By Noemi Rodriguez

The month of October always puts many people in the Halloween spirit. The orange and black streamers hanging from wall to wall, the expansion of candy aisles, giant decorative spiders tangled in their webs, and eerie mannequins watching from the neighbors lawn. But there are always those few who tend to take it a little too far.

The small town of Wasco, California, home to approximately 26,000 residents, recently called upon the attention of the nation. Sightings of scary clowns caused many locals to phone the city police in distress. Unknown individuals walk around the city streets at night after dressing up in clown costumes and hiding behind frightening facepaint. These disturbing jesters even created their very own Wasco Clown social media account where ononimous submissions release the whereabouts of the clown which residents use in order to try to catch them.

However, the surprising part of this fiasco comes from across the country. Many other states including Florida, New Mexico, Indiana, and New York also encountered their own creepy clowns.

“It’s definitely a terrifying trend,” history teacher Gilberto Avila said. “It could be done all in a good fashion, enjoy a fright for free.”

Although these creepy clowns made no connection to criminal activities, nor is it illegal to roam the streets in a clown costume, locals still hope for a solution to this situation. Even more frightening, some reports claimed the clowns carried baseball bats, axes, and machetes while out in public. Several simply call these clowns Wasco Clown imitators while others turn to the seriousness of the new trend.

“It’s good to go with intuition and decide that they’re bad,” junior Andrew Blanco said.

So considering that California, Florida, and New York all fall under the top four largest states in the United States, and Texas as number two, precaution should be taken in order to prevent the spread of trends like these into our community.