Scary Clown Story - Urban Legend

Have you heard the scary clown story? The urban legend about the babysitter and the clown statue? NO? Well let me tell you all about it……….

A couple with children were trying out a new babysitter. About an hour after they left for a night on the town, they realized they had forgotten to give her their cell phone number, so one of them called her.

After she wrote down the number, the babysitter asked if she could watch satellite TV in their bedroom. She had just put the children to bed and wanted to watch a particular show. (The parents didn’t want their children watching too much garbage, so the living room TV did not have satellite channels.)

Well of course she could watch TV in their room, they replied. The babysitter had one other request: could she put a sheet or blanket over the clown statue that was in the bedroom? It kind of made her nervous. Take the children and go to the neighbors, said whichever parent was talking to her. We’ll call the police. We don’t have a clown statue.

The police caught the clown as he was running through the neighborhood.

Are you scared Yet? Well don’t be, it’s just an urban legend.

In the Spring of 2004, we began picking up many versions of the story, one in which the babysitter appears to be the person at risk, and one where the children are the presumed targets of the lurking man’s malice. In the stories that feature the clown having been found in the parents’ bedroom, the slant of the tale leads readers to assume it is the babysitter, not her charges, that are the predator’s primary focus. (The tot-tending teen having been selected as the killer’s (next) victim is a key element in another urban legend: the classic “Babysitter and the Man Upstairs,” in which the sitter receives a series of disturbing phone calls entreating her to check on the sleeping children and so put herself in the room with the murderer.)

Significantly, all the tellings we have so far encountered terminate in the bad guy not only running from the house but being captured by the police and so brought to justice. Could this indicate a subtle shift in how safe we as a society feel about our world, in that it now strikes us as right that a scary story complete with the villain giving up his evil plans and running away when confronted with discovery yet even so not being able to elude the police?

Only rarely does the legend offer any explanation for why the skulking intruder chooses to pass himself off as a statue in preference to just attacking willy-nilly.

Clown