A True Tale of Horror: The Clown

For Halloween, a story from the creepiest summer of my life, the summer of 1992.

One day in July, my parents went gone down to Victoria for the day leaving me in charge of my sister Zoe (14) and my brother Owen (11) at our house in the country. Zoe and I shared a bedroom upstairs. It was a huge room, about 25 feet wide and fifty feet long. The east wall had four big windows and the south wall had one, which was right by my bed. The door was also at this end of the room. The south window looked out over our driveway and the house next door, belonging to this fisherman named Tony. Being a fisherman Tony was often away for weeks at a time, and happened to be away then.

It was a Saturday and we were supposed to clean our rooms, so at around one o’clock I was lugging the vacuum cleaner up and when I went into the room I happened to glance out the window and that’s when I saw THE CLOWN. He was standing on Tony’s patio, a man in black boots, black pants, black turtleneck and black gloves, topped by a creepy clown mask- a big white rubber face with red tufty hair, red nose and a huge freaky grin. He looked like Pennywise and he was LOOKING RIGHT AT ME.

I immediately dropped to the floor and called my sister over from her end of the room- I made her walk along the west wall (no windows) and drop next to me. We peeked around the edge of the curtain and there he was, THE CLOWN, LOOKING RIGHT AT US. We were like HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK. We ran downstairs and locked all the doors and grabbed my little brother, making him come back upstairs with us. I guess we should have called the police but instead we spent the rest of the afternoon up in the bedroom, staying away from the windows. We didn’t see the clown again and when my parents got home (before dark, thank god) and we told them what we’d seen, they went over to Tony’s house but didn’t find any signs of forced entry, and when he came home a few weeks later he never said anything about a break in. Our parents thought Zoe and I had imagined the whole thing but we know THE CLOWN was real.