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There is something unnatural about the fact that clowns are always smiling. We are logically aware that this red, painted smile is fake. Yet it makes it more difficult to tell when the person wearing the makeup is showing actual emotion. Johnny Depp was quoted as saying that when he was a child, he had nightmares about clowns.
He claims that painted-on smiles make it impossible to figure out if clowns are happy or hiding the fact that they are about to bite your face off. This fake smile makes most people feel uncomfortable. Imagine trying to talk to a normal person who never stopped smiling, even for a moment. In Psychology Today , Dr. Clowns also ask us to smile back, and we might not actually feel like laughing or smiling at that very second. Even in the best scenario, we may feel awkward or annoyed by a clown. If there is a real fear there, however, this pressure can add to the terror.
They could pile 20 of their friends into one tiny car, spray you with water from a flower on their shirt, or throw a pie in your face. People thrive when they can stick to a daily routine and often suffer mental stress and anxiety when their lives are unpredictable, unstable, or unsafe.
So it only makes sense that interacting with a clown can be frightening. We are never sure what they are going to do because, by definition, clowns are trying to push the limits of what other people will tolerate before they snap. Penny Curtis from the University of Sheffield noticed that the pediatric hospital had multiple paintings of clowns on the walls. She decided to poll children aged 4 to 16 who were staying in the hospital to find out how they felt about these images of clowns. The results of her study showed that the clowns gave the vast majority of these kids the creeps, even the ones who were too young to have ever seen any horror movies with clowns.
Children and adults alike can see an image of a kitten, and they automatically have an understanding of what a kitten is. The image of a clown shows an abstract creature that is difficult to categorize, almost like looking at an image of an alien, except we know that clowns are real. When clowns have makeup on, they typically stay in character at all times. With regular actors, the public is accustomed to understanding a general idea about their career.
It is easy for us to understand that acting is a job, but it is very difficult to comprehend the motivations behind wanting to perform as a clown as a career choice. So you wallow in a sense of discomfort and unease while being around this person because you are ignoring your natural instincts to run away due to politeness. When McAndrew polled people on their opinions of every occupation that exists, clowns were considered to be the most creepy —even more than funeral directors and taxidermists. While the majority of these clowns were simply loitering and trying to play a prank, they were all suspected of criminal intent.
Many people were up in arms, trying to protect their loved ones from potential clown attacks. There were even nine clown-related arrests in Alabama.
In sociology and psychology, this is an example of mass hysteria—a phenomenon in which an illusion is shared by a group of people who identify something as a threat. No matter how illogical this fear may be, it leads to widespread panic. In an article by Erika Engelhaupt in National Geographic , social media is blamed for the mass clown hysteria.
Remember that sometimes anxiety is helpful and required for your survival. A lot of teenagers lie in bed using their phones at night. We are never sure what they are going to do because, by definition, clowns are trying to push the limits of what other people will tolerate before they snap. And they have stopped trusting it. We crunched along a gravel path towards the astronomy field, where Chip was assembling an Orion SkyQuest telescope.
With the ease of sharing information instantly and the way viral videos spread, it gives the appearance of a phenomenon happening more frequently than it actually does. Human beings have two types of fear: An example of an innate fear would be the fear of heights. Many of us experience overwhelming fear when standing on the edge of a cliff or visiting a tall building. Fear is a normal part of our survival instincts. A perfect example of the learned fear that clowns may have murderous intent would be John Wayne Gacy. He was a serial killer who dressed up like a clown in his spare time.
His story was fuel for nightmares, inspiring coulrophobia in people who may not have had it before. In the years following his crimes, clowns became major characters in horror movies. The nocturnal world, of course, also generates its own light, and those deviations can affect dark-sky conditions. The National Park Service lists numerous natural sources: Atmospheric moisture or dust particles can refract or reflect that light, amplifying glow deserts, for example, are low in moisture but high in dust; forests are the inverse.
Air pollution makes it all worse. On the night we ventured out in Cherry Springs, Maxine — a former game warden, one of just a few women to hold that position in Pennsylvania — had fixed her gaze towards the sky. Maxine was wearing a pair of dangly moon-and-stars earrings, which glinted in the starlight. I n the 17th century, under the reign of the self-described Sun King, Louis XIV, tallow candles fashioned from rendered beef or mutton fat were placed in iron-framed glass boxes and strung above the streets of Paris.
Lamplighters wandered the districts of the city at dusk, unlocking the boxes and igniting the wicks. The idea at its inception was that street lighting would help officials of the state more effectively survey and control city streets after dark.
Whether streetlights actually make anyone safer remains a contentious topic among scholars and city planners. Most studies fail to demonstrate an inarguable correlation between street lighting and decreases in traffic accidents or crime, although it feels wilfully obtuse to suggest that taking the dark way home is always just as safe. Light pollution is aggravated by any kind of irresponsibly aimed outdoor lighting: Proper shielding and direction can mitigate the glare of these emanations — which can be blinding — and the International Dark-Sky Association publishes guidelines for easily modifying outdoor lighting to be more dark-sky friendly.
In recent years, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Los Angeles have been swapping the high-pressure sodium bulbs in their streetlights — which produced puddles of gassy, orange-hued light, a grittily romantic flicker — for comparably cost-effective LED bulbs. The temperature of sodium bulbs is usually around 2, Kelvin, which registers to the eye as warm. LED bulbs burn closer to 4, Kelvin and emit an intrusive, bluish glare. If you live in a major American city, it is now virtually impossible to spend any time at all outside and in the dark.
The new LED streetlights are almost universally described as unpleasant. New York is presently in the midst of its own retrofit, a colossal overhaul scheduled to be completed by the end of But after the new bulbs were installed in Windsor Terrace, a residential neighbourhood in Brooklyn, citizens reacted with disbelief. New York deserves better.
It struck them with awe. They attributed all sorts of things to the night sky. Harder previously had a career as an art dealer but now works full time as a dark-sky activist. She has the kind of fast-talking, no-nonsense comportment that recalls Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday , and is, by all accounts, a formidable opponent. The single biggest challenge facing dark-sky advocates such as Harder is working out a way to change our understanding of darkness as a nefarious force, a thing that needs to be avoided or controlled, if not vanquished entirely.
From a very young age, we are taught that nighttime is when dubious things transpire. At worst, it is terrifying. Night in Times Past , the historian A Roger Ekirch details the ways in which nearly every known civilisation figured darkness as a source of evil: Even in our earliest folklore, night is a proxy for wickedness, worthy of trepidation.
Christianity positioned God as a source of eternal and unblinking light, a corrective to spiritual darkness and chaos. Torches, candles, oil lamps, gas lamps, lightbulbs — these were not only facilitators of productivity and examples of the extraordinary ingenuity of man, but also sacred talismans to ward off ever-encroaching night and the malevolence it supposedly enables. Most historical reasons to fear darkness are now moot; our unease at night is more transcendental than pragmatic.
Still, a kind of basic discomfort with darkness persists. Changing deeply ingrained cultural ideas about darkness is a complicated task. I wrote to Ekirch to see how he understood the stakes of the battle to preserve the dark. Then he quoted an anonymous early Italian essayist, who described darkness as its own lubricant for human communion: A few weeks before I visited Cherry Springs, I went with a couple of friends to a sensory deprivation chamber in Brooklyn. Formerly a component of psychological experiments — and, on occasion, deployed as an interrogation technique — sensory deprivation is now being reconfigured as a kind of bourgeois meditation aid: The idea is to disappear a little.
The stresses and expectations of a modern life seem to demand an antidote of, well, nothingness.
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I was not a natural inhabitant of the tank. I spent the first 15 minutes karate-kicking the door open and then pulling it closed again — mostly to make sure it would, in fact, still open and close. I pressed the button that turns the lights on and off approximately 50 times. I decided to stretch one hand out — ostensibly to see if I could still see it in the dark; I could not — and accidentally dribbled warm, salty water into my open eyes.
Eventually, once I had tired myself out, I was able to consider the experience of pure darkness, unbroken even by starlight. I understood how people found it curative: But darkness, without the galactic punctuations of the night sky — without stars and planets and moons — feels more finite than infinite.
On my third night in Pennsylvania, I went back to the park by myself, after midnight. I stumbled on to the astronomy field, wearing a pair of pyjamas underneath my coat. My rental was the only car in the lot. It had been raining earlier that afternoon, and thick, heavy clouds now hung low in the atmosphere, obscuring the moon and almost all of the stars. There, shivering, I again felt something akin to genuine panic.
When the brain is deprived of visual information — when all external stimuli are washed out — we are alone in new ways. I wondered, then, if the dark acted as a kind of Rorschach test: Whatever you conjure there, in the blackness, speaks to your innermost terrors. Stanley holds degrees in astronomy, religion, physics and the history of science. Mapping the Ancient Cosmos, and another called Understanding the Universe.
I have to do a lot of work to orient them to what human beings actually saw when they looked at the sky. When I did my astronomy degree, I never looked through a telescope. Now, you can imagine a world — almost a dystopia — where no human being has ever seen a celestial body with the naked eye, but we have fantastically sophisticated astronomy, because we do it all above the atmosphere. That curiosity was the catalyst for centuries of intellectual and spiritual growth.