WHY are creepy clowns suddenly terrorising Britain?

Leaping out of bushes, chasing school children, even wielding knives . . .

There have been at least six sightings in Newcastle alone in the past week. In each case, people dressed as clowns burst from bushes and chased startled pedestrians down streets. Megan Bell, a 17-year-old girl with a ‘lifelong fear of clowns’, was walking home in the city at around 8pm when she says she was accosted by a man in a clown costume and mask who briefly chased her after she panicked and ran away screaming.

In another incident, Northumbria police arrested a teenager whose alleged possession of a knife suggests this was more than a cruel prank. In other cases, the perpetrators have been wielding bats.

In Plymouth, a 22-year-old called George Birkbeck chased off a man dressed as a clown who was carrying a hammer.

On Tuesday, in Clacton- on-Sea, essex, two more ‘clowns’ asked a pair of schoolgirls if they wanted to come to a birthday party. When the girls declined, the clowns drove off in a black van. Parents’ anxiety was further increased by reports of clowns hanging around near the local high school’s sports field. The school was subsequently put on lock down.

Similarly, schools in Liverpool were on red alert after a group of creepy clowns on social media threatened to target youngsters.

In County Durham, a knife-wielding man in a clown mask chased four children — aged 11 and 12 — as they were walking to school. One boy in Suffolk was pursued by ‘several clowns’, and in eastbourne, east Sussex, one poor cyclist was left terrified after a ‘clown’ jumped out of a bush clutching a weapon. A mother in Brotton, North Yorkshire, was ‘frightened to death’ after she and her daughter spotted a clown lurking in the dark.

Dubbed the ‘clownpocalypse’, there have also been sightings in London, Manchester, Norwich and Sheffield.

So is this merely a passing craze just in time for halloween — perpetrated, filmed and shared on social media by sniggering teenagers bored of trick-or-treating?

Unfortunately, in the U.S., where the trend started, the unsettling phenomenon of ‘killer’ or ‘creepy’ clowns has been raging long enough not be dismissed as this year’s halloween fad. It has gone far beyond pranksters jumping out of bushes and waving their arms.

AMID reports of killer clowns threatening schools, brandishing guns and being involved in at least one death, a White house spokesman said last week: ‘This is a situation that law enforcement is taking quite seriously.’

After a man reported seeing a clown clutching a knife outside his home, New York City police urged the public on Monday: ‘ Don’t believe the hype and don’t be afraid of the clowns.’ But only two days later, a teenager said he had been chased off a Manhattan train — again by a clown holding a knife.

America’s recent clown frenzy started in August when children in Greenville County, South Carolina, encountered clowns who tried to lure them into woods offering large amounts of money. reports of gunshots turned out to be spooked residents firing into the woods after hearing suspicious noises.

There were other sightings but only by children, prompting sceptics to suspect them of overactive imaginations. Then an adult reported seeing a clown standing under a lamp post late at night, wearing a flashing nose and waving eerily at her. A week later came more reports. even so, police were unable to find a single one.

Was it an elaborate hoax or something more sinister? As clown sightings rapidly followed in two dozen states, the idea that it was a prank — or promotional stunt — has stretched very thin.

Clowns — or, to be fair to professional clowns, people dressed as them — have been chasing people with knives and machetes, menacing them with guns, trying to lure them into woods and shouting at them from cars.

They have been spotted hanging around in graveyards and on remote roadsides where — no doubt as intended — they are momentarily caught in the headlights of passing cars.

Many reports are filtered through the unreliable forum of social media, often backed by creepy footage of dimly lit masked figures and screaming witnesses. In some of these, it appears everyone involved is in on the joke. Others, however, most definitely have real victims and real perpetrators.

The suspect descriptions police are receiving would be comical if they weren’t produced by people scared out of their wits. In North Carolina, a woman who claimed a machete-wielding clown tried to force her into woods near her home described her attacker as male, with red bushy hair and a red nose, black gloves, a black tie and white shoes.

Pennsylvania, too, has been plagued by trespassing clowns. A woman found one peeping through her window and an 18-year-old man was separately charged after he was caught prowling around a neighbour’s house wearing a clown mask and armed with an air pistol.

A local college put out a safety alert after receiving eight clown reports, including one in which a car-load of clowns appeared to be armed.

While the intent so far has mostly been to scare rather than harm, police in reading, Pennsylvania, believe the killer clown craze has already claimed one life after a 16year-old boy was stabbed in a confrontation in which either he or his killer — it’s not yet clear which — was wearing a clown mask.

And clown arrests are piling up. In Alabama alone, seven ‘ clowns’ — including two minors — face terrorism charges. In West Virginia, a 34-year- old man wearing a clown mask was charged last weekend with chasing young children brandishing a baseball bat. In neighbouring Virginia, a 13-year-old girl has been charged after contacting someone with a creepy clown profile on social media and asking the person to kill one of her teachers.

In a country where so many own firearms, police warn the clowns themselves may be most at risk.

An actor dressed as a clown seen wandering around Green Bay, Wisconsin, was exposed as a marketing stunt for a forthcoming short horror film. The joke had gone far enough, warned an actor who had unsuccesfully auditioned to play the clown, after he saw pictures on Facebook of people brandishing guns to defend themselves against it.

Some professional clowns say they are in fear for their lives, let alone their livelihoods. One has even started a Clown Lives Matter movement on Facebook to draw attention to their plight. More than 100 clowns are expected to take part in the first protest march in Tucson, Arizona, this week.

Fear of clowns is so pervasive and instinctive it has its own name — coulrophobia. According to Dr Steven Schlozman, a child psychiatrist and academic at harvard, humans are built to recognise patterns from an early age. A clown’s exaggerated features ‘ set off a primal warning bell’ from within our brain that something is not right, he says.

He hAS a point. A 2008 Sheffield University study on the effect of clown images in cheering up a hospital ward found all 250 children questioned said they disliked clowns. ‘The fascination with clowns is really the fact that they’re not real,’ says criminologist Scott Bonn. ‘We don’t know what’s beneath the make-up. It could be anyone or anything. They’re actually very frightening.’

Although the latest outbreak is virulent — in the U.S., sales of clown masks are up 300 per cent on last year — creepy clowns have been popping up for decades.

There was a wave of sightings in the eighties, shortly after the conviction of serial killer John Wayne Gacy. After murdering 33 teenage boys and young men, Gacy was dubbed the Killer Clown because, as a community volunteer, he had appeared at charity events and children’s parties as Pogo the Clown.

In 1986, master of horror fiction Stephen King magnified the image problem with his novel It, which introduced the terrifying Pennywise the Dancing Clown, a demonic, shapeshifting entity that preferred to appear as a children’s clown.

A new film version of It is in production and its makers, Warner Brothers, have had to publicly deny any connection with the clown sightings. King this week felt compelled to intervene. ‘hey guys, time to cool the clown hysteria — most of ’em are good, cheer up the kiddies, make people laugh,’ he pleaded on Twitter.

And yet as police express fears that real criminals will exploit the craze by dressing as clowns to make themselves indistinguishable from the pranksters, we may never again be able to laugh at anyone with a white-painted face, bright red nose and giant-sized shoes.