December 4, 2025: Urban Legends: Those Damn Clowns

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two ways to AmericanStudy the bizarre spate of clown sightings in 2016.

First things first: I have to share my two favorite sentences from the Wikipedia page “2016 clown sightings.” For sheer silliness, you can’t beat “In October 2016, McDonald’s decided that Ronald McDonald would keep a lower profile as a result of the incidents.” But for far more significant effects of such a craze, there’s “nine people in Alabama [were] arrested on suspicion of ‘clown-related activity.’” That’s really the duality of most urban legends, I’d say—they tend to be quite silly in both origin and collective conversation; but they can have very real and all-too-often destructive effects on their societies. If you don’t believe me, here’s a bonus third sentence from Wikipedia: “Students at Pennsylvania State University and Michigan State University were involved in mobs that searched for clowns on campus after reported sightings.” I submit that any widespread phenomenon which leads to “mobs” can never be dismissed as simply silly.

So the 2016 clown craze was both silly and serious—but what can we make of it? One definite, and very 21^st century, layer was the possibility—and at times the unquestionable reality—of the sightings being part of marketing campaigns. That turned out to be definitively the case for one of the most famous sightings, a series of viral pictures of a clown wandering an abandoned parking lot in Green Bay in August 2016. A Facebook page soon followed, claiming that the clown was named Gags; and then, lo and behold, indie filmmaker Adam Krause revealed that it was all marketing for his short film Gags the Clown, which was expanded into a feature horror film in 2018. Thanks to such stories, as well as to the era’s general and increasing difficulty of distinguishing reality from reality TV (to coin a phrase), just a month later New Line Cinema, distributor of the in-production film adaptation of Stephen King’s It (which would be released the following year), had to release a statement that “New Line is absolutely not involved in the rash of clown sightings.”

Neither was Donald Trump, at least as far as I can prove. But it’s nonetheless impossible to miss the coincidental timing of this spate of sightings in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election (and yes, the clown sightings were a global phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean the American ones didn’t have specific resonances here). Speaking for myself, but also for many other AmericanStudiers with whom I’ve spoken about the moment, when Trump first descended that golden escalator in June 2015, the campaign he launched looked and sounded and felt like a clown show. And even though by the summer of 2016 it was beyond clear that things were far more serious than that, they were also still, y’know, a clown show. Indeed, I’ll go a step further: the most dominant political and social force over the decade since can be summed up as—perhaps can’t be summed up any better than—a killer clown. Ha, ha, fucking ha.

Last urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 3, 2025: Urban Legends: Sewer Gators

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two figures who together helped spread an urban legend, and one broader way to AmericanStudy it.

From what I can tell, it has for some bizarre reason occasionally been the case that New Yorkers have bought baby alligators as pets, decided that they don’t want to keep them, and flush them down the toilet, leading to the genuine (if usually tragically brief, as they can’t really survive down there) presence of these tiny gators in the city’s sewers. But the urban legend that there are full-grown alligators living in New York’s sewer system is largely due to one unique individual, the public worker Teddy May. I can’t sum up May any better than do the three extended passages featured at that hyperlinked sewergator.com page, but I will highlight this quote from Sewer Division Chief John T. Flaherty, featured in the 1999 book Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends: “Yes, Professor, there really was a Teddy May…almost as much of a legend as the New York City Alligator [Alligator cloaca novum Eboracum] itself.”

If May was apparently notorious among his fellow public workers, and perhaps to a degree in the city’s conversations more broadly (at least during his mid-20^th century life), it took an author and book to extend that legend beyond the Big Apple. That text is NYPD officer turned journalist and acclaimed novelist Robert Daley’s first book, The World Beneath the City (1959), an ostensibly documentary work that leans well into the realms of both folklore and humor, with Teddy May as its primary guide for both. Daley writes, “Sewer inspectors first reported seeing alligators about 1935, Teddy May being Superintendent at the time. Neither May nor anyone else believed them.” But Flaherty notes that “in the fullness of time, [May] rose to become a Foreman or, perhaps, a District Foreman.” So it is apparently Daley whose belief should have been a bit more hard-earned, and May whose stories are likely as mythic as those full-size sewer gators.

But even if the gators aren’t really there, the legend certainly is, and like all such tales has a lot to tell us about its and our worlds. In this case, I’d say this urban legend is particularly illustrative of the ways we think about the first word in that phrase, our urban spaces. For at least the last 150 years, many American narratives have been dedicated to spreading fears about our cities, and more exactly about the unseen dangers that lurk around every corner in these urban landscapes. In B.V. Hubbard’s Socialism, Feminism, and Suffragism, the Terrible Triplets, Connected by the Same Umbilical Cord, and Fed from the Same Nursing Bottle (1915), one of the worst books in American history despite having one of our best titles, he writes that “In large cities people do not know their nearest neighbors, and it is sometimes dangerous, both from the moral and financial point of view, to make indiscriminate acquaintances without some investigation of the proposed acquaintance.” Hubbard is using the idea as an analogy for the dangers of Suffragism, but it also succinctly reflects this fundamental fear of the urban unknown—and what could be more unknown nor more fearsome than the legendary creatures lurking in a city’s sewers?

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 2, 2025: Urban Legends: Cryptids in Culture

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On AmericanStudies takeaways from pop culture works about three legendary creatures.

1)      Harry and the Hendersons (1987): I’m not going to make the case that this E.T.-lite film about a suburban family who accidentally adopt a Bigfoot and have to keep him safe from hunters and scientists is any great shakes. But I do think that the tagline, captured on the original theatrical poster, is really telling: “According to science, Bigfoot doesn’t exist. When you can’t believe your eyes, trust your heart.” There are various reasons why folks have been determined to believe in Bigfoot/Sasquatch for more than a century, and indeed why cryptids of all kinds maintain their hold on our collective imaginations—but I think high on the list is that we want to believe that there are mysteries beyond the reach of science or knowledge. I agree with that perspective, by the way, even if I’m not quite sure that one of those mysteries is Harry the Bigfoot.

2)      “El Mundo Gira” (1997): There’s no shortage of cultural representations of El Chupacabra, the goat-killing cryptid whose story seemingly originated in Puerto Rico but who has also haunted much of the American Southwest, Mexico, and further into Central America for at least half a century. But I think this Season 4 episode of The X-Files is particularly interesting for two reasons: it links the mythic creature to one of the show’s most realistic social commentary plotlines, about Mexican American migrant workers in California; and, as the title (which translates to “The World Turns”) suggests, the entire episode is presented in the style of a telenovela. I’m not sure either of those elements entirely works, but both are a great reminder that urban legends can and must always be contextualized with both real-world issues in their societies and the kinds of cultural forms of storytelling through which all legends are told.

3)      “A Night with the Jersey Devil” (2008): You didn’t think I could resist including a Springsteen song, didya? This single-only, b-side type release isn’t anywhere close to Bruce’s finest work, but it’s got a very unique and interesting sound and vibe, one that nicely complements its gruesome description of the activities of the famous cryptid who supposedly inhabits New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. And most interesting, to me, is Bruce’s choice to make that cryptid the song’s speaker, right from the striking opening lines: “Hear me now!/I was born 13^th child, ‘neath the 13^th moon/Spit out all hungry and born anew.” As this whole blog series will illustrate, plenty of folks believe in urban legends—but it’s one thing to believe in these mysterious and often frightening tales, and another to actually listen to what they might tell us. As Bruce’s song reveals, that’s an even scarier prospect.

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 1, 2025: Urban Legends: The Bell Witch

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On three telling stages in the development of a local legend.

1)      Word of mouth: The basic outline of the Bell Witch legend is that between 1817 and 1821, in Robertson County, Tennessee, the family of farmer John Bell Sr. was repeatedly haunted by a female spirit who came to be known as Kate, and who seemed to be particularly obsessed with Bell’s teenage daughter Betsy. Meanwhile, a young military officer named John R. Bell (apparently not related to the farmer, which is cray cray but might also explain why the name “Bell Witch” caught on for this legend) was part of Stephen H. Long’s 1820 expedition to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, and recorded in his detailed journal that during a stop in Robertson County he was told the story of a young woman who was haunted by a ghostly voice. Sometimes that’s all it takes to get an urban legend going, some oral history storytelling and a figure and text that can help pass the word of mouth along.   

2)      Media Investigations: One explorer’s journal wouldn’t likely be enough to perpetuate a legend for generations, though—for that, it takes the kinds of repeated rediscoveries and reports that media outlets can provide. One of the main such outlets for the Bell Witch legend was none other than my public scholarly home The Saturday Evening Post, which supposedly reported on the legend sometime around 1850 (the details are, appropriately, sketchy). Those reports were then picked up later in the 1850s by two New England periodicals, the New England Farmer and Green Mountain Freeman, both of which credited the Post. A few decades later, we see another example of this trend, as a pamphlet associated with the 1880 Nashville Centennial Exposition included a new account of the Bell Witch legend, presumably based on one or more of these earlier versions. The legend continues!

3)      An obsessed author: Those various versions would likely have ensured that the Bell Witch legend didn’t die out completely, but they seem sufficiently isolated in both time and place that they would likely not have been enough to lead to tons of 20^th and early 21^st century pop culture representations. For that, it took what it often takes, an obsessive individual willing to do a very, very deep dive. In this case, that individual was the strikingly named Martin Van Buren Ingram, a Kentucky Civil War veteran turned journalist who became interested in the legend around 1890 and in 1894 published a book with a title I am obligated to repeat in full: An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. The Wonder of the 19th Century, and Unexplained Phenomenon of the Christian Era. The Mysterious Talking Goblin that Terrorized the West End of Robertson County, Tennessee, Tormenting John Bell to His Death. The Story of Betsy Bell, Her Lover and the Haunting Sphinx. If I told you that its publisher, Clarksville’s W.P. Titus, reported a delay due to the witch herself haunting the premises—well, what’s more urban legend than that?

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?