Let me paint a picture for you:

You're living at an off-campus house. The entire off-campus's electricity is being shut off at a specified time. You're well aware of this, you've known about this. It's all well and good...until you hear there is a person dressed as a clown going around to the college campuses and the clown is armed.

Now this just sounds like a bad horror movie (or maybe a really good one, who knows!) just waiting to happen. All I know is, it's not a movie. Those are real people who feel unsafe and whether the threat is substantiated or not, the rumor shouldn't have been spread in the first place.

So I ask: what the is going on with these clowns?

Recently, this has been happening all over the country. People are calling law-enforcement about clown sighting, some of them armed and some of them just creepy as hell. Some claim they're trying to lure children into the woods, others are saying their cars are being chased. Merrimack College was recently put on lock-down only to find no evidence of a clown. And that's how most of the stories end, the police come and find nothing. But does that mean there was nothing there?

Looking at this logically, people in the community very well may be dressing up in creepy clown attire and be "terrorizing" the area, but when the police are called these people can run off and blend right back into the people who are afraid of the clown There's nothing saying that people are making them up. But unless there is photo or video evidence, it's hard to really say it's a true event.

On the other hand, a lot of these stories come from college campuses. Everyone knows that around Halloween (October is Halloween, right?) the students tend to...take the holiday very seriously. Yes, it is possible they're making it up to scare their fellow classmates. But if we look at every possible sighting this way, as the boy who cried wolf, what happens when something actually happens.

All I can say with almost certainty is that whoever is dressing up or making the fake phone calls gets some type of sick sadistic pleasure out of seeing people terrified. Those are the people who would work in the haunted house that's allowed to injure people (Don't think this is a thing? Click here.) So I warn you, take every threat as real until proven not. The last thing you want to do is find yourself in an unsafe condition just because the boy cried wolf. In the end of that story, he gets eaten.