ORONO, Maine — Halloween may be nearly a month away, but someone decided late Monday night to get dressed up early and their choice of costume freaked out at least one person, who called police.
“We had a clown sighting,” Police Chief Josh Ewing said Monday of the report, taken just before midnight. “It came over as a [social media app] Snapchat. It was someone standing outside of a building at The Reserve.”
“Our guys went up there and we didn’t find anything,” the chief said later of the 200-unit student housing complex that once was called The Grove.
Police responded quickly to quell the fears of the person who reported the clown, who told police the costumed character had been standing by the building for hours, making her uncomfortable.
“I know with the recent news around the country that this is making several residents nervous,” Ewing posted on the Orono Police Department’s Facebook page about numerous clown sightings in the U.S. over the past couple of months. “Let me make myself very clear, there is NO indication as of now that whoever is doing this is dangerous.”
The chief added, however, that his department will not put up with criminals intimidating people.
“We will not tolerate anyone harassing, threatening or trespassing on property,” Ewing said. “If someone wants to do this to purposely scare people, we will handle them accordingly.”
Police nationwide have been chasing down reports of people dressed as clowns and acting suspicious for months, including an incident Monday night at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, where emergency evacuation and “shelter in place” alerts were issued after reports of an armed clown on campus.
Police responded in force to what turned out to be a hoax, spokesman James Chiavelli II said Tuesday.
“Most of it came from a Twitter account, Clown Watch, that alleged clown sightings at a number of campuses and in a number of communities,” Chiavelli said. “We have reported the Twitter account as a violation of Twitter’s terms of service.”
Campus police received reports indicating there was an armed man in a clown suit inside Monican Centre, and issued a campuswide alert to evacuate “all Monican residents and ordered others on campus to shelter in place while police conducted a diligent, thorough search of the building.
The alert was lifted about 30 minutes later after Andover and North Andover authorities, Massachusetts State Police and Merrimack College officers found no suspicious person or activity, the college spokesman said.
Clown reports have made headlines since August, when a South Carolina family reported a group of clowns reportedly trying to draw children into the woods with offers of money and candy. Two people in Georgia were arrested in mid-September for allegedly making false reports of clown sightings.
Late summer is also when news was released that Hollywood director Andres Muschietti was making a new movie adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 thriller “IT,” which features a supernatural being that takes the form of a demonic clown to stalk a group of children in the town of Derry, Maine, which is based on Bangor. Actor Bill Skarsgard is playing King’s villain Pennywise the Clown.
The clown sightings prompted the Bangor Daily News to recently ask King why people find clowns scary.
“When I wrote my novel ‘IT,’ I set it in Bangor, because it’s a town with a tough and violent history,” King wrote in an email to the BDN. “I chose Pennywise the Clown as the face which the monster originally shows the kiddies because kids love clowns, but they also fear them; clowns with their white faces and red lips are so different and so grotesque compared to ‘normal’ people. Take a little kid to the circus and show him a clown, he’s more apt to scream with fear than laugh.”
On Oct. 3, Bangor’s most famous author posted on Twitter, “Hey, guys, time to cool the clown hysteria — most of ‘em are good, cheer up the kiddies, make people laugh.”
Orono’s police chief said he’d prefer people call law enforcement if they see anything suspicious, including clowns.
“We’ll check it out, no matter what,” Ewing said.