Since I was little, one of my biggest fears has been clowns. When I was younger, it was more generally people in big costumes, but clowns had always been the worst. However, it wasn’t until I went to a haunted theme park around Halloween-time that my fear was precisely centered on clowns. That night, although a lot of the attractions were scary, I was mostly frightened but the clowns.

It was one instance in particular, however, that triggered this life-long fear. The actors are hired to scare kids and target the “weak” looking ones, and I was one of those. A clown, who was covered in blood and held a chainsaw, walked over to me and my friends and I instantly panicked. That led the clown to follow me around all night and it made me very uncomfortable. At one point, I even cried from the overwhelming feelings of fear and discomfort caused by the clown. For weeks after that incident, I had continuous and recurring nightmare abut clowns and I haven’t been able to shake the fear since.

In recent news, there are many stories involving clowns. Either in parks, streets, schools and colleges campuses, etc., they have been everywhere. By terrorizing the people they meet, the clowns have been causing chaos and havoc all over the country. The whole concept of killer clowns has had a snowballing effect and people have been piggybacking off of the idea ever since. After a few small stories of actual murderers who committed their crimes while dressed as clowns, many people thought it would be a funny concept to copy and use as a mechanism to scare people during this October month full of haunts and fright. However, it has gotten to the point where it’s become excessive.

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been sightings of these clowns on practically every college campus. There have been at least 3 on my campus in the past few weeks. Not only are these reported sightings making me and everyone else around me uneasy, but the plastered clown sightings on various social media platforms have been making the clowns seemingly unavoidable. Videos and pictures have been going viral of these sightings and have been causing fear amongst many of the viewers. However, this attention on social media has just been increasing the epidemic. It has been inspiring more and more people to dress as clowns and scare people so that they can receive the same type of attention. If this continues, I believe that a lot of violence will result. Not only from the clowns who’s actual intentions are to hurt people, but also people who fight back against these clowns or form mobs to catch them.

Therefore, although awareness of the issue at hand is important, I feel that the social media platform given to the unnecessary and irrelevant chaos caused by the clowns is just fueling the fire. If we stop giving them the attention that they desire, there will be a large reduction in the number of participants. This will be a passing trend and something we roll our eyes at a year from now about how dramatized the whole situation became. For right now, however, we need to stop feeding these people attention in order to get the end result we want. No more clowns!