As if clowns aren’t creepy enough, and they are, ALL OF THEM, now comes a report of a group of them trying to lure kids into the woods in Greenville, South Carolina.
“There has been a couple of people that have seen them,” Master Deputy Drew Pinciaro of the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office tells PEOPLE. “Mainly it has been children who have reported they have seen these clowns in the woods. Every time we have gone out there we have not seen any clowns.”
The purported sightings have since sparked intense social media speculation. Fleetwood Manor Apartments itself commented on the matter, issuing a letter to residents, according to WYFF.
“At no time should a child be alone at night, or walking in the roads or wooded areas at night,” the letter read, according to the station.
Okay, well that’s not at all creepy.
But wait, there’s more…
One resident told WYFF her son had also seen the clowns.
“At first, I thought he was telling a fib and I said, ‘Go in the house and we’ll talk about this again,’ because I didn’t want it all over the place,” Donna Arnold said. “And then the next day, there was like 30 kids that came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Donna, Ms. Donna, there’s clowns in the woods.’ My child was with me, so I knew they had to see something.
“There was more than one kid that seen them, so I feel confident that he was telling the truth.”
Another resident told the deputy during his follow-up visit that she’d been walking home to her apartment hours before, at 2:30 a.m., and saw a “large-figured clown with a blinking nose, standing under a post light near the garbage dumpster area,” according to the incident report.
“She stated the suspect waved at her and she waved back while she made her way to her residence safely,” according to the report. “The suspect did not approach her or harm her.”
As if that isn’t enough to freak you out, the kids also told a deputy that the clowns had approached them and tried to get them to go into the woods “by displaying large amounts of money.”
The kids also said that the clowns all live together in an old abandoned house at the end of a hiking trail in the woods. Deputies reportedly checked it out, but said they didn’t find any clowns there and the investigation is ongoing.
Man, fuck clowns.