By Tim Binnall
A man in England got quite the fright this past weekend when he was forced to confront a creepy clown that had emerged from a forest chasing some children. According to a local media report, the bizarre incident took place on Sunday as Jonathan Wood was bicycling through a wooded area in the town of Sandhurst. In what was undoubtedly an unsettling experience, the cyclist was suddenly besieged by a group of terrified kids who claimed that they were being pursued by a clown.
"Help, help, help, we are being chased by a clown," Wood recalled the children saying, observing that "they seemed genuinely freaked out." His initial confusion was soon compounded when he looked over at the woods and saw the haunting harlequin in question. "He had a white face," Wood told an area newspaper, "and was fully decked out in his clown mask." Making matters all the more unusual, the man and the clown found themselves in something of a face-off.
"He saw me and I saw him and we just stood there," Wood said, "I did not know what to do - it was so surreal." The bewildered witness eventually called the clown's bluff by showing the harlequin his phone and indicated that he was about the call the police. This apparently concerned the mysterious stranger as he proceeded to remove his mask and revealed his identity to the children. Although Wood has no idea who the person was, he noted that the kids seemingly did as one of them remarked: "you scared the hell out of me."
As such, it would appear that the unmasking resolved the situation and that the case was an ill-advised prank. Be that as it may, Wood opted to report the strange event to the police, who will presumably be on the lookout for any harlequins making hay in the community. Oddly enough, the encounter in England was not the only clown sighting to catch the attention of authorities last weekend as a woman in Ogdensburg, New York phoned the cops last Saturday to report "that a man wearing a full clown costume came onto her porch and scared her children" before fleeing the scene on foot. With that in mind, readers would be wise to be on their guard over the next few days as clown season hopefully comes to a close.