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It was approaching the end of March 1954,hidden video sex and residents of Bellingham, Washington, about 88 miles north of Seattle, were complaining about damaged car windshields.

Newspapers in Seattle picked up the story, and soon reports of small craters in windshields rolled toward the city like a wave.

SEE ALSO: Police arrest creepy clown found lurking in Kentucky woods

By April 14 of that year, claims of widespread windshield damage were reported just 45 miles outside of Seattle, and then the mysterious vandalism hit the city itself. On April 15, Seattle police recorded thousands of complaints from residents who said their windshields were pock-marked.

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Theories ran wild. Perhaps debris was showering the area, fallout from a secret nuclear test somewhere offshore. Perhaps it was damage from outer space, caused by rays from the sun. Perhaps a cloud of fleas had bombed the region's cars with small but heavy eggs. Alarmed, the mayor called the president for help.

The next day, journalists suggested the reason no one had caught a culprit or seen this rain of nuclear debris was because these things had only existed in the minds of people who expected to see them. Perhaps residents were just now noticing dents in their windshields that some errant rock had put there months before.

The day after that, no one in Seattle called police about a windshield.

We got that anecdote from social psychologist David Myers, though you can read about it in many corners of the internet. When asked about the ongoing spread of strange clown sightings across the United States, he said he knew nothing of this phenomena in particular, but he does know about human suggestibility, which is seeing what we're expected to see.

And right now, more and more people are seeing clowns prowling streets, both real and -- almost certainly -- imagined.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The clowns are coming

The clown sightings started in August.

Kids in Greeneville, South Carolina, said a group of clowns had tried to lure them into a thicket of trees outside an apartment complex. Children were warned against walking near the woods at night and residents became concerned for their safety.

Soon, similar sightings trickled up to North Carolina, where a man said he chased a clown into a forest with a machete. A woman in Oregon said a clown walked up to her while she sat in her car and began beating on her driver-side window.

Late Monday night and into early Tuesday morning, hundreds of Pennsylvania State University students mobbed streets around campus searching for clowns fellow students had supposedly seen on campus. Police, when asked, said they had no reason to believe the rumors.

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But the plethora of news stories, and the holy grail of analytics -- Google Trends -- will tell you that the phenomena is spreading, whether or not it is based in fact. The number of people searching for "clown sightings" on Google has spiked in the past several weeks, from no searches in late August to dozens each day by the start of October.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Whether this began because there was a creepy clown or because someone said there was doesn't matter after a point. The rumors have tipped into reality, and they are spreading rapidly.

Clown crackdown

As the situation escalated, police started to pay more attention to the reported sightings. Multiple arrests have now been linked to the rapid spread of clown sightings across the U.S.

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In Alabama, four teenagers were charged with making terroristic threats from social media accounts Stitchez_the_klown and Crazo_the_cappinclown.

In Arizona, two 17-year-olds were arrested for robbing a Domino's and a Taco Bell while dressed as clowns.

In Virginia, more teenagers were arrested after pulling on clown masks and chasing kids.

In Pennsylvania, a dispute that involved a 16-year-old with a clown-like mask covering the top of his head ended in the boy stabbed to death by a 29-year-old man. The man has been charged with murder.

In Kentucky, police arrested 20-year-old Jonathan Martin for dressing up like a creepy clown and hiding in the woods. They charged him with disorderly conduct.

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Police have strengthened security at schools after anonymous clown-related threats, and officers have also issued updates on department Facebook pages asking residents to stop sending in tips about clowns. They're simply getting too many to be useful.

The hysteria has reached a point that Stephen King -- who authored a book about a terrifying child-murdering clown -- has asked us all to please calm down.

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Fear is contagious

What King said is almost certainly true. Most clowns juggle, dance or make kids laugh at birthday parties.

But the image of a juggling clown is not the one that resonates. The image of a creepy clown is the one that taps into people's fears.

"The mass media, through repeated exposure, has linked clowns to creepy characters associated with violence and aggression," Brad Bushman, an Ohio State University professor of media and psychology who also studies human violence, told Mashable."I can't pretend to know the motive of the people who do this, but I'm sure they have this association in mind."

Let's take an example that comes from the beginning of this year's clown craze. In early August, residents of Green Bay, Wisconsin, began to spot a harsh-looking clown standing around the city at night, holding black balloons. The sight creeped people out, and soon the clown was in headlines across the country.

The clown, as it turns out, has a name. Gags the Green Bay Clown was standing outside as part of a viral marketing campaign for a short horror film, and it worked perhaps all too well. Two months later, Gags lookalikes seem to be everywhere, real and imagined.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Gags made headlines because people associated the clown with menace, not birthdays. And the people who are now dressing up like Gags almost certainly understand this, Bushman said.

"When people engage in deviant behavior they don't want to be detected or held responsible," Bushman said. "It's why people wear costumes and masks, so they can't be detected and held responsible."

Strange sightings can connect people

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Clown masks might allow those wearing them to feel disconnected from their actions, but those who call in supposed sightings could be using the phenomena to conjure the opposite feeling.

"People could make these claims, no one would really pursue it, and then they're kind of connected to something more than themselves," Jason Seacat, a psychology professor at Western New England University, told Mashable.

Seacat talked about TV shows devoted to finding Bigfoot, and how supposed sightings of mystical creatures can crop up in one area or another.

If he walked out of the woods one day and said he'd seen Sasquatch, Seacat said there's a good chance people would believe some of what he said. He's not one to just make stuff up, after all. Soon, as the news spread, others might claim to have seen Sasquatch themselves. Pretty soon, headlines.

These things, he said, "tend to cycle. We certainly go through periods where we have increases in Sasquatch sightings."

The U.S. also goes through periods of clown sightings. "Creepy Clown Sightings Spread Across Nation," is an ABC headline from Oct. 21, 2014. A recent Slatearticle documents supposed clown sightings back to May 1981.

And like we have seen before, the clowns, when they're gone, will probably return.

Topics Stephen King