A clown lurking around a cemetery at night sounds like a disturbing scene from a Stephen King novel, but it turned into a real life scare when some costumed bozo was spotted in a Chicago graveyard.
At the Rosehill Cemetery, a bizarre figure dressed in a yellow clown suit and rainbow wig was seen waving to passers-by earlier this month, CBS Chicago reports.
Julia Graham was driving by the historic cemetery with her husband when they saw the clown running toward the main gate around 10 p.m. on a recent night.
“When we get closer, we realize it’s a clown, which is super weird,” she told the station. “I mean, this was somebody putting forth a lot of effort -- and being really weird.”
The clown eventually noticed the Grahams' vehicle and turned toward it and slowly waved at the couple in an unsettling fashion. The couple captured the spooky wave on a cell phone before the clown ran off, according to UPI.com.
The real identity of the clown is unknown. Cemetery officials said there have been no reports of vandalism, according to Chicagoist.com.
Chicago police say there have been no other clown sightings in recent weeks, but a small subset of humanity seems to get kicks by playing on the creepy clown trope.
In October, 2013, Alex Powell, 22, a student in Northampton, England, became a worldwide sensation when he freaked out locals by dressing up as "Pennywise," a clown that appears in the Stephen King novel "It," the Mirror reports.
In March 2014, a person dressed as a clown was spotted roaming the streets of Staten Island.
Last October, officials in Bakersfield, California, had to deal with at least 16 reports of people dressed as clowns being armed with machetes and baseball bats.
Why do so many people find clowns creepy?
Steven Schlozman, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, told Vulture.com last year that a fear of clowns is closely related to do with a person's own fear of failure.
"Clowns, by definition, are supposed to make you laugh, but in the background is the fear that they won’t, and all of us have that in the back of our mind: the fear that you won’t actually be able to do the very thing that you’re designed to do," he said.
