Are clowns purging on the night before Halloween? It’s a hoax

Rumours that clowns are allegedly planning a purge the night before Halloween are spreading online.

The rumours come amidst a case of mass social-media hysteria about “killer clowns”. A series of rumours of which the majority were utter nonsense, with the main point – of course – being that there are no killer clowns on the loose. We debunk most of this clown related nonsense in our post here.

And now some bright sparks have decided to create “clown purge” related alarmist nonsense that purports clowns are planning some kind of purge the night before Halloween. The warning goes on to advise readers to keep themselves, family, friends and even pets indoors during this night.

The reference to “purge” is likely related to the purge themed movies of the same name where all criminal activity is legalised during a single night of the year.

An example post can be read below –

WARNING clowns are allegedly planning their own purge the night before Halloween. Stay inside, keep all pets inside and keep all doors and windows locked.
Share this post with your family and friends!

The first instance of the post appeared on a page called Clown Hunters, and that post garnered an exceptionally large number of shares before being taken down – presumably by the page admin upon realising they were directly fuelling a genuinely dangerous case of cyber-hysteria.

However, before the original warning was removed, it managed to find its way [verbatim] onto other pages as well. Some pages posting the warning believing it to be genuine, while others more concerned with increasing the number of followers they have by posting ‘click-baity’ alarmist warnings.

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This in turn has led to a plethora of warnings purporting the apparent clown purge is set to happen in specific neighbourhoods, with many warnings falsely claiming that their local authorities have warned of the impending event. This is simply untrue.

Of course these warnings contain all the red flags that you’d expect to see in a typical case of online tripe. For starters, no locations were mentioned, no reference to the people supposedly behind the purge, or how and where they were organising – nor indeed any mention of how the author of the warning even knows about any so-called clown purge.

Additionally, given the lack of any legitimate warnings about any such event occurring from any authorities, this is just to be taken as online scarelore. The real danger here is not killer clowns purging your neighbourhood, but the potentially dangerous consequences of having millions of scared people on edge from a threat that doesn’t even exist.

Hysteria – even when it’s based on a non-existent threat – is dangerous, plain and simple. We just hope the people fuelling this drivel realise that.