BRITISH POLICE HAVE warned about people in clown outfits acting suspiciously and sometimes wielding knives as they follow people.
Today’s warning follows a string of incidents in recent days in an apparent effort to copy clown-related threats in the United States.
Police in Gloucestershire said there have been six reports of clowns acting suspiciously and sometimes in a threatening way.
Police say no arrests have been made because the people dressed as clowns have left the scene before police arrived.
The incidents in Gloucestershire followed earlier reports of disturbances in other parts of Britain.
Police said a masked man with a knife jumped out and threatened children in Durham yesterday and that several people dressed as clowns chased a young boy the day before in Suffolk.
Clown sightings
A series of creepy clown sightings across the US has caused a wave of hysteria, forcing police and schools to scramble to contain spreading jitters.
The spooky sightings were first reported in August in South Carolina when police were called in to investigate what turned out to be bogus accounts of men dressed as clowns trying to lure children into the woods.
But similar sightings have since been reported in more than a dozen states with authorities forced to react to stories of clowns lurking outside schools or businesses, armed clowns driving around in a van or clowns prowling neighborhoods.
One school in Ohio even shut down over security concerns after a woman said she was attacked by a man dressed as a clown.
Hundreds of students at Penn State University, in Pennsylvania, went on the hunt for jesters on Tuesday night after reports of creepy clown sightings.
Here at home, social media reports that a terrifying ‘Darndale clown’ was on the loose in Dublin turned out to be false.
The photo above spread like wildfire on the web – but the person inside the costume, actor Paul Quinn Jnr, confirmed to DailyEdge.ie that the picture was from Halloween last year.
- With reporting from Associated Press & AFP
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say