Wrinkles the Clown has been spotted around Southwest Florida since late 2014 at fairs and Halloween parties. Local filmmaker Cary Longchamps said he is planning a documentary in an attempt to reveal the man behind the mask. (Source: YouTube)

SHARE Cary Longchamps In this file photo, Cary Longchamps, a volunteer at the Baker Museum, is dressed as a clown for community day at Artis-Naples on Sunday, Oct. 26, 2014. (Samuel Wilson/Staff) Wrinkles the Clown has been spotted around Southwest Florida since late 2014 at fairs and Halloween parties. Local filmmaker Cary Longchamps said he is planning a documentary in an attempt to reveal the man behind the mask. (Source: YouTube) The duplex filmmaker Cary Longchamps rents off Bayshore Drive in East Naples. The bush in front of the front window appears to be the same bush in a Wrinkles video from June 2015. Note the white security camera in the window. The reflection of that camera can be seen in the Wrinkles video. (Ryan Mills/Staff)

By Ryan Mills of the Naples Daily News

Wearing a white mask and a red-and-white polka dot jumpsuit, Wrinkles the Clown stood motionless in front of an East Naples duplex before stealing the balloons tied to the mailbox for a little girl's birthday party.

The creepy display was caught on security video, shared June 20 on a Web page dedicated to all things Wrinkles.

In tony Naples, where streetscapes are perfectly manicured, powerful CEOs live out their golden years and downtown is known for high-end restaurants and boutiques, there is a cranky, 65-year-old clown walking around in public, at times scaring kids. At least that's the story told about the character known as Wrinkles.

Over the past year or so, tales of Wrinkles stalking local fairs and popping up outside people's windows have gone national.

First the Palm Beach Post wrote a story about him. The Washington Post wrote two. Jimmy Fallon and James Corden have joked about him on their television talk shows. He was the subject of a question on National Public Radio's "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me." He's been featured in the Huffington Post.

Now local aspiring filmmaker Cary Longchamps is trying to raise $45,000 through a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary about Wrinkles. But there is evidence the story of Wrinkles may be just that, a story, the creation of a few creative minds in on the Wrinkles joke, like Longchamps and his friends.

What is known is there is little evidence Wrinkles has ever been "the talk of Naples," as media put it last week. Law enforcement in Fort Myers, Naples, Collier County and Lee County say they've never received complaints about an old guy dressed in a clown outfit and creepy mask stalking neighborhoods, stealing things, walking the streets or scaring local kids. And members of the Naples clowning community — the people who keep tabs on this kind of thing (and yes, there is a clown community) — haven't heard of him.

"I've never seen him," said Jackie Nolder, a former Collier deputy who has been performing around town as Melody Merrymaker for 28 years. "Everybody wants to go viral. I think that's what somebody's done."

Ask Longchamps, and he plays it straight: A purveyor in oddities, horror and fetish art, he said he grew interested in Wrinkles only after seeing photos of him online.

But what about the evidence that at least one of the submitted Wrinkles videos, the security camera footage that purports to capture the clown stealing a girl's balloons, was filmed in front of Longchamp's East Naples duplex?

And then there's this. In the days before the first Wrinkles photos appeared on Longchamp's social media pages in 2014, Longchamps appeared as a clown at an Artis — Naples Community Day event wearing what appears to be Wrinkles' red-and-white polka dot clown jumpsuit. C'mon, Cary Longchamps. What gives?

"Wrinkles is Wrinkles," he said. "I'm Cary Longchamps."

***

To the uninitiated, Wrinkles is a ghoulish clown in a white mask with a wide red frown, black patches for eyes and a receding hairline. There are photos and videos of him lurking outside people's windows, stalking local festivals, and even dancing at bars.

This is not the kind of behavior most clowns condone.

Pam Moody thinks it does a disservice to her art. Moody, who performs in Iowa as Sparky the Clown and is the vice president of the World Clown Association, had never heard of Wrinkles. "Don't say you're a clown," she said when asked about him. "You're a person in a scary costume scaring the crap out of people."

One of the first Wrinkles "sightings" is one of the creepiest, and that's saying a lot.

Grainy security camera footage shows a little girl who, so the caption says, is sleeping on a trundle bed in Sarasota. Slowly, the drawer under the bed opens to reveal Wrinkles. He doesn't disturb the girl. Rather, he places a stuffed animal on her bed.

He then turns his crazy clown gaze to the camera and reaches for it. The video goes to static.

A description of the video says it was shot in June 2013, but not published to YouTube until Nov. 8, 2014. It gives two explanations. The first: a local homeowner, who wishes to remain anonymous, captured the video, and has no idea how the clown got in or under his daughter's bed.

Surely someone called the cops on this psycho clown guy under their daughter's bed?

"I have nothing," Sarasota County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Kaitlyn Johnston said. "I spoke with my Captain. He would have remembered something like this. And we also searched our database of crime reports and things like that, and we have nothing on this incident."

The second explanation, which the writer says is offered from Wrinkles himself: He was hired to do this to "strike fear into a misbehaving child."

***

Cary Longchamps has spent most of his 39 years on this Earth in Naples, but he takes every chance he can get to get away. He enjoys exploring abandoned towns, empty prisons and mental hospitals, where he shoots video for his side business, Anomalous Curiosities, which sells stock footage of "anything weird and curious," according to his website.

"This town is boring," Longchamps said in a phone interview with the Daily News (he turned down a request for a face-to-face interview.). "If you're not down at Larry's getting hammered every night, or at the beach or at the mall, there's nothing to do here."

The Anomalous Facebook page is littered with photos of doll parts, medical oddities and horror-themed memes. It also seems to have the first documented post about Wrinkles; a photo of him outside a sleeping man's bedroom on Oct. 26, 2014.

Longchamps posted two more photos of Wrinkles creeping outside of windows days later, on Oct. 28 and Nov. 1. About a week later, he set up a Google+ page tagged HvUSeen Wrinkles. Longchamps also maintains Instagram and Twitter pages, all to document Wrinkles.

"I didn't meet him until after the whole Google+ page," Longchamps said of Wrinkles. "His picture started showing up online and I was fascinated by it."

The Wrinkles sightings came on the heels of similarly creepy clowns in 2014 showing up on streets, front porches and security footage across the country, from California to Jacksonville.

Shortly after the Wrinkles sites surfaced, local photographer Krislin Kreis — and longtime Longchamps collaborator — just happened to spot the clown at the St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church fair. She snapped a photo of the paunchy clown waving to her in front of the Silver Streak. She got closer with a shot of a sad looking Wrinkles across the carousel. She snapped another shot by the Berry Go Round.

"He made for a very good photo subject," Kreis said. "I just showed up because I wanted to do a photo project with the fair. It was interesting. I didn't expect to see a clown there."

Longchamps reported additional Wrinkles sightings over the next few months, including a photo of him at the Collier County fair, a video of him next to a trash bin in Naples and a video of him waving on the side of U.S. 41 in Fort Myers.

The Wrinkles legend really blew up last November, after NBC-2 tracked him down in North Naples' Victoria Park on Halloween.

"People pay me to go scare their friends. People pay me to go dance at their parties, bar mitzvahs and what not," the clown said in a thick — almost too thick and sometimes inconsistent — Northeast accent during the interview. "Ever since these kids put me on the Internet my phone rings nonstop. It's ridiculous."

National attention soon followed. Wrinkles told The Washington Post he is a 65-year-old retired transplant from Rhode Island and military veteran. Divorced and without family ties, he moved to Southwest Florida to escape the New England winters and took up the clown shtick to have some fun, the newspaper quoted him as saying.

After the story blew up online, Longchamps said he reached out to Wrinkles about shooting a documentary.

"I started bugging him. I was like, 'You've got to let me film a documentary about you.' He was like 'No, no, no.'" Longchamps said. "It took months, but he agreed."

Earlier this month, Longchamps launched his Kickstarter campaign, hoping to raise $45,000 by March 4. As of Thursday afternoon, he's raised less than $2,000 from 49 people.

***

So what's real?

There have been documented "sightings" of Wrinkles around town, but most people who know anything about him seem only to know him from social media hyped by Longchamps and media coverage based on Longchamps' hype. It's unclear who is actually behind the mask.

Longchamps isn't completely candid when asked about details.

For instance, in the June video claiming to show Wrinkles stealing the birthday girl balloons off her mailbox, Lonchamps said it came from an anonymous East Naples man. But stand in front of Longchamps' duplex near Bayshore Drive, it's so obvious the video was shot in his front yard. The same large bush in front of Longchamps' window is in the video. And the white security camera, seen on video in the window's reflection, is still there today.

Longchamps, after prodding by a reporter, acknowledges the story wasn't true.

"It's called viral marketing, bro," he said.

But he stuck to his guns, insisting that it is, in fact, Wrinkles — not him — in the video.

"I've had the guy over to my house before. Big deal," he said.

OK bro, but what about the photo of you wearing the Wrinkles red-and-white polka dot clown suit in Naples at the community event — the same day you posted the first Wrinkles photo on your Anomalous Facebook page. Longchamps said it's just a coincidence. (Nevermind that a Google search turns up hundreds of stylish, creepy and sometimes cute clown costumes to choose from.)

"This is an art project," Longchamps said. "It's my art project, something I've been working on for a long time."