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On the Media

Scary Clowns

On the Media

WNYC Studios

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4.68.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2017

⏱️ 13 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

October is a time of tradition: changing leaves, fall harvest, Halloween and ... clown terror.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Ah, autumn. The days are getting shorter. The leaves are changing. Halloween is on its way. And tradition. So much tradition.

0:10.4

New tonight at six, clown sightings in Ironton, Ohio. No joke. Police say they have been

0:15.8

swarmed with sightings all over town with scary clowns just, you know, walking down the sidewalk.

0:21.2

Yep, they're back.

0:23.6

Last year at this time, to believe the reporting, the country was overrun with evil clowns,

0:29.7

terrorizing communities across the USA.

0:32.7

Cracking down on clowns spotted in six Central Ohio communities.

0:37.5

A group of girls told Annapolis Police it happened on their walk to school.

0:41.8

Monday morning, they spotted a creepy clown.

0:44.5

Plus, with Halloween on the way, scary clown sightings have communities on edge from

0:49.9

South Jersey to New York.

0:51.5

Reports of creepy clown sightings caused mayhem at UMass, Amherst, and Penn State, too.

0:56.3

Cell phone video shows hundreds of students running through campus trying to hunt down the clown.

1:00.8

As I said last year around this time, the clown situation is out of control.

1:06.9

That's from an interview we did with Benjamin Radford, author of Bad Clowns and a research fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

1:15.6

With Clowns making their annual resurgence, we're re-airing that interview to remember our historic and cultural relationship with clown sightings.

1:25.4

The phenomenon that we've seen over the past month or so is a comedy of two different things.

1:30.5

The first one is stalker clowns, and these are people who dress up as clowns, usually teenagers, sometimes young adults.

1:37.4

They're on darkened street corners, they're at parks at night.

1:40.4

They don't actually harm anyone.

1:42.4

They're just sort of standing around looking weird

1:44.5

and strange out of place. The other type of clown is the phantom clowns. Clown hysteria

...

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