Free Story Friday 8/1/2025
The Phantom Clown
Inspired by the real phantom clown sightings of the 1980s, this story reimagines what might really be behind the mask—and why he always comes back.
It was a humid August night in 1987, the kind where the air hung thick as molasses and cicadas screamed their summer song. She'd been sent to bed early for talking back at dinner, but sleep was impossible in the stifling heat. Instead, she pressed her face to the bedroom window, hoping for even the whisper of a breeze.
That's when she saw him.
He stood beneath the streetlamp at the corner of Maple and Third, perfectly still in a pool of yellow light. Tall and thin, dressed in a faded red suit with oversized buttons. His face was painted white as bone, with black diamonds around his eyes and a crimson smile that stretched too wide, too knowing. In one gloved hand, he held a single red balloon.
Rachel blinked hard, certain she was seeing things. But when she opened her eyes, he was still there. Still watching. Still smiling that terrible smile.
The clown lifted his free hand and waved. A slow, deliberate gesture meant just for her. Then he turned and walked into the darkness between streetlights, the balloon bobbing behind him like a drop of blood.
She never told anyone. Who would believe her?
Thirty-seven years later, Rachel Marsh pulled her Honda into the same driveway she'd left behind at eighteen, swearing she'd never return. But life had a way of bringing you full circle, especially when your grandmother's dementia meant she could no longer live alone.
The house looked smaller than she remembered, paint peeling from the Victorian trim, porch sagging under the weight of decades. Still, it was home. Or had been, once upon a time.
Rachel was unloading boxes from her trunk when she heard the children's voices drifting from the elementary school playground across the street. She'd forgotten how close it was—close enough to hear the afternoon chaos of recess, the shrieks of joy and playground politics.
But these voices weren't joyful. They were hushed, worried.
"I'm telling you, I saw him," a boy was saying. "Standing by the swings after school yesterday."
"You're lying," another child replied, but there was uncertainty in the accusation.
"Am not! He was tall and skinny, wearing a red costume. And he had a balloon."
Rachel's blood turned to ice water. Her hands stilled on the cardboard box she'd been lifting.
"My mom says phantom clowns aren't real," a girl chimed in. "She says it's just stories from when she was little."
"Well, my mom says they took kids back then. Made them disappear."
"Did he... did he look at you?" The girl's voice was barely a whisper now.
"Yeah. He waved."
Rachel dropped the box. Old books spilled across the driveway, but she barely noticed. She was a child again, pressed against a bedroom window, watching a nightmare wave from beneath a streetlamp.
Rachel threw herself into the routine of caring for Grandma Rose, trying to push the children's conversation from her mind. The phantom clown sightings of the 1980s were well-documented folklore—mass hysteria, most experts said. Children feeding off each other's fears until shadows became monsters and imagination became reality.
But the reports kept coming.
While substitute teaching at Millbrook Elementary, she heard them in hallways and classrooms: whispered accounts of a clown seen at the edge of the playground, standing just inside the tree line. Never approaching, never speaking. Just watching with those painted eyes.
The principal, Mrs. Henderson, addressed it in the weekly newsletter with the bland reassurance of bureaucracy: "While we understand some children have reported unusual sightings, we want to assure parents that our grounds are secure. We encourage families to discuss the difference between imagination and reality."
Everything changed the morning Eli Morrison didn't show up for school.
Rachel was covering Mrs. Patterson's third-grade class when the office made the announcement over the intercom. Eli's mother had found his bedroom window open, with the screen removed from the outside. His pajamas were folded neatly on the bed. His sneakers were gone.
The children exchanged knowing looks that made Rachel's skin crawl.
"He took the balloon," whispered a girl named Sophie. "That's how he gets you. You have to take the balloon."
"Sophie, that's enough," Rachel said sharply, but her voice shook.
"It's true," the girl insisted. "My cousin told me. He lived here in the eighties, and he saw kids take balloons from the clown man. They got quiet and weird after that, and then they disappeared. The police said they ran away, but everybody knew better."
"Children don't just disappear because of balloons," Rachel said, but even as the words left her mouth, she remembered another August night. Another missing child. Another family destroyed.
Her brother Michael had vanished two weeks after she saw the clown. Eleven years old, gone without a trace. The police had questioned everyone, searched everywhere, and found nothing. Eventually, they'd closed the case with the conclusion that he'd run away.
But Rachel remembered the morning they'd discovered his room empty. She remembered something the investigators had overlooked: a deflated red balloon in the trash can beside his desk.
That evening, while Grandma Rose dozed in her recliner, Rachel climbed the narrow stairs to her childhood bedroom. The same floral wallpaper lined the walls, faded now and peeling at the seams. Her old desk sat beneath the window, scarred by years of homework and teenage angst.
She opened the top drawer and found it immediately: a construction paper drawing in crayon and marker, carefully preserved behind a sheet of plastic. Eight-year-old Rachel had drawn it the morning after the sighting, trying to capture what she'd seen before the memory could fade.
The clown stared back at her from the paper—tall and impossibly thin, with a white face and black diamond eyes. Red lips stretched in that too-wide smile. In one hand, a crimson balloon. In the other, something that looked like a child's hand.
At the bottom, in her careful third-grade printing: "The Bad Clown That Took Michael."
Rachel's hands trembled as she held the drawing. All these years, she'd convinced herself it was trauma, grief-induced fantasy. But looking at the image now, she could remember every detail with crystal clarity. The way he'd stood perfectly still beneath that streetlamp. The deliberate wave. The balloon that seemed to pulse like a heartbeat.
And underneath it all, a terrible certainty: he was back.
Rachel spent the next three days researching everything she could find about phantom clown sightings. What she discovered made her blood run cold.
The phenomenon wasn't isolated to her small town or even to the 1980s. Reports stretched back decades, scattered across the country like breadcrumbs: Boston, 1981. Chicago, 1982. Phoenix, 1985. Omaha, 1986. Always the same pattern.
It would start with sightings. Children reporting a clown near schools, playgrounds, neighborhoods. Adults dismissed it as imagination or pranksters. Then the balloons would appear—red ones, tied to mailboxes, fence posts, playground equipment. Finally, the silence. Children would stop talking about the clown. Stop playing outside. Some would develop strange behaviors: walking in straight lines, staring at empty spaces, speaking in whispers.
And then they'd disappear.
The cases never made national news. Local police departments handled them as isolated incidents—runaways, family disputes, custody situations gone wrong. There was never enough evidence to connect the dots, never enough to see the pattern.
But Rachel saw it now, clear as daylight.
The clown moved from town to town, leaving devastation in his wake. He'd take one or two children, maybe three, and then vanish. The sightings would stop. Life would return to normal. Until he surfaced somewhere else, months or years later, and the cycle began again.
Her hometown was visited in 1987. Michael had been one of his victims, though the truth had been buried under official explanations and parental denial. Now, decades later, he was back.
Rachel was printing the last of her research when she heard Grandma Rose calling from downstairs. "Rachel, honey? There's something at the door for you."
She found her grandmother standing in the front hallway, holding a manila envelope. No return address, no postmark. Just Rachel's name written in spidery red ink.
"How did this get here?" Rachel asked.
"Don't know, dear. Found it slipped under the door."
With shaking fingers, Rachel opened the envelope. Inside was a length of red ribbon—the kind used to tie balloons—and a single sheet of paper with four words written in that same crimson ink: "He remembers you."
That night, Rachel couldn't sleep. She sat in the living room with all the lights on, her laptop open to the emergency dispatch website, finger hovering over the call button. Every creak of the old house made her jump. Every shadow seemed to move.
At 2:17 AM, she heard it: the soft sound of laughter drifting through the walls.
Children's laughter, high and musical, but wrong somehow. Too rhythmic, too controlled. Like a music box playing the same melody over and over.
Rachel crept to the front window and peered through the curtains. The streetlamp flickered, casting erratic shadows across the empty street. But then she saw him—not the clown, but a child. A boy in pajamas walking down the middle of the road with jerky, puppet-like movements.
Eli Morrison. It had to be.
The boy stopped directly in front of her house and turned toward the window. His eyes were wide and glassy, reflecting the unstable light. His mouth hung open in a perfect O, and that eerie laughter continued to pour out like a recorded sound.
Behind him, stepping out of the darkness between streetlamps, came the clown.
He looked exactly as he had thirty-seven years ago. Ageless. Unchanged. The same red suit with oversized buttons, the same white face paint, the same impossibly wide smile. In his gloved hand, he held a red balloon that seemed to glow with its own inner light.
The clown placed his free hand on Eli's shoulder, and the boy's laughter stopped abruptly. Then the clown looked directly at Rachel's window and raised his hand in that slow, deliberate wave she remembered so well.
Something snapped inside her. All the fear, all the suppressed memories, all the guilt over Michael's disappearance—it crystallized into rage. She'd been a helpless child then, paralyzed by fear. But she wasn't that frightened little girl anymore.
Rachel yanked open the front door and stepped onto the porch. "Let him go!"
The clown tilted his head with bird-like curiosity. Up close, his painted features were even more disturbing. The white face paint was cracked and yellowed with age, revealing glimpses of gray skin beneath. His black eyes weren't painted on—they were real, deep as wells and twice as empty.
"I remember you," Rachel said, her voice stronger now. "I remember what you did to my brother."
The clown's smile somehow grew wider, stretching beyond the bounds of human anatomy. He held out the balloon, string dangling between them like an offering.
"I'm not eight years old anymore," Rachel continued. "And I'm not afraid."
That was a lie. Terror coursed through her veins like ice water. But she held her ground.
The clown's expression shifted, confusion flickering across those painted features. His grip on the balloon string loosened.
"You took my brother," Rachel said, her voice steady despite the terror coursing through her. "You took all of them."
The balloon began to rise, tugging gently at the clown's fingers.
"Well, I won't let you take any more."
Rachel lunged forward and grabbed the ribbon, yanking it from the clown's grasp. The moment her skin touched the string, the world exploded into sensation. Images flooded her mind: children walking in straight lines down dark streets, their eyes empty of everything that made them human. A carnival that existed between spaces, where the music never stopped and the rides never ended. And Michael—dear God, Michael—standing at the center of it all, forever eleven years old, forever lost.
The clown let out a shriek that shattered every window on the street. He lunged for the balloon, but Rachel was already moving. She ran back into the house, the ribbon burning her palm like acid, and went straight to the kitchen. She turned on the gas stove and held the balloon over the flame.
"Give them back," she demanded. "Give them all back."
The clown appeared in the doorway, his form wavering like heat shimmer. His painted smile had become a snarl of rage and desperation.
"GIVE THEM BACK!"
Rachel opened her fingers. The balloon touched the flame and exploded with the force of a gunshot. Light poured out—not the harsh glare of electricity, but something warm and golden, like sunlight after rain. The clown's scream became a wail of agony as his form began to dissolve, breaking apart like smoke in a strong wind.
And then, silence.
Rachel woke up in her childhood bed, sunlight streaming through windows that were somehow whole again. For a moment, she thought it had all been a dream—the research, the envelope, the confrontation with the clown. But her palm still bore the burn mark where the ribbon had seared her skin.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. A news alert: "Missing Child Found Safe: Eli Morrison discovered sleeping in his own bed this morning, with no memory of the past three days."
Rachel smiled and closed her eyes. It was over. The balloon was destroyed, the clown was gone, and the children were safe. She'd done what she couldn't do as a child. She'd fought back.
But as she drifted back toward sleep, another notification chimed on her phone. And another. And another.
She opened her eyes and checked the screen. News alerts were flooding in from across the country:
"Phantom Clown Sighted in Portland Elementary School"
"Children Report Mysterious Figure Distributing Balloons in Des Moines"
"Missing Child Case Reopened After Clown Sighting in Miami"
Rachel's blood turned to ice as she scrolled through the reports. Different towns, different children, but the same story playing out over and over. The same impossible creature spreading his nightmare across the country.
She'd destroyed one balloon. But how many more were out there, floating in the hands of children who didn't know better? How many small towns were just beginning to whisper about strange sightings and red balloons?
Rachel closed her phone and walked to her closet, pulling out a suitcase. She began folding clothes with methodical precision, her movements calm and determined.
She'd destroyed one balloon and saved one child. But there were more out there—so many more, in Portland, Des Moines, Miami, and dozens of other towns where families were just beginning to notice their children's strange behavior, where parents were dismissing the first whispered reports of a clown near the playground.
Rachel had spent thirty-seven years running from her past. Now it was time to run toward something else: a future where other children might not have to suffer what Michael had suffered. Where other families might not have to endure what hers had endured.
She zipped the suitcase closed and looked out her bedroom window one last time. The street was empty, peaceful in the morning light. But she knew better now. Peace was fragile, temporary. It had to be fought for, again and again.
Her phone buzzed with another alert: "Phantom Clown Sighted Near Elementary School in Portland."
Portland was a twelve-hour drive. If she left now, she could be there by nightfall.
Rachel picked up her suitcase and headed for the door. The phantom clown had been hunting children for decades, moving from town to town, leaving devastation in his wake.
He’d missed her once. That’s why he came back. But this time, she wasn’t running.
And Rachel Marsh knew exactly how to find him.
Have you ever seen something as a child that no one else believed? The phantom clown might just be watching still. Let us know what you think in the comments—and if you dare, share your own sightings...
© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved.
This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog.
Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission.
This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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