Clowning Around

There isn’t much you can do on your phone, especially not with the Dahlbergs. It’s a pretty common name in this area, and Facebook is sort of useless without a starting point. The girls are 18 now, so they could theoretically be just about anywhere for school, so with a fair bit of distaste you look into the fucking clown.

Again, no idea where to start. Clowns haven’t really been in the news since 2016 when they were showing up everywhere. You briefly considered figuring out a way to use that to your advantage, but decided that it was way too creepy to even think about. You’ve been disturbed by clowns ever since you watched one kick a man in a horse costume to **** at the age of 11. You couldn’t be more thankful that Ronald McDonald has fallen out of the public eye. Hell, you remember reading something back in ‘92 about a statue of him falling on a six year old and cutting off the tip of her finger. Creepy motherfucker.

It doesn’t take too long before you’re falling down the Google rabbit hole. The clown panic of ‘16 leads to the less documented Phantom Clown scare of 1981. Seeing a trend you do some quick mental math and research clowns in 1946. 35 year interval. It takes some doing and wading through some serious bullshit like Swedish ghost rockets and an alien craft the the Fortean types claimed was named Kerrata that was spotted over San Diego, plus discovering that Bozo the Clown was created in ‘46, but you eventually stumble onto a handful of newspaper scans that involve white faced clowns popping up and randomly terrifying people. In 1911 it was mimes. The pattern seems to repeat itself. Of course regardless of how strange that is it doesn’t get you any closer to identifying your particular clown.

The next stop is Minnesota based urban legends. You find it vaguely weird that people only really started complaining about the fuckers in the 80s. Maybe Stephen King managed to crystallize the innate panic we all experience at the sight of the white greasepaint when he wrote It. The sinister or “evil” clown has been around a lot longer though. In 1940 the Joker was created. In 1849, Poe gave us Hop-Frog, the opera Pagliacci with its murderous Canio, the Harlequin himself from commedia dell’arte. Punch & Judy, the Clown from the Harlequinade. There have been bad clowns as long as anyone can track. Even the obnoxious Juggalo phenomenon.

You finally strike gold on a reddit page about haunted Duluth. It tells a story about a clown who ran a local access children’s show in the mid ‘70s, and went by the ridiculous name of Mr. Happy. Vowing to never refer to your cock as that again, you read on. Mr. Happy was on the verge of national success when something happened and he went completely off his rocker. He strangled his producer, burnt down his studio, and stormed off never to be seen again. Until this morning unless you miss your guess.

Every couple of years someone claims to have seen Mr. Happy show up, taunt or threaten someone, then click his heels and run off. A scan of an old sketch is linked, and you nearly wake up Chrissy when you spray coffee upon looking at it. He’s obviously younger in the sketch, but the makeup patterns are the same. Mr. Happy, children’s entertainer and arsonist. At it again.