A chapter in a newly released anthology
of historical curiosities by Robert Damon Schneck has reopened one of
the most perplexing facets of modern coulrophobia culture and
dissected it in a novel and innovative light, contributing
significantly to the study of some of the most bizarre and intriguing
territory in modern “urban legend.”
Having corresponded here and there over
the past several years with Schneck about our shared interest in the
subject of reoccurring Phantom Clown scares (using here the term
coined by fortean anthropologist Loren Coleman, whose 1980s research
is principally responsible for bringing this phenomenon to popular
attention), I was particularly excited to dig in to this portion of
his new book, Mrs. Wakeman Vs. The Antichrist, And Other Strange But True Tales From American History.
I was
not disappointed.
Since Coleman, the legendary legacy of
Phantom Clowns has been examined by a number of folklorists and other
researchers, including Jan Brunvand, Joseph Citro, Robert
Bartholomew, Peter Muise, Greg Jenkins, myself, and most recently
filmmaker Josh Zeman (in his new documentary Killer Legends),
and yet it has remained curiously obscure, given its relatively long
tenure and widespread geographical reoccurrence (by my count, more
than 30 regions on at least four continents have coped with these
panics from the late 1960s to 2014 -that we know of.) While
there has been some level of variation on its structure, Schneck does
a good job of first recapping its basic chronology and surprisingly
consistent elements, which I will summarize much more briefly and
cursorily here, for sake of space:
Sudden,
sensational rumors which spread rapidly across a community of a clown
(or clowns), typically traveling in a van or similar vehicle,
attacking, attempting to abduct, or otherwise harassing children.
Generally, local police are quickly inundated with such reports,
passed on by terrified parents from accounts that almost always
originate with children under the age of 10. While first taken very
seriously, investigations persistently fail to locate any such
individuals, and eventually it is dismissed as pernicious rumor or
mass hysteria.
Speaking
generally, Schneck assesses the broader context of sociological
factors associated with these types of rumor-panics, particularly
prevalent in the 1980s through mid '90s:
“Beyond
fears of child abduction, the clowns-in-vans should be considered in
relationship to the pedophilia, serial killing, and satanism panic
that beset Americans at the end of the twentieth century.”
Having treated the already much-vetted
aspects of the phenomenon with admirable conciseness, he then turns
to the true meat of his exploration- a historical and psychological
connecting-the-dots that ranges from mid 19th century
origins of Klansmen and “Night Doctor” legends to the modern
media intersection of John Wayne Gacy and the Atlanta Child Murders,
ultimately arguing for a major racial component to its origins when
viewed against the backdrop of a national culture deeply scarred by a
history of wholesale abduction by white faces.
“The
history of clowns-in-vans,” Schneck contends boldly,
“begins with the demand for
labor created by colonizing the New World.”
Beginning this story in the antebellum
south, he recounts several means by which southern whites attempted
control African abductees and their descendants, both before and
after the Civil War, tactics which do seem to bear a certain uncanny
resemblance to attributes of the “Killer Clowns” that have
occupied the headlines of numerous American cities in recent decades.
From pre-War “Patterollers,” who
worked to keep slaves from wandering or gathering at night often
impersonating ghosts in white sheets and masks, through the continued
evolution of this tradition by the KKK, Schneck follows these kind of
savage traditions to the obscure but relevant figure of the “Night
Doctors,” - legendary figures based on real horrors of racist
abduction and body-theft by the early medical community, who in
stories took on mythic and even supernatural qualities over time.
From there, Schneck follows the trail
forward to the time frame immediately preceding the appearance of
clowns-in-vans, examining both the clown-tinged media sensation of
the Gacy killings, and more intriguingly the Atlanta child murders.
In these killings, we see a kind of convergence of the rising fear of
serial killers, child abduction (“Stranger Danger”, etc) with
reasonably deep seated underlying fears of kidnapping and murder of
African Americans by racially motivated Caucasian villains- as at the
time, the culprit for the growing number of slain black youths was
widely believed to be one or more rogue racists of the Klan or
similar varieties.
Additionally, it was publicly suggested
that the motivation behind the killings could be one of illegal
medical experimentation, in a manner that clearly hearkened back to
recollections of night doctors.
“If
rumors about Atlanta involving Klansmen/night doctors and children
were circulating through the black community nationwide,”
speculates Schneck, “they
could have provided the basis for the clowns.”
I won't go into full detail of the
intricacies of his argument, because you really should buy the book,
of which this chapter is but one of twelve fascinating subjects from
the fringes of U.S. History. However, it presents a fairly
convincing theory for how the convergence of events at this juncture
of late 70s and early 80s could have synthesized a set of seemingly
disparate subjects and lore into something that combined both age old
archetypal fears and the news of the day into a new kind of terror,
one that might have had particularly striking impact in black
communities.
In doing so, Schneck provides a
compelling possible answer to one component of the Phantom Clown
mythos that has always puzzled me- namely, why it is that in so many
American cities, these rumor-panics when traced back to their first
emergence in said cities, seem to first crop up in predominantly
African American neighborhoods.
It does not, however, address instances
of virtually identical rumor-panics prior to Atlanta, which date back
at least to 1969, or some of those which occurred later in isolated
rural areas of other countries unlikely to have been exposed to these
instances in American media. However, his emphasis on the possible
underlying fear of medical experimentation as motive for the Phantom
Clowns' attempted abductions is especially provocative, in light of
the fact that when these scares occurred later in Latin American
countries in the mid-1990s, pre-existing cultural fears of organ
theft were very explicitly associated with alleged abductions by
clowns-in-vans.
So while Schneck's examination does not
address or explain every aspect of the Phantom Clown phenomenon -nor,
I believe, does it intend to – it does present a very solid and
well crafted case for the role of these earlier American boogeymen in
influencing this modern folkloric re-occurrence.
