A babysitter is having an easy time babysitting - the child went to bed well, and now it's late and everything's going well. There's just one thing, an old clown statue that kind of freaks her out. The parents call to check up on her, and she mentions it to them.

There's a pause.

"We don't have a clown statue."

Originally (probably) harmless jokers, the descendant of the jester... turned into something scary... turned into now murder clowns terrorizing (mostly) the Eastern half of the United States.

Clowns are something sort of alien to normal people. They're supposed to be happy and fun, they have garish red smiles painted on their lips and they're supposed to dance in ruffled costume and make children laugh. But something like that slips into the uncanny valley, and something like that can turn a red smile into something that looks painted out of blood. And when you have popular horror authors such as Stephen King writing books about clowns, evil clowns that live in the sewer system and eat kids, well, then you're going to have a stock of people upset about clowns... especially when said clowns don't seem to be confined to the pages of a horror book anymore. When there are reports of clowns hanging out in playgrounds, in wooded areas behind homes, going up to security cameras and looking straight into them. When the reports were that these clowns were originally harmless but then more and more start pouring in and oh no, it turns out these clowns do want to hurt us...

The question is, of course, who are these clowns? Random sickos who think it's a fun idea to sneak into someone's backyard and try to lure their children away with candy? People who get the idea from the movies, from the novel IT, where the titular clown uses his clown facade to lure children closer? People do thinks like that. Get ideas from movies. Or is it something deeper? There's no use denying that these clowns did spread west. They all sort of originated in New England - a place where, incidentally enough, the Stephen King novel took place - and then they spread westward.

A gang of clowns. A gang of people in clown suits ready to kill. A gang that will most likely be active this Halloween - a Halloween that has the capacity to be fun for these clowned-up pranksters. I don't know why people are afraid of clowns, but I do know that these monster clowns aren't helping anyone's coulrophobia. Especially not when you see a picture of one standing still, in the trees. A blurry, low-resolution photograph showing a blur of something menacing.

And with this in mind, with those urban legends in mind, what's next? What urban legends will spring straight from campfire stories like it's Urban Legend and, well, you'd better not turn on the light the next time you come back from class and your roommate is (probably) sleeping? Will it be the hook-handed maniac preying on teenagers in parked cars? Escaped mental patients in bunny costumes? Humans that, hey, can lick too? And will it be like the movie, where humans are perpetrating all of these strange things, or will it turn into something a little more than natural? Who's to say it hasn't already?

Either way, these clowns wandering around aren't normal. It may have started as one person who thought it would be funny to dress up in a clown costume and freak people out, but now, with several of them carrying guns... machetes... standing in cemeteries... smashing pumpkins on people's front porches...

Well, there's definitely something a little bit weird, a little bit sinister, about that.