VIDEO: Real Life Clown Horror Stories That Won’t Let You Sleep for Days

Being afraid of clowns is a known phobia even though to some it might not seem normal or even have a tiny bit of sense. But since people have been scared of weirder things, this one also keeps living.

The people that are afraid of clowns, normal ones and not those that are especially made to freak you out, think that they use make up to cover up their faces so that you can’t recognize them or read their true emotions and this freaks them out. The fact that they’ve been portrayed in horrible ways doesn’t really help.

According to nypost.com, it would appear there’s a creepy clown epidemic gripping the South, plucked straight from our collective nightmares.

The disturbing reports began in South Carolina on Aug. 21, prompting an apartment complex to send warning letters to residents after receiving calls that a clown was trying to lure children into the woods.

On Sept. 1, a 12-year-old told police there were two clowns in her back yard in Greenville, South Carolina. On Sept. 7, a man in Greensboro, North Carolina, grabbed a machete and chased a clown into the woods.

Recently, Georgia police said they were investigating a threat from a Facebook usersaying they planned to dress like a clown and abduct children from local schools, and multiple schools in Alabama were put on lockdown last week after receiving clown threats.

“If this is a hoax or publicity stunt, it is not funny,” Greensboro police spokeswoman Susan Danielsen told People. “We just don’t know at this point, because we haven’t had the chance to interview any clowns.”

(Un)luckily for your nightmares, the current circus-y horror isn’t the only clown terror. Read up on these terrifying real-life clowns and enjoy never sleeping ever again.

On May 26, 1990, at 10:45 a.m., in Wellington, Florida, Marlene Warren opened her door to a find a bulb-nosed clown holding a bouquet of red and white flowers and two balloons, one emblazoned with a picture of Snow White.

The clown shot her point-blank in the face, and she died at the hospital two days later. Warren’s teenage son saw the clown run to a white Chrysler LeBaron and escape, never to be found.

“This is the strangest thing I’ve seen in all my 19 years in law enforcement,” Palm Beach County sheriff’s spokesman Bob Ferrell told the Sun-Sentinel.

Warren’s husband, Michael Warren, was a prime suspect in the crime. Police searched his office at a West Palm Beach car dealership and found evidence that he’d tampered with odometers, but nothing to connect him to his wife’s murder. However, a suspected affair and five-figure life insurance policy looked suspicious.

Michael Warren was allegedly romantically involved with a female employee. The flowers and balloons delivered before Marlene Warren’s murder were purchased at stores near the employee’s apartment, and costume shop employees tentatively identified her as the woman who had purchased a clown costume the same day as the killing. Neither was charged in the murder, and the case remains unsolved.