The hand was attached to a clown. He had a chalk-white face and round red nose, with a grin painted across his mouth, and an oversized wig of curly red hair. There was a miniature derby perched on top and the clown tipped it courteously in the girls’ direction—then said that he and his companions (two more grease-painted faces appeared at the window) were lost; would the girls get into the van and help them find the circus? The clowns had more candy than they could possibly eat and would give it to them. Though young, the girls were not naïve; they wanted to see the candy first.
The van’s side panel slid open with a metallic rumble and a big clown in a red polka-dotted suit climbed out; there were neither lollipops nor candy bars in his hand, but a long-bladed carving knife. The girls shrieked and sprinted away with the clown in pursuit.
—
While this scene is imaginary, it dramatizes some of the real encounters with unfunny clowns that children across America claimed to be having at the beginning of the 1980s.
In May 1981, the Fortean researcher and writer Loren Coleman was living at Cambridge, when the first reports came in of clowns trying to lure kids into their van in Brookline, Boston, and soon from East Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Canton, Randolph, and other cities near Boston. When the reports jumped to include Rhode Island as well, Coleman decided to sweep his network and wrote to all of his American associates and informants to learn if there was similar activity in their areas. He was shocked and startled by what he found—which was being totally ignored by the national media. The eastern United States was under a full-scale invasion of “Phantom Clowns,” a phrase he decided to coin to capture the essence of them.1
Coleman describes what happened in his 1983 book, Mysterious America; it is summarized here along with information on additional sources):
April 26–May 2, Boston, Massachusetts: Reports were made of “adults dressed as clowns . . . bothering children to and from school.” Parents were told to advise children “that they must stay away from strangers, especially ones dressed as clowns.”2
May 5, Brookline, Massachusetts: Two clowns were reported driving an older-model black van, with ladders on its side, no hubcaps, and a broken headlight. They tried luring children inside with candy and were sighted near an elementary school.
May 6, Boston again: Clowns in a black van were harassing children at a park and a school; one clown was reported to be naked from the waist down.
May 8: There were more sightings of clowns-in-vans in East Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Canton, Randolph, and other cities nearby. “Police were stopping vehicles with clowns delivering birthday greetings and ‘clown-a-grams,’ but no child molesters were arrested.”3
Children at Providence, Rhode Island, begin telling psychiatric social workers about clowns.
May 10–16, Kansas City, Kansas: Children claimed that a white-faced clown with a sword ordered them into a yellow van. They ran away and the clown chased them.4
May 22, Kansas City, Missouri: The mother of two sisters, age six and seven, was watching them walk to the school bus stop, when a yellow van pulled up. The driver apparently spoke to the girls, who ran home screaming, and the vehicle took off. They said that “a dark–haired man . . . wearing a clown outfit and . . . a painted face ‘with red polka dots’ . . .” had brandished a knife and ordered them inside.5 This may be the incident a later article describes as “a confirmed sighting from at least one adult in a predominantly black neighborhood in Kansas City, MO,” which led to the stories “being viewed with some concern.”6 There were also reports from six different elementary schools, with police receiving calls at the rate of “about one a minute.”7 Several clowns driving vans were stopped that turned out to be entertainers heading to parties.
A clinical psychologist at the Wyandotte Mental Health Center suggested this was a case of “group hysteria,” while a newspaper writer dubbed it the “Demon Clown.” Our Lady and St. Rose school distributed memos warning parents about a “Killer Clown.”8
May 24, Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri: There were reports of a “garishly painted” van, and LaTanya Johnson, a sixth-grader at Fairfax Elementary School, saw a clown “dressed in a black shirt with a devil on the front. He had candy canes down each side of his pants.”9
June 1–6: Rumors circulated in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about a clown hiding in the woods and attempted child abductions by men dressed as Spider-Man, Superman, and a gorilla. A man wearing a rabbit costume and driving a blue van reportedly raped two children; he may have also been spotted going into a tavern or, perhaps, running through a cemetery.
There were also reports from Omaha, Nebraska, and Denver, Colorado.
Loren Coleman compares the appearance of the clowns to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the musical exterminator who cleared the city of rats and then led the children away forever. In both cases, strangers in exotic clothing appear from nowhere and threaten to carry away a community’s children. The story of the Pied Piper is often interpreted as a memory of the Children’s Crusade of 1212, when religious enthusiasm led to the youth of France and Germany setting out to liberate Jerusalem from the Saracens, with disastrous results. 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.
This chapter argues that phantom clowns did not step out of the collective imagination fully formed, and drive off in a fleet of waiting vans, but are a traditional terror required to cope with a new threat, and based, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, on memories of traumatic experiences.
White-Faced Terrors
The history of clowns-in-vans begins with the demand for labor created by colonizing the New World. After enslaving Indians proved unsuccessful, Africans were shipped to North America and a system of chattel slavery was created that continued in the South until the end of the Civil War. It was maintained in modified form for another century by oppressive laws and violence that kept former slaves in a position where they could continue to be exploited. Three of the instruments used to control black populations during and after slavery are relevant to this history.
The first was an antebellum form of policing devised to thwart slave rebellions. “Every slave we own is an enemy we harbor,” went the ancient Roman proverb, and fear of insurrections haunted Southern landowners.10 They tried to prevent slaves on different plantations from making coordinated plans by requiring them to have written permission to be abroad at night, a rule enforced by small groups of white men that patrolled the roads. The “patterollers” whipped slaves who did not have a valid pass, chased runaways, broke up meetings, and discouraged nocturnal wandering by dressing as ghosts, wearing “white robes, or sheets, and masks” and using stage props, such as “a rotating false head, which gave the appearance of all-around vision.”11
Patterolling ended with slavery, but with the war lost, and former slaves acquiring political power under the protection of federal troops, Southern whites embarked on a campaign to restore the old system. Numerous groups emerged to drive out carpetbaggers and Republicans, including paramilitaries like the White League, and clandestine groups called Redcaps, Knights of the White Camellia, and, most important, the Ku Klux Klan.
The latter’s name probably derives from the Greek word kuklos, “circle,” and what began as a fraternal order set up by Confederate veterans in 1865, with all the extravagant titles, ceremonies, and other trappings typical of secret societies, was soon engaged in intimidation backed by horrific violence. Like the patterollers, members of the “Hooded Order” cultivated a supernatural reputation.
White robes and conical hoods came later; the early Klansmen paraded on horseback in bizarre masks, false beards, horns, and peaked hats (“Dr. Avery had on a red gown with a blue face, with red about his mouth, and he had two horns on his cap about a foot long
”12). They claimed to be the spirits of Southern soldiers killed in battle and would visit black families in order to play gruesome tricks, such as demanding a drink and seeming to swallow bucketfuls of water while emptying it into a concealed rubber bag. Sometimes they extended a skeletal hand to shake, or seemed to remove their own heads. The latter inspired stories about Klansmen being able to disassemble themselves, but they were also said to emerge from the ground at night like cicadas and had an appearance so terrifying that the sight of them could cause pregnant women to have babies that were “a perfect representation of a disguised Ku Klux” (several of these monstrous births were reported in Alabama).13 What is most relevant to phantom clowns, however, is the identification of the Klan with the medical profession, a belief that came together in the form of night doctors.
Night Doctors
In 1838, a Dr. T. Stillman of Charleston, South Carolina, placed an advertisement in the Charleston Mercury, expressing his interest in buying “fifty negroes.”
Any person having sick negroes, considered incurable by their respective physicians and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for negroes affected with [list of conditions]. The highest cash prize will be paid upon application as above.14
Dr. Stillman was interested in performing experiments and testing new drugs, and a system that classified blacks as property denied them “the legal right to refuse to participate.”15 The extent of this sort of experimentation before the Civil War is unknown, but after Emancipation, there were notorious medical studies like the Tuskegee Experiment, which followed the progress of untreated syphilis in black men.16 Women were sterilized without their knowledge or consent (a “Mississippi appendectomy”), and the general attitude, as expressed to a reporter in 1893, seems to have been that “doctors don’t care for us poor black folks. They want us to cut up, but they don’t keer for us . . .”17 Nor did death did mean an end to victimization.
Black cadavers were regularly stolen, preserved in spirits, and shipped to schools across the country. The trade was so regular that instructors had standing orders (“[a] Professor of Anatomy in a New England medical school told me . . . he had an arrangement under which he received in each session a shipment of twelve bodies of Southern Negroes. They came in barrels marked ‘turpentine’ . . .”18 From a black perspective, there was often little difference between the KKK and the AMA, and their fears of the profession were embodied in the idea of “night doctors” (also called “slab doctors,” “night witches,” “Needle Men,” studients, and “ku klux doctors”).
Night doctors were believed to be medical students, doctors, and corpse vendors who went out in “droves” between midnight and dawn, searching for victims. They wore masks, Klan-style hoods, white lab coats, or dark clothes for hiding in the shadows; and haunted the neighborhoods around medical buildings, colleges, and train depots (Union Station in Washington, D.C., was a favorite hunting ground). These places were especially dangerous for those who were fat or had “peculiar physical conformation . . . which renders their dissection of particular interest to medical students”; it was said that “first class hump-backed subjects” worth a reported $150.19
When night doctors tried grabbing a person, some fought back; others believed that “shootin’ ’em is no good, an’ dey turn the edge of a razzar jest like a stone wall,” so the best plan was to run.20 In 1904, a man in Washington, D.C., escaped by jumping off Long Bridge into the Potomac River, though some accounts read like urban legends.21
The doctors, it was claimed, used chloroform to capture victims, as well as throwing hypodermics filled with paralyzing drugs (“flying needles”) and slapping adhesive plasters over their mouths to stifle cries. Once subdued, they were bound, gagged, blindfolded, and put into a hearselike wagon with rubber wheels, pulled by dark, rubber-shod horses, that quietly trundled captives off to the nearest hospital or college.
Night doctors were “young student doctors” who carried out gruesome medical procedures and experiments on their prisoners, for they “got their experience that way,” and then killed them. Victims were hanged from the ceiling, exposing “a laughing nerve on the bottom of the foot. When the nerve was cut the victim laughed and laughed until he laughed himself to death.”22 The incision also drained the blood, and was described in a secondhand account:
He said he seed ’em ketch a little girl, an’ dey put sumpin’ nudder yer [pointing to the front and back of his head], an den dey put a band roun’ her body to keep de cirklashun from movin’, an den dey strung her up, an’ she was laughin’ all de time, kind o’ conjured like. In ’bout five minutes de blood all runned out o’ her feet into a bucket, an’ den she was toted off to de ‘sectin room.’23
Blood and fat were used to make medicines. “One old colored woman insisted that she knows the white men make castor oil out of negro blood, and that in slavery times a negro would die before he could take a dose of castor oil.”24
Belief in night doctors persisted, “at least” into the 1930s, and “disadvantaged people chose to avoid certain cities altogether, certain parts of cities in the daytime (areas adjacent to hospitals), and many avoided traveling at all at night unless accompanied by small groups. Whether fact or simply fear, the night doctor had certainly captured the imagination of the folk.”25 Some doctors (like the grave robbers that supplied anatomy classes) were black; nevertheless, they follow the pattern established by patterollers and the KKK in which roving bands of grotesquely dressed, white-faced men abduct, torture, and kill black people.
Atlanta
Every period has its characteristic anxieties, and during the late 1970s and 1980s, many of these concerned children. Countless numbers were reportedly being abducted by pedophiles or ritually abused at daycare centers by satanic cults; moreover, the country seemed overrun by homicidal maniacs.
Between 1900 and 1959, American police recorded an average of two serial murder cases per year nationwide. By 1969, authorities were logging six cases per year, a figure that nearly tripled in the 1970s. By 1985, new serial killers were being reported at an average rate of three per month, a rate that remained fairly constant through the 1990s.26
Americans developed a horrified fascination with the crimes, but it was a series of child murders in Georgia that produced the mixture of traditional and contemporary fears that became the basis for clowns-in-vans.
From July 1979 to June 1981, dozens of black children and adolescents were murdered in Atlanta. Almost all the victims were male, and many were strangled or suffocated, and their bodies hidden in overgrown areas. Over time the pattern changed and came to include adult men, whose bodies were sometimes dropped into local rivers to wash away physical evidence. This new behavior prompted police to stake out the bridges, and before dawn, on May 22, 1981, police heard a loud splash coming from the Chattahoochee River just as twenty-three-year-old Wayne Bertram Williams was driving slowly across the bridge; two days later, the body of a twenty-seven-year-old man was found downstream, leading to Williams’s arrest. He was convicted of murdering two men in 1982 and received consecutive life sentences; police attributed most of the murders to Williams and considered them solved.
That the killer turned out to be black surprised much of the public as well as law enforcement. For two years, conventional wisdom in the black community had been that the Klan or a similar group was responsible—a reasonable assumption at a time when black serial killers were rare and, more to the point, the city had elected its first black mayor. The killing of black children was seen as a means of spreading fear, heightening tensions, and diminishing confidence in the authorities. (There are still those, including Wayne Williams, who claim he was convicted on weak evidence to prevent rioting.) Georgia’s former governor, President Jimmy Carter, considered a racial motive likely enough to order the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist the police task force, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) put alleged Klansmen under surveillance.
This line of inquiry failed to produce convincing results, but the FBI report contains a number of different scenarios describing who might be committing the murders. A section headed “Theory” proposes:
That the core killings, of children, in Atlanta, are the work of a small, fanatical, right-wing cell (possibly linked with the KKK, American Nazi party, Minutemen, or other right-wing organization).
The “killer group” was estimated to be
four to five, white males, twenty-five to fourty [sic] years old. These would be males in their top years of physical condition, powerful enough to overcome the resistance of a child without help.27
It goes on to describe how the abductions could be carried out and the sorts of vehicles that might be involved:
[One] promising type would be a small van of some kind. Not one with a fancy, “Star Wars,” paint job (that would attract too much attention) or a window van, but a simple panel van (probably with one way decals on the rear windows). Such a vehicle would draw little attention to itself, and could provide a rolling murder scene (and if the vehicle is carpeted inside, it could account for some of the fibers found on a few of “the bodies”).28
Civilians were thinking along similar lines. Atlanta’s current (2014) mayor, Kasim Reed, was ten years old during the murders and remembers that “[e]verybody was very mindful of vans at that time.”29 Coincidentally, the KKK was also identifying itself with vans through the recruiting slogan, “Get on the Klan Van—Join the Klan Youth Corps.”30
White racists, however, were not the only possibility. Vans had long been associated with sex and drugs and proved popular with a number of contemporary serial killers, including Ted Bundy, Gerald and Charlene Gallego, Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker, and the Chicago Ripper Crew (vehicles with tinted windows or enclosed cargo areas are still called “murder vans”).
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist Page 17