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This Rash Of Carolina Clown Sightings Even Has Stephen King Freaked Out, You Guys

YouTube screenshot/CBS This Morning, Shutterstock/Sergey Shubin

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Legendary horror-fiction writer Stephen King said that the recent rash of strange, creepy clown sightings in South Carolina and North Carolina is as unnerving to him as it is to pretty much everyone else.

“Kids love clowns, but they also fear them,” King told the Bangor Daily News — his hometown newspaper — on Friday. “Clowns with their white faces and red lips are so different and so grotesque compared to ‘normal’ people.”

“Take a little kid to the circus and show him a clown, he’s more apt to scream with fear than laugh,” King added.

King developed his expertise on the subject of terrifying clowns, of course, when he wrote the 1986 novel “It,” which involves a demonic, supernatural entity that shows up in a small town as a clown to prey on young children.

Witnesses have described the clown — or clowns — terrorizing South Carolina and North Carolina as dressed in traditional clown garb — curly red hair, comically large shoes, the whole nine yards. Some people say they have seen the clown figures wearing a scary mask and carrying a machete. Others have said the clown tried to lure children into a wooded area near an apartment complex.

Approximately six clown sightings have been reported to various police departments this summer, reports The Washington Post.

Police in Greenville, N.C. have said they will arrest anyone dressed as a clown if they believe the clown is terrorizing people.

King said he thinks the Carolina clown is probably just a garden-variety crazy person who wants to attack people.

“I suspect it’s a kind of low-level hysteria, like Slender Man, or the so-called Bunny Man, who purportedly lurked in Fairfax County, Virginia, wearing a white hood with long ears and attacking people with a hatchet or an axe,” King told the Bangor Daily News. “The clown furor will pass, as these things do, but it will come back, because under the right circumstances, clowns really can be terrifying.”

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