In the summer of 2016, children at a South Carolina apartment complex ran out of the woods screaming. They said there were clowns in the trees. No one believed them. Within weeks, the sightings had spread across the country, school lockdowns, armed mobs, arrests, and a panic so intense that McDonald’s benched Ronald McDonald. But where did it actually start? The answer is stranger than the legend.
Then: Halloween night, 1974. An eight-year-old boy in Pasadena, Texas eats a piece of candy from his trick-or-treat bag. He’s dead within the hour. For fifty years, parents have checked their children’s candy because of what happened that night but the real story is darker than the urban legend it created.
TW: Child death
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TRANSCRIPT
I want to take you back to the woods of Greenville, South Carolina, on August 21st, 2016
It’s A Sunday night at the Fleetwood Manor Apartments, and a bunch of kids are still playing outside.
When all of a sudden, there’s a scream
Behind the apartments is a big patch of woods that eventually turn into Reedy River, and from the treeline, two little boys come running, tears streaming down their faces.
Their parents rush over to them and ask what happened. The boys catch their breath and then tell them,
There are clowns in the woods.
Now, back in those dark woods, there’s a pond with an old house sitting beside it. According to the boys, they were out exploring by the pond, when all of a sudden, they heard whispers. One of the boys stopped in his tracks his face frozen in terror, and when the other followed the direction he was looking, he saw in the distance there were two clowns standing in the trees in full circus costume and white face paint, and they were Whispering to each other. Making strange noises. The boys stared at them, totally confused. Then one of the clowns looked at the boys, and held out some money. like they were trying to get the children to follow them deeper into the woods.
The boys were totally breathless as they recounted this story, and they told the adults “there are clowns that live in that old house by the pond!”
One of the moms decides that she’s going to go look. There’s no way there’s clowns in the woods, but maybe she can find what they were talking about and make them feel a little better.
So she walks to the edge of the woods behind the complex, and looks out where her son said he'd seen them. She’s scanning the woods, there’s nothing but trees and brush.
But wait, what’s that? There, in the distance, through the trees, she sees it. What the boys saw. two figures, crouching, staring directly toward her, in full clown costume. One of them pulls something out of its pocket and points it at her, and she goes blind, she can’t see anything. That’s because it has a green laser that it’s pointing right into her eyes.
She puts her hands out in front of her face to protect herself and starts heading in their direction, but the clowns turn and run deeper into the woods. And by the time she gets to where she first saw them, they’re gone.
The Greenville County Sheriff's Office eventually gets called, and they have a few problems. One, there’s another neighbor who also saw a clown that night. A big one, standing under the light by the dumpster, with a nose that blinked on and off. It didn't approach anyone. It just... waved and then walked off.
And two, someone else in the area called in saying they heard gunshots in the direction the clowns headed.
So deputies did the only thing they could do. They found the trail the boys had taken behind the basketball court and started walking. Into the woods. Toward the pond. Toward the old house where the children said the clowns lived.
But the police couldn’t find anything. No clowns, no sign that anyone had been living in that cabin. No sign that a clown had gotten shot OR had shot someone.
And since no one had gotten hurt, the police wrote it off as kids being dramatic.
Then, on August 24th, management at the apartment complex where the kids lived posted a letter to residents. It warned that there had been reports of "a clown or a person dressed in clown clothing" trying to lure children into the woods, and told parents to keep their kids inside after dark. Somebody photographed that sign and put it on Facebook.
And that letter went viral, and thus the clown panic of 2016 had fully commenced. Spreading like an urban legend throughout the entire country, and then the rest of the world.
There are clowns in the woods, trying to lure children is what the legend said. But as the story started spreading, so did the sightings. And it seems like the clowns were just getting started.
Within a week there were more reports in Greenville. A child at another apartment complex said a man in a clown mask was watching from the woods. A twelve-year-old at a third complex said two clowns had been in the yard behind her building.
Six reports in total were called in, but the police felt like this was just all part of the legend, because none of them had any physical evidence of the clowns being there. No footage, no corroborating witness sightings. The police would do quick searches of the areas but they never found anything. And again, there were no injuries. So they were all written off.
But then more calls started coming in from more states.
On September 4th, there was a sighting in Winston-Salem North Carolina. It happened on East 29th Street off Highway 52 around 8:30 p.m. The sun had set, it was getting late, but two children were playing outside an apartment complex before being called in for bed.
One of the children was running by the tree line to the woods, when something caught their eye. It was dark, but they could make out the shape of a figure. An adult man, it looked like. There was just enough light to illuminate the white overalls the person was wearing as they slowly walked towards the children. And as the figure emerged from the woods, the kids could see the person was also wearing white gloves, red shoes, red bushy hair, and a red nose. Their face was painted bright white as well.
This figure stood there, smiled at the children, and then reached into their pocket, and pulled out some wrapped candy.
The children turned to run, and the clown let out a loud laugh (SFX), loud enough for another adult in the apartment complex to hear and later tell the police about.
The police came and investigated, but never found any physical evidence of the clown. Here’s the woman who called the police talking about it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr7GWdoXt_U (:41- :54)
And here’s another woman in the neighborhood explaining how scary it was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr7GWdoXt_U (1:13 - 1:20)
But that wasn’t the only sighting of the clown that night.
About four hours later, a caller who refused to give their name reported seeing a clown about 2 miles away. Police say again they found no evidence.
And then, two days later, another child in the area saw the clown in the woods. And this sighting was also confirmed by another adult man who saw the clown, ran into his home, grabbed a machete, and then ran out after it. The clown was able to escape, and the police, once again, never found the person.
But were these sightings real, the police wondered?
After all, 5 days later, on Sept. 9, a man named David Wayne Armstrong was arrested and charged with filing a false police report relating to a clown sighting. Armstrong claimed a clown knocked on his window before he chased it into the woods. Police say he later admitted to making it all up. They released a statement saying "the Winston-Salem Police Department has not been able to substantiate any sightings".
So they started wondering if these people were all lying,
But less than a week later there would be a sighting that no one could deny
On Sept. 15th, 2016, the sightings changed from "sightings in the woods" to anonymous online school threats.
That night, A senior named Alex at Flomaton High School in Alabama gets a Facebook friend request from someone he doesn’t recognize. The name on the account is "Flomo Klown." The profile picture is a deranged looking clown with sharp teeth and an evil smile. He accepts it—and then messages the account. Who is this? How do you know me?
There’s a beat, and then The clown answers.
"Coming for you."
"Gonna kill you."
"See you at school."
Alex starts freaking out, and he sends these messages to some friends, and then they start spreading it around facebook. Other kids see it and get scared, parents start seeing it. Eventually, the police look into the “Flomo Klown” account. And it’s more disturbing than they thought.
The account posted this horrifying video of themselves dressed in that clown costume with sharp teeth, holding the severed head of Ronald McDonald. And written on their facebook page was "I kill people for a living."
they had also posted "it's going down tonight." with a bunch of gun emojis. The next day, About 700 students at Flomaton High School and nearby Flomaton Elementary School were told to shelter in place and the schools were placed on lockdown while police tried to figure out who was behind the account.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAsQ-E7jPbc (:54- 1:03 - 1:16)
thirty officers swept the campus, room by room, looking for a clown.
There wasn't one. Nobody had seen a clown anywhere near the school.
So police took a closer look at the Facebook page that made the threats. The sheriff's office, the district attorney, and the FBI worked through the night tracing the accounts. By Thursday evening, police were at a house on Pecan Leaf Lane making arrests
It turns out, Four people were behind Flomo Klown. A twenty-two-year-old woman. A fourteen-year-old. A fifteen-year-old. And a twelve-year-old from Pensacola. None of them went to the school. According to their own statements, it was just supposed to be a prank on that one kid, Alex.
The woman was held on two hundred thousand dollars bond and charged with making a terroristic threat. The first case of clown terrorism I’ve read about, and I hope to god it’s the last. Three years later, she pleaded guilty. A judge sentenced her to ten years in prison, suspended it, and put her on five years' probation with one condition: no social media.
By this point, the clown sightings were picking up around the country, and they were getting more and more terrifying. There was a rumor started that on Halloween of that year, there would be a “clown purge”, and masked clowns would terrorize cities and kill people.
But still, up to this point, they were just sightings. People had not gotten hurt. That is, until two weeks after the school lock down.
So on Sept. 30 in Reading Ohio, A woman called 911 in a fit. Breathless, she told the dispatcher that someone just tried to kill her. And when the dispatcher asked for a description of what the assailant looked like, she told them it was a clown.
So according to the woman, early that morning, around 4am, before the sun was up, she was smoking a cigarette on her porch at around 4am when she saw someone strolling down the street. It wasn’t normal to see people out for walks that early, but it wasn’t unheard of, so she didn’t think much of it. Until, she realized what the person was wearing.
The passerby had on a striped outfit, a red wig and a white clown mask with an eerie grin. They were walking by her porch, when they suddenly turned and climbed up towards her.
Before she knew what to do, the person grabbed her by the throat and whispered in her ear, "I should just kill you now" and "Some students and teachers would wish they were never born at the Jr. and Sr. High School today,"
The clown then released the woman and took off. She called 911 immediately afterwards.
The district closed every school in Reading that day but, like every sighting I’ve told you about thus far, they didn’t find anything credible about the threat, though an Elementary student told officials that someone dressed as a clown holding a knife chased her on her way to school. They were never able to find that person and claimed it was not a credible threat.
Then, the very next morning in the same town, Alexsandra Conley, 18, of Hamilton called police around 6 a.m. Saturday, saying a clown jumped over a fence, waved a knife at her and cut her left thumb. BUT…Conley admitted to making up the story, police said, because she was running late to work and didn't want to lose her job.
And the idea that you could plausibly tell people you were late for work because a killer clown attacked you should tell you just how crazy things were getting.
By the first week of October, sightings had exploded everywhere. A fourteen-year-old in Houston charged with a terroristic threat for saying he'd shoot up his school with his "clown friends." Teenagers in Baytown, Texas arrested for chasing people with sticks in clown masks. A man in Pennsylvania arrested for prowling his neighbors' yard in a mask with an Airsoft pistol. Two people in Georgia charged for calling 911 about clowns that didn't exist. A Massachusetts college locked down and a dorm evacuated over a hoax.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek1DYg0ujLk (:29 - :44)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBL_3Dn5ANw (:25 - :36)
Stores started pulling clown masks off shelves. Retailers in New Zealand were yanking costumes. Some School districts banned clown costumes outright heading into Halloween.
On October 3rd, Stephen King—the brain behind Pennywise—posted a tweet that read: "Hey, guys, time to cool the clown hysteria. Most of 'em are good, cheer up the kiddies, make people laugh."
And a week later, McDonald's issued a statement saying it was "mindful of the current climate around clown sightings" and would be "thoughtful" about Ronald McDonald's public appearances "for the time being."
So yea, McDonald's benched Ronald McDonald.
That same night Stephen King posted—October 3rd—something happened at Penn State that showed what the panic had turned into.
It started on Yik Yak, you might remember that anonymous messaging app. Somebody posted that a clown had been seen near campus. Then somebody else said their friend had seen it, too.
by eleven-thirty at night, at least 500 students were gathering on the quad.
And they were armed. They grabbed whatever they could grab from their dorm rooms. Baseball bats. Hockey sticks. Golf clubs. Tennis rackets. Flashlights. Pepper spray.
They had had enough of this clown epidemic, and they were going to end it one way or another.
The mob moved across campus and into downtown State College, and it grew as it went, chanting about the clown. One student gave a speech on the Old Main lawn with a message to the clown written across his bare chest. Somebody projected a giant clown face onto the side of an apartment building, and the crowd roared at it. For an hour and a half, a small army of college students ran through the streets of a Pennsylvania town looking for someone in a wig to hoist on their pitchforks.
After months of the police not finding anything, of fake accounts and harassment, this was going to be the moment where one of these clowns was caught. And maybe it would send a warning to the other bad actors out there, “hey knock it off, we’re not messing around anymore”
But the group never found a single clown. The police sergeant on duty that night told a local reporter that if there'd been a clown out there, with that many students and that many officers, somebody would've run into it. Nobody did.
After this, the clown sightings started dwindling. Halloween came and went. Maybe the bad actors dressing up as clowns got scared and stopped, or maybe the mania had just run it s course.
When it was all over, the New York Times tallied up the clown panic of 2016. At least twelve people arrested across multiple states. Schools locked down. Death threats against professional clowns. Working performers who said they'd lost their bookings for the season.
The number of children actually taken into the woods by a clown? Zero.
And they tried to trace back the origins of the clown panic. And it turns out, that it might have been started for a reason.
So The farthest back we can go in this “clown epidemic” is a photo that was taken on August 1st in 2016, in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Three weeks before our first story, where the kids at the Fleetwood Manor apartment complex ran out of the woods.
That night, A photo appeared on facebook Around two in the morning. It was of A clown, standing under a downtown bridge. It had on a Filthy costume, white face, and a fistful of black balloons. Just standing there in the dark, like he was waiting for someone.
The photo went viral in hours. People named him. "Gags." Local news picked it up, then Fox news. The police got multiple calls, but never found who was behind it.
a week later, though, on August 8th, a local filmmaker named Adam Krause stepped forward and explained.
Gags was his.
Krause had written a short horror film about a clown called—you guessed it—Gags. He'd planned a ten-day viral marketing campaign to promote it. Somebody in a costume, a few staged photos under a bridge, a slow drip onto social media. He later said he'd hoped maybe a couple hundred people would see it. The photos had actually been taken back in May. The only reason the secret came out when it did was that actors who'd auditioned for the film and didn't get cast started talking.
Gags the Clown was a movie ad.
So now, it’s believed that a marketing stunt was what set off the 2016 clown panic. Where the fear of something manifested into an actual panic, where people really got arrested and children REALLy did see clowns, even if no one believed them.
But this is not a new pattern. It's the same one every Halloween legend runs on. And for fifty years, the scariest legend in America surrounding halloween, hasn't been about a clown. It's been about a stranger, handing out candy.
This one's different, though. In this one, a child really did die.
Trick or Treating has an official rule, check your candy before you eat it. Some take it even further. Throw away anything homemade. Only factory-wrapped candy. If the wrapper looks loose, toss it. And whatever you do, don't eat the apples—because somewhere out there, somebody has pushed a razor blade into one.
This is the oldest Halloween urban legend in America. That somewhere out there, The stranger who hates children has loaded candy bars with needles and poison and is handing them out with a smile. Hospitals actually used to offer free X-rays for trick-or-treat hauls. Some still do.
Now, there's a sociologist named Joel Best who spent much of his career on this exact question. In 1985, he and a colleague went through every newspaper report they could find of tampered Halloween candy going back to 1958. And here's what he found: in all that time, he never located one substantiated case of a stranger killing or seriously injuring a child with candy collected while trick-or-treating. Not one.
But this legend must have come from somewhere, right?
Well, it does. But the story is a little different than you think
Let’s go back to Halloween, 1974. In Pasadena, Texas—a suburb southeast of Houston, refinery country, where the sky glows orange at night from the petrochemical plants along the ship channel.
That night, it was raining.
Thirty year old Ronald O’Bryan and his wife Danayne had taken their children to have dinner at a family friends, the Bateses, before heading out to trick or treat. Ronald O'Bryan was thirty, an optician at a Texas State Optical shop, and a deacon at his Baptist church. His son Timothy was eight. His daughter Elizabeth was five. The Bateses had two children of their own.
After dinner, the kids got into their costumes, and got ready to go out. Because of the rain, one of the Bates children decided to stay home, so the group that went out was the two dads, Ronald O’Bryan and Jim Bates, Timothy, Elizabeth, and one of the Bates children. It was going to be a short night. There were only two streets to go trick or treating in the neighborhood. Citation Street and Donerail Street.
The group had a system in place. Jim Bates stayed on the sidewalk with the candy bags. And Ronald O'Bryan walked the kids up to the doors.
Partway down Donerail street, the group came to a house with the lights off. The kids ran up and knocked anyway. Nobody answered. So they gave up and ran ahead to the next porch, the way kids do.
But Ronald O'Bryan stayed behind. Standing in the dark at the door nobody had opened. For about thirty seconds.
Then he came back down the walk waving five giant Pixy Stix—swishing them through the air like batons—and called out to the kids: somebody in that house had finally come to the door, and look what they were handing out.
If you haven’t seen one, a Pixy Stix is a paper straw filled with flavored sugar. The regular ones are about the size of a drinking straw. But Ronald was holding the giant ones- twenty-one inches long—nearly two feet of sugar in a tube. When you're eight years old, that's the best thing anybody's going to hand you all night.
He told them he’d hang on to them and hand them out properly later, once everybody was home.
Back at the Bates house, he did exactly that. One for Timothy. One for Elizabeth. One for each of the two Bates kids, including the one who'd stayed home. And then a fifth: a boy came to the Bateses' door trick-or-treating, said he went to O'Bryan's church, and O'Bryan gave him one too.
Five giant Pixy Stix for Five kids.
The Bates children put theirs in their bags for later. The boy from church walked home with his. And then, the O'Bryans said goodnight and headed back to Deer Park with the kids' candy in the car.
That night, as Ronald was getting the kids ready at their townhouse in Deer Park, they asked if they could have one piece of candy from their stash. Ronald agreed and let them choose. Timothy picked the Pixy Stick.
He tore it open and tipped it up. But The powder wouldn't come out. It was packed in there, stuck like it had gotten wet at some point. So his father took the candy and rolled it back and forth between his hands to loosen the sugar inside, and then handed it back.
Timothy swallowed a mouthful and made a face. He swallowed another, And he told his dad the candy tasted bad.
Ronald went to the kitchen to grab him some Kool-aid to wash it down with.
But Within moments, Timothy was vomiting. Ronald ran in and tried to help him The boy went into convulsions, so he called for an ambulance.
When the paramedics arrived, Ronald tried to explain what had happened. Twice while he was talking, he told them he felt sick himself and went into the bathroom. Both times they offered to treat him. Both times he said no.
They rushed Timothy to the hospital, but it was too late. Eight year old Timothy O'Bryan died less than an hour after he opened the candy.
When the medical examiner tested the contents of his stomach, they found something that they had never seen before. Timothy had eaten sixteen milligrams of potassium cyanide. The concentration in his blood was 0.4 milligrams. He'd swallowed nearly twice what it takes to kill a child.
Somehow, an eight-year-old's Halloween candy had been poisoned
Within hours, Pasadena police were trying to find out where the pixie sticks came from
And while they were doing that, word about what had happened was spreading. Parents across the Houston area dumped their kids' candy on the counter and started picking through it. Then they started bringing it to the police. The station had an entire room full to the ceiling of candy that parents didn’t want to touch.
But that wasn’t the candy police were interested in. Not right now. The first job was finding the other four Pixy Stix. Elizabeth hadn't eaten hers. Neither had the Bates kids. But what about the church boy.
Police got his name and ran to his home to tell his parents to not let him eat the candy. His parents brought officers to his room, where the boy was laying in bed, eyes closed, pixy stick in hand.
His mother screamed and the boy woke up. Turns out, he hadn’t touched the candy. He tried to open it the night before, but it was stapled shut and he just fell asleep.
Wait. Stapled shut??
That's not how Pixy Stix work. the straws were heat-sealed at the factory, both ends, every time. They are never, ever stapled. So that meant Somebody had opened these, poured something in, and closed them back up by hand.
The lab confirmed it. Each of the four remaining straws had a fatal dose of cyanide packed into the top two inches. Timothy's straw was missing its first four inches—the part he'd swallowed. And The powder left below it tested clean.
So who handed them out? Detectives asked Ronald O'Bryan about the house the sticks had come from.
But, strangely, he couldn’t remember. his answer kept changing. At first he didn’t remember which street. And then he remembered the street but not the house. Then he remembered the house, just not the person that handed him the candy. He only saw an arm.
Eventually, Ronald pointed to the house. The dark one on Donerail. He said he was almost positive the man who lived there was the one who'd handed him the candy.
And so…Police went to the house.
The man who lived there was a shift supervisor at one of the local airports, and he'd left for work at 1:30 that afternoon and worked until 10:30 that night. There were roughly two hundred coworkers who could place him there.
His wife and kids had handed out candy until they ran out around 6:45, then they turned off the porch light and stopped answering the door.
But they were surprised by the story the police told them, because They hadn’t handed out giant Pixy Stix. And when detectives canvassed the entire route—every house on Citation, every house on Donerail—not one of them had either.
So if they didn’t come from one of these houses, where did they come from?
Investigators started pulling records on the only other person they could confirm touched the candy. The father. Ronald O’Bryan. And what they found…did not look good.
In January, Ronald O'Bryan had joined a bank club that put a ten-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on every member of his family. His wife objected to him doing this, but that’s not all that abnormal. Right, you can have life insurance policies on your family.
But Then, a few weeks before Halloween, he'd taken out twenty-thousand-dollar policies on each of his children. Ones that his wife didn’t know about.
Again, maybe normal. Definitely less normal. But officers looked more into his finances, and it turns out he was behind on everything. Eight months late on the car payment, with a repossession letter already in hand. He owed thousands in delinquent loans. And his take-home pay came out to about a hundred and fifty dollars a week. He was in a deep hole his salary wasn’t going to get him out of.
And the story started to take an even more firm shape once investigators talked to his coworkers.
So Back in August, he'd asked his manager at the optical shop to get him some cyanide. He said he needed it to clean gold eyeglass frames. His manager thought that was strange because yes, he’d heard of people using cyanide that way, but not in twenty years. But Ronald asked again a few weeks later. Then, when that didn’t work, Ronald called an old coworker from a chemical company and asked where you could buy cyanide. But not just where to buy it. He asked how much it took to kill a person, and how a poison would show up in a dead body.
Ronald tried to explain these questions away, saying it was for research, but what exactly was he researching at this optical shop??
Then, police learned that the morning after Timothy died—at nine a.m.—Ronald called about collecting on the insurance. When the funeral home told him each policy would need its own death certificate… he went ahead and ordered six.
That felt like enough for police, who arrested Ronald O'Bryan on November 5th, 1974, for the murder of his son.
The trial took place in Houston the following spring. O'Bryan took the stand and denied all of it. The jury came back in about forty-six minutes.Guilty of capital murder. The sentence: death.
But Ronald never confessed. When he heard his sentence, he slumped and started nodding, and the detective leaned in and said, "Ronald, tell me." And Ronald looked up and said, "Tell you what?" And the moment was gone.
He spent nine years on death row, appealing. On March 31st, 1984, the State of Texas executed him by lethal injection—one of the earliest in the country. He was pronounced dead at 12:48 in the morning. Outside the prison in Huntsville, a crowd of a couple hundred people had gathered. Some of them, waiting for the announcement, started chanting "trick or treat."
What’s most horrific to me about this story, is that Ronald had two children, but he made 5 poisoned pixie sticks that night. Which meant he was completely willing to kill three other innocent children in order to make it look like he wasn’t guilty.
Like they were handed poisoned candy from a rich elusive neighbor, and no one would ever know it was him.
And Ronald didn’t know it, but he was fundamentally changing trick or treating forever.
Eight years later, after the Tylenol murders in Chicago, dozens of towns across the country canceled trick-or-treating altogether. Hospitals rolled out X-ray machines. By the late eighties, they were spending more than a million dollars a year scanning candy.
And Fifty years later, parents still check the candy.
But what do you all think? Do you have your own halloween legends that you were raised on? You can let me know wherever you listen. And I’ll be back here next week with more scary stories for all of us to listen to together.
I’ll meet you here, and until then, stay curious