In late August last year in Greenville, South Carolina, a little boy in Alabama ran to his mom with a odd story. Two people dressed in clown garb - one with a red wig, the other with a black star on his face - had tried to lure him into the woods. And so it began.
Clowns began appearing like pumpkins at fall festivals. Calls came pouring in at the Greenville County police's office, as both children and adults reported clown sightings near apartment complexes and at the edge of the woods. In Spartanburg, also South Carolina, there were reports of clowns trying to lure kids into the woods with treats.
By September, North Carolina cities Greensboro, Marion and Winston-Salem were affected. Florida also began receiving a rash of clown incidents. What all these sightings had in common were apartment complexes and woods. Spooked out people fired shots into the woods.
On September 30, 2016, the creepy clown uprising had made its way overseas - in the UK, Newcastle police were grappling with a creepy clown of its own.
Soon the clown sightings were everywhere. On Facebook, concerned parents were unwittingly spreading the news, and accounts with menacing-looking clowns popped up in all social media. With Halloween around the corner in the US, some people vowed to attack clowns on sight. It was mayhem.
With increased police surveillance and worldwide attention, the sightings soon decreased but didn't die down. Halloween is again just around the corner, and we can guess at least a few more clowns are going to pop up.
The Creepy Clown Uprising of 2016 even has its own horror movie in the works: Behind the Sightings, directed by Tony Cadwell, coming out in October 2017. Sooner than that, Stephen King's It will terrorize a fresh new crop of millennial teens.