The Clown Scare of 1981 That Terrified Boston

With the COVID-19 pandemic I haven't been taking any long road trips to visit strange places. I've been exploring closer to home, though, and luckily there are some weird places very close by. That's one of the nice things about New England. There are spooky stories all over the place. 

Recently I took a short trip to the Lawrence School in Brookline, Massachusetts. Built in the early 20th century, the Lawrence School is part of Brookline's public school system. It's a very stately looking building, but in May of 1981 some students at the school reporting something very unusual: creepy clowns. 

Actor Lon Chaney as a clown in He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

On Tuesday, May 5, 1981 the Brookline Police received a report that two men dressed as clowns had approached children on Longwood Avenue near the Lawrence School. The men were driving a van and tried to entice the children into the van by offering them candy. According to The Boston Globe, 

The vehicle was describe as an older model black van with ladders on the side, a broken front headlight and no hubcaps.  

Brookline Police called the town's school department and told administrators to be "extra cautious." 

School Superintendent Robert I. Sperber instructed all ten elementary schools to warn pupils. (The Boston Globe, May 7, 1981, p. 21, "Beware 'clown' pupils told")

This was not an isolated incident, but was instead just one of several creepy clown sightings across greater Boston that spring. Officials in Boston's school system were told the last week of April to warn elementary and middle school pupils about sinister clowns. The memo was sent on May 6:

"It has been brought to the attention of the police department and the district office that adults dressed as clowns have been bothering children to and from school," the memo said.  

"Please advise all students," it continued, "that they must stay away from strangers, especially ones dressed as clowns." (The Boston Globe, May 7, 1981, p. 21, "Beware 'clown' pupils told")

Yes, especially ones dressed as clowns. Boston Police even issued a citywide bulletin for a clown who had been seen in a black van near Franklin Park in Roxbury and the Curley School in Jamaica Plain. He was reportedly naked from the waist down and was wanted for questioning. 

Just a few days later, though, the clown scare had died down in Boston. On May 9, The Globe reported that a clown driving a pickup was stopped by police in Randolph, but was released when they realized he was delivering a "clown-a-gram" to a department store in Canton. No other clowns were arrested because no other clowns, particularly creepy ones, could be found. There was nothing behind all the reports the police had received. 

... police officers in Boston, Cambridge, Brookline, Randolph and Canton all said yesterday that their departments had received no calls from adults who claimed to have seen clowns doing anything questionable.  

The police said virtually all reported sightings of clowns originated with children aged 5 to 7. Police could offer no evidence of any child being harassed, molested, injured or kidnapped in the metropolitan area by a person in a clown's get-up. 

No adult (civilian) or police officer has even seen a clown. We've had calls saying there was a clown at a certain intersection and happened to have (police) cars sitting there, and the officers saw nothing. When the officers get there, no one tells them anything. I don't know if someone's got a hoax going or not, but it's really foolhardy." (The Boston Globe, May 9, 1981, p. 15, "Police discount reports of clowns bothering kids")

A May 13 article in The Globe told parents how to talk with their children about 'stranger danger,' noting that 27 children had been murdered in Atlanta. The clown scare may have been a hoax, but the world could indeed be dangerous for young children. 

The Lawrence School in Brookline

That seems to be the end of the 1981 creepy clown scare in Boston, but the phenomenon popped up in other parts of the country later that spring. Author Loren Coleman notes in Mysterious America (2007) that children in Providence, Rhode Island reported scary clowns soon after the Boston clown scare, and by late May children in Kansas and Missouri were reporting the same thing. Children were seeing the clowns in Pennsylvania by June. Once again, Massachusetts was the cradle of innovation, since we brought America its first scary clown panic. I don't think tour guides on the Freedom Trail will be bragging about this one too much.

Coleman thinks that the media helped to spread the panic. Parents read about the clowns in the newspapers or saw it on TV and mentioned them to their children. The children then reported seeing the clowns, which got reported to the media. More parents read about the clowns and told their kids. And so it went. Luckily, unlike the Satanic panic that came a few years later, no innocent people were arrested.

The creepy clown phenomena first appeared in 1981, but has happened several times since then. Many of you might remember the big, nationwide clown scare in 2016. Although no one really knows why America was receptive to the idea of creepy clowns back in 1981, Coleman notes that creepy clowns (or phantom clowns, as he calls them) tend to show up in election years. That was certainly the case in 2016, and I feel like those clowns were just foreshadowing the scary circus we're living through now. Will clowns show up to scare us in time for this year's election? I hope not. We all have enough to worry about already. 

Recent UFO Sightings, Plus the UFO I Saw As A Child

While we were all busy celebrating the holidays last month, some people spent December seeing strange lights and objects in the sky. I don't think any of them were flying reindeer. Read on!

On the night of December 10, someone in the Maine town of East Baldwin reported seeing an enormous flying craft the size of a football stadium. It was accompanied by two smaller objects flying next to it. The witness had trouble seeing the largest UFO clearly, and speculates that some type of force field may have been responsible.

That's all pretty strange, but it gets stranger:

As the formation approached, I was hit with a wave of nausea, felt anxiety and fear. One of my K-9's ran off back to the house and the other cowered behind me. Both have been agitated ever since and hesitant to go out at night. I have felt ill and uneasy ever since as well. I later heard that there were an unusual number of ambulance calls in the area for anxiety or heart attacks the following day. I looked online and saw that another Maine couple in Windsor saw the giant craft that night and fell ill themselves. I am a trained observer and out every night with my dogs. I have seen many other "craft" but never so close as to be able to determine that they were not made on Earth (that we know of). I am concerned about the health effects of whatever force field overflew us at such a low altitude to make us feel instantly sick.

Yikes! That's creepy stuff. Happily, a sighting on December 5 in Kingston, New Hampshire was less traumatic. The witness was inside their house watching TV when they heard a helicopter approaching. This was unusual so the witness went outside to see what was happening. The helicopter was not yet overhead, but some type of large dark object was. It did not have any lights on it and the witness was only able to see it because it blocked out the stars overhead. Before it flew off the witness saw a single pale red light appear on the flying object. After it disappeared from view the helicopter finally appeared and flew off after it, as if in pursuit.

On December 14, someone outside taking a cigarette break from work in South Burlington, Vermont took a photo of the moon. They didn't notice anything unusual. When they went back inside and looked at the photo they noticed the following:

Is it an alien craft? A lens flare? An airplane? I don't have a clue. I suppose that's what makes these flying objects unidentified.

There were also UFO sightings during December in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Surprisingly, there weren't any reported in Rhode Island. I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps Rhode Islanders have better things to do than look up at the night sky, or maybe Rhode Island is so small that UFOs fly over it before they have a chance to be seen? OK, I'm kidding on both of those, but I do wonder why no one reported any UFOs there.

I found all these reports by looking through the MUFON database online. MUFON, or the Mutual UFO Network, has been collecting UFO reports for decades and they are a great source if you like to read about UFO sightings, which I do. I grew up in the 1970s when UFOs were everywhere in popular culture and I still have a fondness for them.

When I was very small, my brother, a young neighbor and I once saw a UFO. It was nighttime and we were standing in our backyard when we saw a very bright light descend from the sky and go down behind a hill. We were terrified. We ran into our house and told my parents what we had seen. I don't remember their response, sadly, but I don't think they were particularly concerned.

What I do remember is the amazement and fear that I felt. I had seen something from another world. It was thrilling but scary. Would we see alien creatures next? That thought terrified me. My brother and our neighbor felt the same way; our neighbor's parents were out and he refused to go home until they came back later that night. I seem to recall being afraid that something would look in my bedroom window (even though I slept on the second floor). I suppose I can understand why the witness in East Baldwin felt sick and uneasy, even if a force field was not present.

We were quite young (I was only in elementary school, if not kindergarten) and the media was full of UFO stories at the time. It's no wonder we were freaked out. Did we really just see a falling star? A lone bottle rocket? A very silent helicopter? It could have been any of those things, or maybe it was something else entirely. It truly was unidentified.

People have been seeing strange lights in the night sky since history began. In the past they might have been explained as gods, angels, ghosts, or special omens. Astronomy can now explain most of the things we see in the sky, but every now and then something still manages to slip through the cracks of rationality to remind us of the great mysteries that lurk out in the universe.