It’s a menace stalking America — a menace called “clowning.” Alex Johnson, NBC News Journalist

To me, clowns have never been the enjoyable part of carnivals. They’re creepy, not funny, and can be pretty weird. Hollywood has utilized clowns in a number of horror movies such as the movie It, which depicts a demon that takes form as a clown to terrorize and kill children…very charming.

Fear of clowns is a trait shared almost universally. Now, I’m not talking about just a normal, jovial, happy-go-lucky clown, but the ones that have been dressing up with evil face paint, blood stained clothes, and even with the appearance of knives. I think it’s safe to say that an encounter like that would scare anyone.

In the past few months, creepy clowns have been spreading across the country terrorizing small towns, deserted roads, and even urban areas. This leaves us with many questions. What is this? A cult? How can you tell the joking clowns from the crazy ones? The list of questions is endless and this unfortunate phenomenon is becoming a nationwide trend.

The first creepy clown sightings were reported in Greenville, South Carolina, around the end of August 2016. They were seen standing around street corners with balloons and nightmarish face paint. The residents of Greenville were very worried and eventually the police were involved and concluded their investigation by discovering that these clowns were promoting a Rob Zombie film, 31. However, the clowns promoting the film were very passive and did not give threats or prompt any danger; they just scared the town people unintentionally. It wasn’t until people dressed as creepy clowns–with no affiliation with the movie–started trying to lure kids into the woods that caused residents and police to become very worried. With so much news coverage on the clown sightings, people decided they would make it a trend. In the past two months, this creepy clown epidemic has spread to 10 different states, including Illinois.

The word epidemic has become a common use due to the threats some of these clowns deliver. Multiple school shootings have been threatened as well as people being chased by clowns with knives and other weapons. The craze of this trend is becoming dangerous with high school teens finding it funny to post threats of them claiming to be a clown and terrorizing a list of schools. Ohio schools were closed one day when a woman reported being attacked by a clown while smoking on her porch. She described her attacker to have been wearing a striped outfit along with a clown mask while exclaiming, “I should just kill you now” as well as “Students and teachers will wish they will never born at the junior and senior high school today.”

As is the case with so much in the world today, some people are taking this way too far and are threatening the lives and wellbeing of young people in school. 

Let’s recap: a few clowns promoting a movie started it all and shortly thereafter, naturally, a few copycats join for a quick–albeit in horrible taste–laugh. Now, it has become a mix of people poking fun at what seems like an incredibly unlikely situation to sick psychopathic criminals that are attacking people.

What people are missing about this whole situation is the answer to the biggest question: what is this? The affect of social media has galvanized this fad to explode and feed the craze that is the creepy clowns. So, the answer to that question everyone has been wondering is, believe it or not, ourselves.

People who go on Facebook and share an article about the school’s closing in Ohio, or people who like the countless Instagram accounts devoted to creepy clowns, to the kids at lunch talking about how they want a clown to come into their town just so they can chase it down. Even this article that you are reading right now is feeding the craze.

Yet, despite me feeding this psychotic epidemic, I am issuing some advice to anybody reading this. Let it go. Stop making it grow incessantly by building up its potential to destruct. People have gone to large extremes to promote it, whether malevolently or not, and a few of those people live in our neighboring town, Waukegan.

A few kids at the Greenwood Elementary in Waukegan reported that three people dressed as clowns, one wielding a knife, the other a gun, and the third a briefcase, threatened to come back on Friday and kill them. This came as no joke to the Waukegan Police Department who later discovered after a short investigation that the children made it up in order to feed the craze and gain attention.

People may think it’s funny to have one of their friends dress up as a clown and film them chasing a car or a group of people–especially during Halloween season–but this opens the door for the wrong and possibly dangerous person to take it to a whole new level.

In recent news, a woman was chased in Australia by a clown with an axe. It has now turned into a global phenomenon reaching as far as England, the Netherlands and as stated before, Australia.

Again, let it go. Don’t feed this crazy trend and build it up. Just imagine coming face to face with one of the crazy people dressed as a clown with nowhere to run. Keep those images in our nightmares and far aware from the reality in which we live.