For over six years the past and the curious has been winning fans sharing stories of real people from the past and making people smile.

I'm mix Sullivan author of I see Lincoln's underpants which is a book about well famous people's underwear. You'll find all of those

stories and much much more in the 100 plus episodes of the Past and the Curious that are currently

available.

Find it in all the usual podcast places.

The Past and the Curious with Mick Sullivan!

That's me. In the summer of 2016, the Sheriff's Office in Greenville County, South Carolina received a panicked phone call.

Children at an apartment complex set a group of people offered them money to come into the woods nearby.

No one was harmed, the children are safe.

So there's not an emergency, but of course the sheriff wants to get to the bottom of this.

In taking down information for the report they ask for a detailed description of these people.

Did the children recognize any of them?

No, they didn't recognize any of them?

No, they didn't recognize any of them. We don't know what they looked like because they were all dressed like clowns.

A flurry of clown sightings followed. A woman in the same town saw a clown under a streetlight when she was walking home one night. The clown waved. She waved back. People began drawing connections between clown sightings in U.S. cities and cities all over the world.

Hardly any of these sightings had actual crimes associated with them.

In most of them, people just saw the clowns.

Which begs the question, why were they assuming they were all evil? Of course we should say that it's completely wrong to dress up like a clown

and try to get kids to come into the woods. But what if there's just a clown

standing somewhere? Most of us would probably be scared, or at least creeped out, right?

So has it always been this way?

Have clowns always been upsetting? I'm Elise Perijian and we will look at the history of

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