I once watched this talk show, although I forget which one it was, where people faced their worst fears. A woman somewhere in her forties confessed that she was terrified of clowns and had been since she was six years old. I’ll never forget the way she cried and whimpered when the host brought a clown on stage to help her face this fear. She was telling the truth when she said that she didn’t like clowns.

A British survey conducted by the University of Sheffield quizzed 250 children between the ages of 4 and 16 about how they felt about clowns. The vote was unanimous: every child in that survey was afraid of clowns.

The researchers determined that clowns are “universally disliked” by children, and that some kids find them “unknowable.”

I disagree with the above statement because I’ve always liked clowns, even the scary ones on Killer Clowns from Outer Space and the one in Stephen King’s It. Curious, I asked my boys how they felt. The older one shrugged with indifference, while the younger one felt that they were stupid. I feel much better knowing that I hadn’t given them permanent nightmares when I hired a clown for my oldest’s fifth birthday party.

Both literature and movies have depicted clowns as evil creatures that lure children to their doom, whether portraying them as mythical monsters or sickos. It’s no wonder that children and adults are terrified of them.

This rumor is very reminiscent of Stephen King’s The Cell. An unsuspecting cell phone user answers their phone, finds a red-colored apparition of a woman on their display screen, and dies when their brain explodes. The rumor swept through Karachi, with new warnings of impotency and pregnancy.

According to the rumors, the cause of these supernatural killer calls is due to a mobile phone company building a tower at a graveyard. This enraged the spirits, who decided to kill off the company’s customers in retribution.

As preposterous as these rumors are, they have sent a wave a panic among cell phone users in Karachi. This fear has prompted cell phone companies to issue clarifications to their customers that their cell phones are safe to use. Other people have taken this rumor for what it is, an urban legend started by bored kids or an angry customer.

I was curious about how other countries celebrated Halloween and decided to search the topic. This is what I found:

Jack O’Lanterns.net: Halloween Traditions

My favorites are England and Ireland because of their pagan and Celtic roots.

Thousands of people have flocked to a small village in northern Malaysia to look at what appears to be a human face that formed in a frond of a betel nut tree. Village elders believe that the face is a ghost and have urged villagers and sightseers not to talk to it, lest they anger the spirit.

Skeptics believe that enterprising locals have manipulated the pictures to make the form scary enough to draw more tourists to their otherwise obscure village.