Tag Archives: scary stories

Scary Story: The Clown Statue

Nationality: U.S. American, Russian Heritage
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: California
Performance Date: 4/6/15
Primary Language: English
Language: Russian

Context:

My informant first told me this story when we were on a retreat together in the mountains. She told it at night when our cabin-mates were sharing scary stories. I met with her again at a cafe, and we shared more scary stories over coffee. I recorded this interview during that meeting.

Interview Transcript: 

Informant: Once upon a time, there was a girl. She was babysitting some children, and… so the parents were out and the kids wanted to watch T.V. in their parents’ room, but they were afraid of the clown statue. So they asked her… they asked the babysitter if she could cover it up with something, like a towel, or a sheet. And so she decided, being the good citizen she is, to call the parents and ask if it would be okay to cover the clown statue. And she did, she called them, and she talked to the father on the phone. And she said, “Can I cover up that clown statue? It’s kind of, you know, creeping out the kids. I just want to cover it with like a towel.” And he said, “What? Clown statue? We don’t have a clown statue in our room. Get the kids! Get out of the house! Save yourselves!” But by the time they got home, the babysitter was gone, the kids were gone, and they were never found. Because the clown statue was actually a serial killer. The end.

Me: I like it. So… where did you first hear that story?

Informant: I think I read it somewhere… I think I read it in some kind of magazine, and it was a bunch of urban legends, and that was one of them.

Me: I see… Um, what settings do you usually tell that story in?

Informant: Retreats!

*laughter*

Informant: Um, if it’s late at night, oh my gosh… If I’m working on art in the studio and it’s late at night and people are still working I’ll tell it. Like, ‘hey guys, let’s tell scary stories.’ Or like, if like someone is like sleeping over, or like when I was little and like camped in my back yard and invited friends over to camp. I haven’t camped in like two years though.

Me: That is a good story to tell while camping.

Informant: Yeah. I think, um, also some thematic information. It’s not really information, but it’s funny that there’s a lot of, um, like scary stories about babysitters specifically.

Me: Mhmm.

Informant: Maybe something to examine. There’s actually a lot of scary stories about teenagers specifically. Or like, teenage girls. Anyway, something I noticed.

Me: That’s interesting. I can understand the babysitters, because like, you know how it’s kind of a fear of leaving your children alone with somebody that you’re not familiar with.

Informant: Hmm… Or like, being a babysitter and like being in someone else’s home. Or like, needing to like be an adult and taking care of someone else’s kids, but you’re in an unfamiliar location.

Analysis:

The horror of this story is derived from the listener’s fears concerning clowns, murderers, and the unknown. Clowns are a popular symbol in horror stories, despite their purpose being to make people happy. Serial killers are also commonly used as horror story villains. Batman’s rival the Joker, who appears in the 2008 film The Dark Knight is a popular example of a villain who embodies these characteristics.

Backseat Horror Story

Nationality: America
Age: 23
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 30th, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: French

“A guy is driving on the road at night, and someone behind him keeps honking and flashing his brights. So the guy keeps turning around like what the fuck? So eventually he pulls over and the car pulls over and they get out and the guy’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ And the other guy’s like, ‘Dude, there was a guy standing in your backseat with a knife but every time I honked or flashed my brights he ducked down and you just never saw him.’ So they checked the backseat and there was a bloodstain on the ground and the guy was gone.”

The informant learned this legend from friends at camp when he was much younger. The informant was convinced that he didn’t know any folklore, so I asked him if he knew any classic scary stories, and this is what he told me. He kept trying to tell me personal anecdotes which, as I had to explain to him, were not actually folklore. He told this scary story very quickly and without much detail, because I think he found it boring and over-told. He was surprised that I had never heard the tale before. It is very similar to many of the scary stories I’ve heard, with a serial killer and an unwitting victim. The informant used to tell this story along side those similar stories at sleepovers and around the campfire. He hasn’t told it in a long time.

I have never been a big fan of scary stories; I used to plug my ears when my friends told them. Thus, I don’t know very many. However, I did not find this one very scary, probably because the informant told it in a hurried way and didn’t build any suspense. Most scary stories have an element of suspense, drawing out the story and keeping the reader from knowing what will happen, that keep listeners at the edge of their seats. This story is relatively recent, because it takes place on a road with cars that have high and low beams. It could even take place yesterday. I’m a little confused by the ending. It doesn’t make sense that the  guy waited so long in the backseat with a knife only to flee last minute. Also, I don’t know why there would be a bloodstain on the floor if he hadn’t killed anyone. I think the ending is an attempt to quickly wrap up the story and make it scary. It’s almost scarier knowing that there was someone behind you with a knife, even though he’s now gone, rather than the guy actually killing the man. The former gives me goosebumps, the latter is more shocking.

Red (a Ghost Story)

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 16
Occupation: High School Student
Residence: Arcadia, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

“So there’s this ghost story that I heard at Mock Trial state, and… it goes something like… There’s a man who checks into this hotel, and… he’s there alone.  So every night he’s there he goes down to the bar, and while he’s sitting in the bar, having a drink… he observes… up at the counter… he sees the back of this beautiful young woman.  And… he keeps trying to muster up the courage to go talk to her, but as soon as he’s close… uh… she just… goes away.  So he’s keep trying every night and every single night he sees the same beautiful woman and he keeps… trying to bring up the courage to go talk to her.  But she leaves every single time… he’s supposed to go talk to her.
So at night when he retires to his room… he… hears a scratching… at the door.  He wakes up… and he asks, “who’s there?”  But nobody responds.  So… he goes up to the door and looks through the eye hole… and all he can see is red…  There’s nothing there but the color red.  He finds this… kinda odd so he just goes back to sleep.
Uh, when he goes back to the bar he sees the woman again, same chain of events occur… he’s back at his room that night… hears the scratching again.  He looks at the eyehole, asks “who’s there?” No one’s there… it’s JUST the color red.  So the next day… he goes back to the bar… and he sees that the girl is gone.  So he goes up to the bartender and says… “Where’s that girl who sat here every night,  I really wanted to talk to her.  And… the bartender is like… “Oh… um… you mean that young woman?  Well… she left… but there was something really really odd about her.”  And the man asks, “what was that?”  And the bartender says… “Her eyes were colored red.”

My sister heard this story from a friend on a car ride back from a mock trial competition.  She and her friends were sharing scary stories when it was around evening.

My sister was particularly disturbed by this story and claims to think about/dream about it for the remainder of the day and night she hears or re-tells it.  She says that the thing that scares her the most is the connection between the girl’s eye color and the red that the man sees through the eye hole.  The catch is that every night she was here, the girl was peering through the eye hole, watching the man.  She says the thought of being watched in places of supposed privacy frightens her.

When I first heard the story, my first thought aabout the color red was that this either represented a trait of the man or the girl.  I thought that the color would imply something sexual about the story, so I was surprised that the association was quite literal – that the girl’s eyes are red and so when she went to watch the man it covered the eye hole’s view with red.  The story was not as disturbing for me, probably because I was expecting some form of bizarre twist when I had the conversation with the informant, and it was outdoors and fairly light.  The place in which this piece is performed is important. My sister heard this story during the evening in a car – the cramped and dark environment probably contributed to how the story impacted her.  However, I do agree with her on the frightening prospect of being watched without knowing.  I think the element of having the man “watch” the girl without knowing the girl was watching him all along helps emphasize that twist and underlying fear in the audience.

I also noticed that my sister learned this from a high school classmate and was performed in a group of high school students.   I think that the story is scary for high school students because privacy is something adolescents value a lot.  Although adolescents use things such as social networking and are pretty immersed in an environment of disclosure, they also want a certain extent of privacy for their own thoughts.  I feel like high school students like the informant worry about surveillance because they understand how the world they’re growing up in is becoming more and more transparent (partially because of their own practices).

In my opinion, this story shares similarities with other scary stories involving being watched.  The main recurring elements in the story (the girl and the red behind the eye hole) are kept mysterious throughout the entire story – at the end, another character/informant makes the terrifying connection for both the main character and the audience.  But the girl doesn’t really come across as a ghost to me.  She has an unusual characteristic and doesn’t actually speak to the man, but the story itself doesn’t explicitly call her a ghost.  So I find it interesting that my sister calls this a ghost story.

The Bunny Man Myth

Nationality: Irish
Age: 30
Occupation: Exec. Assistant of the Dean of USC School of Architecture
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 25 April 2012
Primary Language: English

“Halloween Night comes around. Nothing happens until midnight. Right before midnight supposedly a bunny or two enters the bridge. Right before midnight his soul (a dim light) walks the tracks above the bridge. When Midnight hits, his soul stops right above the bridge (dead center), and disappears, only to reappear inside the bridge. From then on it’s his soul which lights up the whole area, so brightly that you can’t even see him. That’s when he instantly kills you by slitting your throat and slashing your chest, only to hang you at the edge of the bridge. You can even see the rub marks that have worn away at the rock where the body’s were swinging. Who ever is inside the bridge ends up dead.” -Forbes

This informant grew up in Washington D.C., she would always hear about the urban legend of The Bunny Man Bridge in Virginia, which she claims was also the inspiration for the bunny in Donnie Darko. There is a very old tunnel with an overpass in Virginia. She says that in the early 19th century, an accident occured over the tunnel and it was transporting all these convicts, violent types. Some of the passengers escaped and the police were eventually able to find all of them except for one men. When they were searching for these men, they kept finding half eaten rabbits. So, they named him The Bunny Man and now that tunnel is called The Bunny Man Bridge. Also, my informant said that she heard from her friends if you go to the bridge and you walk halfway through and then turn around you will see The Bunnyman standing there. She had never tried it, but many of her friends had.

The legend of the Bunny Man is actually a very prominent legend in Virginia. The tale goes back to 1903 in Clifton, Virginia where there used to be an asylum, which was later relocated and is now called “Lorton Prison”. In Fall of 1904, many convicts were put on a bus and to get sent to the prison, but an accident happened and many of them fled to try to escape into the woods. They actually had trouble finding two of the convicts, Marcus and Douglas. However, they never found, Marcus, whom they later named The Bunny Man. Then, that October, people started seeing dead bunny’s along the roads again. On midnight Halloween night, a few kids that had gone to the bridge saw a bright light in the tunnel and then were murdered by the same kind of tool that they found in Marcus’ hand almost a year before. “Not only were their throats slashed, but all up and down their chests were long slashes gutting them” and then both guys were hung from the bridge and then the woman on the other side. This then happened for many years in the same way.

So, for this piece of folklore there was a legend component as well as a myth. My informant told me that many teens today still go and try to see the Bunny Man, but the murders only occurred around midnight on Halloween night. Some of the variations on the legend also involve the murderer wearing a bunny suit. Although this story seems farfetched, many of the articles regarding it swear on its truth. I think that these kinds of myths represent the country’s fascination with ghost stories and mysterious unknown. Also, by creating haunting figures and urban legends like the Bunny Man, it could be an attempt to stop teenagers from going to the bridge at night or partying on Halloween Night. In my research about this story, there was actually one girl who stayed away from the bridge at midnight while her other friends stayed to see if the Bunny Man legend was actually real. Supposedly, at midnight, she heard the screams of her friends and by the time she got to the bridge, all her friends were hung. In fact, she was later accused of their murders and ended up being put in an insane asylum for shock. Like other sinister figures, such as Bloody Mary, it seems like each folklore has a myth component as well as a legend behind it and they get more complex in variation as the stories get spread around.

Annotation/Additional Comments: This legend and myth can be found at this source: http://www.castleofspirits.com/clifton.html and http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library/branches/vr/bunny/

Supposedly, the Bunny Man had been reported in a few other towns in 1973 and the Fox Family Channel series “Scariest Places on Earth” did a segment called “Terror on Bunnyman Bridge’ in 2001.