North Carolina Man Arrested For Making a False Statement About Evil Clown Knocking On His Window At Night

So I saw many commenters discussing this Evil Clown sighting story last week.

Police say a person dressed as a clown disappeared into the woods after being chased by a man wielding a machete on Tuesday -- the third incident involving a clown in as many days in the Greensboro, North Carolina area.

The North Carolina incidents come after multiple reports of clowns attempting to lure kids into the woods in South Carolina last week.

A "local witness reported that a person wearing a scary clown mask, red curly wig, yellow dotted shirt, blue clown pants and clown shoes exited the woods," near an apartment complex, Greensboro police said in a statement. "Upon seeing the clown, another witness -- an adult male -- ran after it yielding a machete. The clown ran back into the woods and disappeared from view."

One man has been arrested for filing a false report about an evil clown sighing.

One thing worries me here, and it's not the clowns. Before 9/11, we had a "Summer of Sharks" as the media did its usual preferred job of selling fake stories to the public for traffic. It's not that there weren't shark attacks that summer; it's that there are always shark attacks, and the shark attacks of the summer of 2001 weren't noticeably worse than those of previous summers.

It's just that the stories started to get traction in a slow-news environment, and then Shark Stories because a quick and easy way to draw eyeballs.

I always worry about that now when I see some silly story being talked about, that it presages another big terrorist attack. I know that's irrational.

But who knows. If there's a Wisdom of the Crowd, who knows, maybe there's a Subconscious Nagging Worry of the Crowd too. Maybe everyone is looking for a scary story because we know, instinctively, that there's something out there we should be worried about.

So the evil clowns have me worried about terrorists, the original evil clowns.

I'm sure that's just me being silly though.

posted by Ace at 05:10 PM

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