[billorites]

Time for your tests kid!

[metmom]

I always hated clowns. There was something about something that looked somewhat human but not quite that really bothered me.

Interesting, also, that the kids found the decor *babyish*.

Funny how adults have all these ideas about what kids like and nobody ever bothers to ask the kids before all the time and effort is wasted.

[OCCASparky]

Can’t sleep, the clowns will eat me...can’t sleep, the clowns will eat me...

[mtbopfuyn]

Coulrophobia - who knew it had a name.

[NewCenturions]

Bump from all us Clown-o-phobes! (shudder!!)

[Ditter]

Of course kids don’t like clowns! One got too close to my little brother at the circus and he hit the clown with his cotton candy. The clown got mad and cursed at him. Clowns are ugly and scary!

[windsorknot]

Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

[tiki]

I just always thought they were stupid and not very funny.

[hinckley buzzard]

Another factor is the representation of evil clowns in films such as Stephen King's It.

No, the fear of clowns goes back at least to the renaissance when the harlequin was a comic figure based on the medieval depiction of an evil emissary of the devil. King merely tapped into a pre-existing intuitive archetype.

[Titan Magroyne]

Uh-oh dude, they’re talkin smack aboutcha! ;o)

[Joya]

A very long time ago, the paper where I lived carried the “Rose is Rose” comic strip, and in it, Rose’s little son was terrified of clowns.

In real life, my daughter was afraid of clowns when she was a child. Nothing I could think of to say seemed to help.

[Larry Lucido]

I was always afraid of nuns. I had countless nightmares about them.

[109ACS]

Kramer is afraid of clowns also and I don't blame him.

[boomop1]

Sounds like a Stephen King novel.

[andy58-in-nh]

I'd never heard the technical name for the fear of clowns before, but it is certainly common in children (my daughter and several of her cousins have expressed the same fear). I was scared by a jack-in-the-box when I was about 6 years old - it just popped open by itself while I was looking at it. Not only was there a clown inside, but a strangely unsettling picture of a clown on the outside. It completely freaked me out, as I was a child with an active imagination to begin with.

I had a dream that night (well, a nightmare) which repeated about a half a dozen times until I was about 12. The nightmare recurred as an episode of "sleep paralysis" - something else I only learned about many years later as "Old Hag Syndrome". You feel like there is an evil presence in the room sitting on you or pressing you down, and you cannot move or cry out. In my case, it was the Clown. It is quite an eerie thing and a bit traumatic for a child. It hasn't happened to me for over 30 years, yet I still get chills when I think about it. As Stephen King might tell you, the human mind is capable of some pretty wild things.

[SALChamps03]

Some people think clowns are funny. But I think they're scary. But maybe that's because when I went to the circus as a little boy, a clown killed my dad.

Jack Handy

[montag813]

This man ruined it all for clowns...

[giotto]

added Mr Eldridge, who is also a director of the Clown Museum in London... "We live in a world where everything is banned and it has got rather silly."

This from a clown.

I hate clowns. I don't find them scary, just boring and garish. I do sort of like the white clowns, though--Pierrot or whatever the character is called.

[Cuttnhorse]

Wasn't this guy also afraid of clowns??

[naturalized]

Adults often don't give children credit for their powers of observation. We should all be wary of anyone, clown or not, that wears a "painted-on" smile. I think children also are unsettled by the body language and "off-stage" conduct of clowns, and the strangeness of having their parents tolerate this in their presence. And freaks like Gacy and Klutzo don't help.