will escalate, but hopefully it will never come to that point. These evil clowns have been scaring people all over the country for 3 months now, and there seems to be no end in sight. Junior Bryce Quarles stated, “I don’t know why people are still dressing up like clowns. It’s really scary and one of these days somebody is probably going to get really hurt by one of them. They’re crazy!” Everyone, especially children, should be careful when going out alone; it does not seem like these phantom clowns are going away anytime soon.