The Phantom Clown Panic

by Ben Radford
August 12, 2025

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The clown panic of 2016 can be traced back to a bizarre incident in August of that year. Creepy clowns were reported in Greenville, South Carolina, allegedly luring children into the woods behind a block of apartments. It was scary and alarming — whether real or rumor.

Most of the handful of reports were from children. No one was actually harmed by the menacing clowns, who children claimed live in a house located near a pond at the end of a trail in the woods. Police who investigated this sinister Hansel and Gretel-like tale found no signs of suspicious activity, nor anyone dressed as a clown.

According to an ABC News story at the time, "One resident said she was in front of her apartment one evening when one of her sons 'approached her and stated that he [had] seen clowns in the woods whispering and making strange noises.' The resident added that she 'went over to the area that her son mentioned and observed several clowns in the woods flashing green laser lights' before seeing them run off."

If this report is to be credited, it suggests that pranksters were afoot — perhaps teenagers with store-bought clown masks and laser pointers having fun in the months leading up to Halloween. Either way, it was only the latest in a series of creepy clown reports; in fact there had been several earlier sightings across the country, but none of that profile.

Most evil clowns are fictional, though a few (such as serial killer John Wayne Gacy) are real. But there are other bad clowns reported to roam streets and parks looking for innocent children to abduct — yet seem to vanish just before police can apprehend them. Some say they are real, while others claim they are figments of imagination. They are known as phantom clowns, a phrase coined by author Loren Coleman in his book Mysterious America.

Phantom Clowns

As discussed in my book Bad Clowns, one of the earliest reports of phantom clowns occurred in May 1981, when several children in Brookline, Massachusetts, reported that clowns had tried to lure them into a van with promises of candy. Police searched the area but found nothing. The following day Boston parents and police grew worried when children there claimed that adult clowns had been bothering children on their way to school. Other reports surfaced in other cities and in later years, with the same pattern: Parents were fearful, children were warned and police were vigilant, but despite searches and police checkpoints no evidence was ever found of their existence.

Though the public and police didn't know what to make of the panic, folklorists and sociologists had been studying them for years. Folklorists Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell, writing in their book Supernatural Enemies, researched phantom clown panics and concluded that parents, police, and the mass media all played a role in spreading and legitimizing the rumors: "One student reports that older children told the stories to frighten younger ones. Others appear to assume that the story derives from an actual incident, even though it may have become exaggerated in the telling." When teachers, police, parents, and news media share warnings about the threat, that further legitimizes the reports.

In their 2024 book Social Panics and Phantom Attackers, Robert Bartholomew and Paul Weatherhead examine phantom attacker panics. These cases typically begin with outbreaks of sensational claims of attacks by elusive mysterious figures who frighten the public and then seem to vanish without a trace, leaving few if any serious injuries — but many questions. Some of the most recognizable events include the panics surrounding The War of the Worlds radio play, the Monkey Man, Havana Syndrome, Satanists during the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, and many others.

The clown panics fit neatly in this category. Were the evil clown sightings phantom attackers? Well, yes — and no. Though there were no actual clowns trying to abduct or harm strangers, there were of course copycats (lots of them) who were definitely trying to scare people, for fun, clicks, or both.

Throughout the phantom clown panic, no hard evidence was ever found, and — more importantly — no children were actually abducted. This suggests that some form of social delusion or mass hysteria was at play. If the clowns were real, why were they so invariably incompetent? Surely at least one of the bad clowns would have succeeded. Any real clown could easily abduct a child at a birthday party and spirit the victim off to a waiting van. Dressing as a clown is guaranteed to draw attention, which is exactly the opposite of what real-life child abductors want to do.

Digging a little deeper into the original Greenville sightings, we find an odd detail: an August 21 report from the Greenville County Sheriff's Office noted that "Several children of the community stated that several clowns have been appearing in the woods behind building 'D' and try to persuade them into the woods further by displaying large amounts of money."

This is a curious (and suspicious) detail. Malicious clowns might be expected to lure children with candy or ice cream — but big stacks of Benjamins? Flashing wads of cash can draw a crowd anywhere, and no clown costume is needed. It seems like an example of urban folklore in the making, perhaps fueled in part by creepy clown sightings in the news and the recent release of publicity photos of the Stephen King killer clown Pennywise from the (then) upcoming remake of It.

The Greenville clown reports were likely either pranksters, mistakes (for example assuming that a bang on a door must have been caused by an unseen clown), legend, or a combination of all three. The chances that one or more people dressed as clowns are actually trying to abduct kids is vanishingly remote. Many people likely recognized this, but parents and police understandably err on the side of caution, deciding it's better to be safe than sorry.

But it didn't go away, and soon the panic spread. Viral videos and threats, many of them originating (or shared) on social media, resulted in increased police patrols and in some cases full lockdowns. In September 2016 police in Flomaton Alabama investigated what were deemed credible threats to students at Flomaton High School shared via social media. The "Flomo Klowns" had a Facebook page where they said, "I kill people for a living" and displayed several gun emojis. One post stated, "it's going down tonight." About 700 students at Flomaton High School and nearby Flomaton Elementary School were told to shelter in place while the schools, following protocol, were placed on lockdown for much of the day while dozens of police and other law enforcement officers searched the grounds for threats. The digital trail led FBI investigators to one adult and two teens. Twenty-two-year old Makayla Smith of Flomaton was arrested for making a terroristic threat while posting as an evil clown. She pled guilty and in 2018 received a sentence of five years of probation.

This string of other incidents left parents and teachers wondering if the "clown lockdowns" were the new normal. In another Alabama school threat, two people dressed as clowns appeared in a Facebook video brandished a knife and ranted for several minutes about "coming for you in Troy, Alabama." Police identified the two in the video, which had been seen more than 50,000 times, as juveniles who attend Charles Henderson High School in Troy. Police did not charge the two boys but warned other potential copycats that such pranks would not be tolerated.

The rumors can, of course, have serious consequences. Though children have little to fear from stalking clowns, the urban legend may pose a real danger; in the Greenville reports, alarmed citizens fired weapons into the wooded area, hoping to kill any clowns lurking there. Fortunately no one was hurt, but the situation could have turned deadly. Amid the rumors and scares an eleven-year-old girl in Georgia took a knife to her middle school to fight off clowns. The girl was arrested September 16 at Burney-Harris-Lyons Middle School in Athens; a police report quoted the unnamed minor as saying she needed the knife to protect her and her family from the clowns she'd heard were coming out of the woods and attacking children.

By mid-October the scary clown panic had spread across the country to dozens of states. The creepy clown panic became so serious that it was addressed in an October 4 White House briefing; press secretary Josh Earnest said, "I don't know that the president has been briefed on this particular situation... Obviously, this is a situation that local law enforcement authorities take quite seriously, and they should carefully and thoroughly review perceived threats to the safety of the community, and they should do so prudently."

Aside from the videos, many of the real-life reports were later admitted to be hoaxes; for example a North Carolina man who falsely claimed that a scary clown had knocked on his window at night was arrested for faking the incident, and an Ohio woman claimed that a knife-wielding clown attacked her on her way to work and cut her hand, but later admitted she made up the story because she was running late for her job at... McDonald's.

There were also a handful of people dressing as clowns and scaring people. A pair of Canadian teenagers dressed as clowns had fun in a park scaring younger kids, and in Wisconsin a clown seen at night was revealed to be part of a viral marketing campaign for a scary film. A year earlier, a creepy clown was sighted outside a Chicago cemetery. In some cases both adults and schoolchildren admitted to making up stories of seeing threatening clowns.

Any other time reports of threatening clowns would likely have been ignored or dismissed, but these incidents came at a time when very real terroristic threats and school shootings were in the news. Parents can take comfort that no clowns are actually trying to abduct or harm kids — not a single credible report has surfaced of any child being hurt or even touched by a threatening clown. It's a form of the old Stranger Danger threat and moral panic, focusing on Satanists, immigrants, and the scary Other.

Social panics and phantom attacker scares recur, and just as the 2016 clown panic was not the first of its kind, it also will not be the last. When the next one happens — and it will — keep in mind that the best defense against these panics is media literacy, skepticism, and critical thinking.

By Ben Radford