A clown named ‘Gags’ has a town on edge
Someone took a picture of the creepy clown, but no one knows what his story is.
Now those pictures are freaking out residents of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who want to know what the clown, dubbed “Gags,” was doing wandering around around 2 a.m. on Monday holding three black balloons. A Facebook page was created by someone, who posted the pictures and asked if anyone else had seen him.
It’s unclear where the name Gags came from, but the Facebook page isn’t a fluke, according to WGBA. Police told the station they had received a few calls about the clown, but there was nothing they could do about it.
“A person can walk down the sidewalk dressed however they want as long as they’re in a place they legally can be, and they’re not in a place that has a closing time, like a park,” Captain Kevin Warych, of the Green Bay Police Department, told WGBA.
Some Facebook users speculated the page had been set up by a friend of the person who dressed as the clown for a publicity stunt. Others wondered if he was part of a horror movie filming.
It’s not the first time a clown has managed to freak out an entire city, but it typically happens closer to Halloween.
In October 2014, an incredibly similar incident occurred in McComb, Mississippi. People posted multiple photos on social media of a clown wandering around town in the middle of the night, according to the Clarion-Ledger.
But the police chief of that town said the clown wasn’t doing anything against the law, though he did ask residents to call police if they saw the clown in person so they could speak with him.
In the same month, a few clowns wandered around Bakersfield and Wasco, California in the middle of the night. Police received multiple reports of clowns carrying machetes and baseball bats, according to the Christian Science Monitor. One teenager was arrested for chasing children while dressed as a clown.
This story was originally published August 3, 2016 at 3:38 PM with the headline "A clown named ‘Gags’ has a town on edge."