I've been scared of clowns ever I was a little kid. My mom has a picture of me at a friend's birthday party screaming my head off next to a clown. I was too young at the time to remember that incident, but in fairness to that particular clown, she wasn't especially creepy and was probably perfectly nice and just showed up because she was being paid to wear silly makeup and do magic tricks for toddlers. You know, back when watching someone pull a rainbow scarf out of their sleeve was the most amazing thing you'd ever seen. I'll tell you what clowns seem decidedly not friendly though, are the ones who keep popping up in multiple countries this fall. That's right, the clown sightings have now gone international. The first one was reportedly sighted in Wisconsin, followed by a string of "killer clown" sightings all across the southern United States, and now we can add sightings from England, Australia, and Canada to the mix. It's important to note, though, that it's suspected, and probably rightly so, that a lot of these sightings are pranks by people who heard about the initial sightings and decided to freak out their communities by making them think the clown epidemic had come to their neighborhood.

Even if the whole thing is a prank, It’s still pretty creepy when you consider that clowns are associated with Halloween for two reasons, Stephen King's character, Pennywise, and John Wayne Gacy, a serial killer, rapist, and pedophile who made appearances as a clown at children’s birthday parties before he was arrested. Yep, that’s where the “killer clown” trope comes from.

So besides freaking everyone out, what are the killer clowns doing? First of all, apparently the so-called "clown panic" is actually nothing new; sightings of people lurking around dressed as clowns during this time of year have been happening since the eighties, but this year there have been more sightings in a shorter length of time than ever before. The good news is that except for a few sporadic reports of the creepy clowns assaulting or harassing people or trying to lure kids into the woods, the clowns are "basically all copycats". Most people who do this are just pranksters who dress up in a weird costume, show up somewhere, and freak everyone out, but don't do much beyond that. If you want to get on the local news, this is almost always going to get some attention, and since wearing a strange costume in public isn't usually illegal as long as you're not threatening or following people, it's a low-risk attention-getter. So should you be creeped out? I certainly am. But should you be panicked? No, probably not. As bizarre as this is, most of the clowns appear to be relatively harmless. Apart from using the same common sense you'd use around anyone you don't know or a person who is behaving strangely, the clowns aren't something you should lose sleep over.