For those of you that haven’t heard, there is a, I guess you call it a phenomenon, of people dressing as clowns in the North Carolina woods and trying to lure people into the woods. Yes, I’m dead serious.

Reports first started surfacing in late August of eerie looking clowns hanging out around the perimeters of the woods trying to get kids to follow them. The reports say that the clowns have offered the kids money (new strategy, but ok) to follow them, and people were able to identify a small house in the end of a clearing where these people could supposedly be hiding out. The house was empty when investigated, however.

These have continued into the last couple of days, but no one has been able to find these clowns or even successfully follow them into the woods. One man tried, machete and all, but apparently these clowns are quite the athletes because they managed to outrun him and completely disappear. These people are supposedly dressed in white overalls with a white face and red shoes and a nose, so pretty accurately clown-like, but are a lot more sinister than just the run of the mill birthday party clown.

This has caused tensions to run high in these little towns where people are chasing them with machetes, and people are being indicted for falsely reporting a clown sighting. As you can imagine, these poor souls are living completely on edge because they are living (literally) in a horror movie. Not in the sense that they’re perpetually scared or that tensions are really high in these small towns, but that there are actually potentially killer clowns just hanging around people’s residences.

This was one of those topics that I read and was mixed between wanting to laugh about what was talked about but also completely terrified and making a vow that I will never go to North Carolina ever, and I’m still unsure how I feel about this. The scary part to me is the unknown of it all. No one can identity who these humans are, or what they want, and quite honestly, no one has even seen them aside from those people making the reports. It’s one of those things where the dichotomy of the absurdity and the terror just seem to continue to battle and no one knows how to feel about this.

Now, there’s a possibility that this is a hoax given the lack of evidence, but who in their right mind would make up such a sinister thing that would put an entire town in complete terror? I guess probably the same people who would dress up as clowns on the edge of town, if we’re being honest. It’s just too absurd to be false, in my humble opinion. It’s also quite comical that in an age of such heightened news constantly with the election, and the problems we face internationally, that this kind of thing still catches the news and dumfounds two states in the process.

I guess we’ll never know exactly who these humans are or what they want, but here’s hoping Stephen King is right that it’s just a phase and it will, undoubtedly pass.