“So my friend was babysitting for this family for the first time.  She called the parents to ask if she could watch TV and they said that after she put the children down for bed, she could watch TV in their bedroom since the TV downstairs did not have cable.  She asked them if she could put a sheet or something over the clown statue in their room because she was afraid of clowns.  The parents then told her to take the kids and get out of the house immediately; they would call the police.  My friend did what they said and as soon as the parents got home, they told her that they did not own a clown statue and that it must have been someone dressed up as a clown.”

My informant heard this urban legend from a friend around the age of twelve or thirteen from a friend of hers in Houston, Texas.  She found this urban legend particularly frightening because she and her friend both babysit.

My informant says this urban legend is mostly told to teenage girls who babysit as a job or who babysit to earn extra money.  It is scary for these girls because many already feel uncomfortable being alone in a strange house with children as their responsibility.

After researching this urban legend on the Internet, there are several websites that tell of the same urban legend.  I do not believe this urban legend actually happened to my informant’s friend; I believe she told it from a first person perspective to make it scarier.  Since she tells the urban legend as something that happened to her, it makes the legend seem more like reality.  It is just like saying “If it happened to me, it could happen to you.”