Police say unidentified attacker stabbed victim as wave of hysteria about ‘scary clown’ craze sweeps US and Europe

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A man in southern Sweden has been stabbed by an unidentified attacker wearing a clown mask, as a wave of hysteria about sightings of “scary clowns” sweeps the United States and several European countries including the UK.

“A man born in 1997 was stabbed in the shoulder by an unknown person who ran away,” police in Halland county in southern Sweden said on their website.



The incident late on Thursday came after two people in clown costumes threatened to kill a woman in the centre of Sweden on Wednesday.



“She was extremely frightened,” a police spokesman told the Aftonbladet newspaper, adding that there was nothing funny about the craze.

Also on Wednesday, a group of men in clown outfits surrounded four 10-year-old children and threatened them with what turned out to be fake chainsaws.

The interior minister, Anders Ygeman, has called for calm, telling the TT news agency: “We don’t want to see a situation where a person gets into real trouble because someone, perhaps half-joking, puts on a clown mask.”

Warning: contains strong language

In the US, a social media-fuelled frenzy led the McDonald’s hamburger chain to announce this week it would scale back the use of its smiley-faced Ronald McDonald.

The craze has also spread to Britain, where police forces have been called to several incidents involving pranksters dressed as clowns jumping out and trying to frighten people.

Police in Britain and the US fear the craze will spike in the run-up to Halloween. Even the White House has weighed in and warned that authorities were taking such incidents seriously.

The phenomenon has also hit the Netherlands, where two people have been seen wearing masks and brandishing weapons.

France had a similar craze in 2014, which according to sociologist Robert Bartholomew was “quite intense and violent”, leading to the arrest or jailing of a dozen teenagers.

“Clowns can be seen as creepy because you can’t read a clown’s face, and 80% of communication is non-verbal,” he said. “If a person is wearing makeup or a mask, it is hard to know whether they are friend or foe.”