“No matter who you’re voting for we can all agree on one thing, fuck the clown.”
Hello, friends. You may have noticed that the United States of America is having a serious moment of crisis. A CLOWN crisis. It's got schools on lockdown, parents paranoid, and the police are pissed AF.
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BuzzFeed News has found:
- More than 20 states have been plagued in one way or the other by clown hysteria.
- A teenager was stabbed to death during an alleged dispute over his clown mask in Pennsylvania.
- Nearly 30 people have been arrested nationwide in connection with clown hoaxes, social media threats, robberies or stabbings. Several have been charged with felonies.
- At least four schools were forced to go on lockdown and one entire school district had to be shut down due to violent clown-related threats.
- Dozens of schools have had to ramp up security while absentee rates have increased due to clown-related threats.
- Even Stephen King was forced to calm people the fuck down.
Why has it come to this? Where did it start? How did it all go so wrong? BuzzFeed News has answers.
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1. How did it start?
The start of this clown frenzy can be traced to the South Carolina town of Greenville.
On Aug. 20, police received an anonymous call complaining about clowns being spotted in the woods behind Fleetwood Manor Apartments.
A resident of Fleetwood, who filed a police report on Aug. 21, claimed that her son had "seen clowns in the woods whispering and making strange noises" and that she herself had “observed several clowns in the woods flashing green laser lights [who] then ran away into the woods.”
Movie studios behind the upcoming films It and 31 — which, of course, involve clowns — denied conspiracy theories that they were associated with the these sightings.
News of these sightings was widely shared. Since then creepy clown sightings and threats have been reported in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, Kentucky, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, Virginia, Cincinnati, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Texas, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Los Angeles, and Connecticut.
In fact, the mass hysteria has circled right back to the Carolinas. On Thursday, police in North Carolina were investigating social media postings of clown threats made to several schools in Greensboro.
So if you want to ascribe blame to anyone, blame Fleetwood Manor residents, and well, BuzzFeed News for picking up that initial story.
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from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/2dIN4xo
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