Legend – Beckett, Massachusetts

Legend—USA

“At Camp Greylock, a summer sleep-away camp in Beckett Massachusetts, counselors dressed up as clowns and terrorized boys in the middle of the night.”

David informed me that he first heard this legend when he was a counselor at Camp Greylock during the Summer of 2007.  He decided to build a campfire with his co-counselor and tell the kids in their bunk ghost stories,  Though most of the stories were fictional, his co-counselor did tell one extremely alarming tale, which he swore was true, or at least is believed to be true.  Apparently in the 70s (the camp was founded in 1916), a group of sick and twisted counselors decided that it would be funny to torture children.  They decided that the best way for them to this was to dress up in complete clown costumes; white faces, colored wigs—and scare 11 and 12-year-old boys.  After they put on the costumes, a bunch of them would go into a bunk and sit in the center of the main room, staring into space.  When one or more of the kids would wake up, they would be terrified as they would see a group of frightening clowns, not moving, just sitting on the floor staring off into space, or worse, at the children.

Though we will likely never know if this is a true story or not (the current owners of the camp say it’s false, but the events allegedly happened 2 or 3 owners before them).  Clowns must be a common fear amongst people, because I have heard several legends involving clowns.  The most notable is an urban legend that I heard while here at school in L.A.; apparently a girl is house sitting for her neighbors when she sees a statue of a clown and calls the owners of the house to ask about it.  They say that they don’t have a statue of a clown, and the idea is that some random guy dressed as a clown was terrorizing her.  Whether or not the two are somehow related—one somehow being a variation of the other, or one coming after the other, we will never know for sure.  This is why such urban legends are so fascinating, not only are we unsure as to whether or not it is true, but we also wonder what relationship it has to other legends.