Author: Colin Gorenstein

Depending on who you ask, clowns are either harmless fun or the stuff of nightmares. But no matter where your opinion falls, there’s a lot going on beneath the face paint of this surprisingly old profession. There’s even a story behind the iconic red nose: It can be traced to a member of the Fratellini family named Albert, who originated the Auguste clown archetype—complete with the world debut of the bright red clown nose. Now make like a clown car and stuff as many of these facts in your head as you can.

1. THERE REALLY ARE A LOT OF CLOWNS IN CLOWN CARS.

It’s tempting to think the clown car gag is an illusion, but according to Greg DeSanto, executive director of the International Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center, “There’s no trick to the clown-car gag.” He told Car and Driver that “there are no trap doors in stadium floors, and the cars are real cars.” Instead, the car is gutted of its interior, and all windows are painted over except for a peephole for the driver, who sits on a milk crate. “Then,” DeSanto said, “it’s a matter of shoving in the clowns.” A compact car can fit between 14 and 21 clowns.

2. YOU CAN ATTEND GRIMALDI’S FUNERAL—AND DANCE ON HIS GRAVE.

Joseph Grimaldi was one of the world’s first circus clowns, and he made his biggest mark on the profession in 1806 with his rogue-meets-fool clown character. Pantomime clowns—a.k.a. Joeys—get their clown makeup from him. Grimaldi’s work is honored by his present-day peers every year on the first Sunday of February at the Holy Trinity Church in London. You can celebrate one of history’s greatest clowns, too, by heading to north London, where artist Henry Krokatsis installed musical tiles over his grave. Tap your feet to play “Hot Codlins,” a tune Grimaldi was known for.

3. THE CREEPY CLOWN FAD HAS BEEN AROUND SINCE THE ’80s.

Mysterious clown run-ins currently abound, but this isn’t the first time people have used clown costumes to frighten their community. In 1981, there were reports of men dressing as clowns and harassing school children in Boston. Later that spring, Kansas City kids reported being chased by clowns. Sightings have popped up in the news periodically ever since. The World Clown Association has had to contend with their profession being besmirched by these jokers, and they’re not happy about it.

4. CLOWNS MUST FOLLOW THE EIGHT CLOWN COMMANDMENTS.

Being a clown is no laughing matter, and Clowns of America International asks professionals to follow the Clown Commandments. They include “remember[ing] that a good clown entertains others by making fun of himself or herself and not at the expense or embarrassment of others,” promising not to smoke or drink when in makeup or costume, and to “remove my makeup and change into my street clothes as soon as possible following my appearance, so that I cannot be associated with any incident that may be detrimental to the good name of clowning.”

5. THERE’S CURRENTLY A CLOWN SHORTAGE.

With standards rising for clowning, and its popularity amongst millennials falling, clowning just isn’t what it used to be. The World Clown Association, the nation’s largest clown trade group, says membership is down about 28 percent since 2004. A lifetime career as a clown can also be daunting due to low pay and tough competition. In 2013, Ringling Brothers only had 26 clowns in its three circuses.

6. CLOWNING WAS ONCE CONSIDERED A FEMINIST ACT.

In 1895, The New York Times dubbed Evetta Mathews “the only lady clown on earth.” The newspaper was being hyperbolic (lady clowns Amelia Butler and Irene Jewell Newton were Mathews’s predecessors), but, as a female clown, the 25-year-old was a rare sight for her time, and her clowning was framed as an example of women’s emancipation. Mathews herself said that despite her circus family disapproving, she felt like she had chosen her big top career well. Being a clown meant fewer chances of being injured and more opportunities to write her own skits.

7. YOU CAN VISIT A CLOWN MOTEL NEXT TO A GRAVEYARD.

If you happen to roll into the tiny town of Tonopah, Nevada and prefer your motels on the spooky side, check into the Clown Motel for the night. A desert oasis made of pure nightmare fuel, you’ll find clown dolls and images everywhere you turn. Don’t forget to enjoy the view while you’re there, either: This motel is right next door to an early-1900s graveyard.

All images courtesy of iStock unless noted otherwise

The Salem witch trials of 1692 to ’93 might be among the most famous in history but they were by no means alone—nor was the paranoia that surrounded the grim witch hunts of the 17th and 18th centuries unique to New England. Witch trials were being carried out all across Europe right through to around 1800. Here are the stories behind five witch trials from across Great Britain.

1. BIDEFORD, DEVON

The Bideford witch trial that took place in Devon in the far southwest of England in 1682 was one of the last in England to lead to an execution. The three women involved were Temperance Lloyd, a local widow (who had already been acquitted of the murder of a man by witchcraft in 1671), and two beggars, Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards, who had allegedly been spotted conversing and begging for food with Temperance. Together, the three were suspected of causing the illness of a local woman, Grace Thomas, by supernatural means—although the full list of accusations thrown at the trio included a claim that a demonic figure in league with Temperance had transformed himself into a magpie and flown through Grace’s window to peck her while she slept; Grace later reported that she had suffered “sticking and pricking pains, as though pins and awls had been thrust into her body, from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet.”

Despite a great deal of the evidence brought against the women being little more than hearsay, all three were found guilty and executed on August 25 at Heavitree, outside Exeter. A plaque commemorating the women on the wall of Exeter’s Rougemont Castle, where the trials were held, is dedicated to “the hope of an end to persecution and intolerance.”

2. WARBOYS, CAMBRIDGESHIRE

In 1589, a young family named the Throckmortons moved into the manor house beside the church in the tiny rural English village of Warboys, 20 miles north of Cambridge. Soon afterwards, one of the family’s young daughters, Jane, began suffering seizures and fits, which the local doctors found impossible to ease or cure. Then one day the Throckmortons’ neighbors—John and Alice Samuel, and their daughter Agnes—happened to pay the family a visit, but as soon as Alice arrived and took a seat by the fire, Jane’s condition suddenly worsened, and she began to point wildly at Alice, screaming, “Look where the old witch sits!” The mother quickly rebuked Jane and thought nothing more of it. But as more of the children began showing similar symptoms and a respected physician was unable to discover the cause, suspicions returned to the Samuels.

Even Lady Cromwell, the wife of Oliver Cromwell’s grandfather and a close friend of the Throckmortons, once confronted Alice about her apparent crimes; when Lady Cromwell died a little over a year later, her “murder” was added to the list of crimes of which the Samuel family were eventually accused. Imprisoned and tried before the Bishop of Lincoln, Alice, John, and Agnes Samuel were all found guilty of witchcraft and hanged in April 1593.

3. NORTH BERWICK, EAST LOTHIAN

The North Berwick witch trials of the late 16th century are notable not only for the sheer number of people involved (over the two years from 1590 to ’92, around a hundred supposed witches and warlocks were implicated in the case), but because the trials were, for much of their duration, personally overseen by the king himself, James VI of Scotland. James was convinced that a local coven of witches had together raised a storm to wreck the ship on which he and his new bride, Anne of Denmark, were returning home from their wedding in Norway. Once suspicions were raised, one of the first to be accused was Geillis “Gelie” Duncan, the young servant of a local chamberlain, who confessed under torture to practicing witchcraft when her apparent gift for healing the sick aroused suspicion. Duncan implicated three further people in her confession, who each implicated several others, who were all then in turn brought in for questioning. One of the accused, Agnes Simpson, a local midwife and healer, was even taken before the king himself for questioning; after confessing to more than 50 crimes brought against her—including relieving the pains of a woman in labor by suffering them herself, and even baptizing a cat—Simpson was executed in January 1591. Another, Euphame MacCalzean, was burned alive without being granted the “mercy” of being hanged first, an astonishingly severe sentence even for the 16th century. In all, a total of six supposed witches were executed.

Eventually, the supposed network of witchcraft James and his court uncovered led him to believe that his cousin Francis Stuart (or Stewart), 5th Earl of Bothwell, had been behind the entire plot, and had worked with the coven to plot to kill the king and secure the throne for himself. In 1593, however, Bothwell staged a short-lived coup in James’s court and took the opportunity to have himself acquitted of the charges against him. After James retook control, Bothwell fled into exile and died in Naples in 1612.

4. PENDLE HILL, LANCASHIRE

The Pendle Hill witch trials of 1612 are amongst the most famous in British history, partly because their events are so well documented, partly because a number of those involved genuinely believed that they had supernatural powers, and partly because so many of the accused were eventually executed: Only one of the dozen individuals implicated in the case, Alice Grey, was found not guilty, and one, Margaret Pearson, was sentenced to being pilloried, but was spared the gallows.

The trials began when a young woman named Alizon Device, from Pendle in Lancashire in northwest England, was accused of cursing a local shopkeeper who soon afterwards suffered a bout of ill health, now believed to have probably been a mild stroke. When news of this reached the authorities, an investigation was started that eventually led to the arrest and trial of several members of Alizon’s family (including her grandmother, Elizabeth Southerns, a notorious practitioner of witchcraft known locally as “Demdike”), as well as members of another local family, the Redfernes, with whom they had reportedly had a long-standing feud. Many of the families’ friends were also implicated in the trial, as were a number of supposed witches from nearby towns who were alleged to have attended a meeting at Elizabeth Southerns’s home on the night of Good Friday 1612.

The first to be tried (in a different but related case) was Jennet Preston, who was found guilty and executed in York on July 29; the last was Alizon Device herself, who, like her grandmother, was reportedly convinced that she indeed had powers of witchcraft and freely admitted her guilt. In all, 10 men and women were hanged as a result of the trials.

5. SAMLESBURY, LANCASHIRE

Following the arrest of Alizon Device in Pendle in 1612, the discovery that witchcraft was being practiced in Lancashire caused a wave of paranoia that swept across the county and eventually implicated three women—Jane Southworth, Jennet Bierley, and her daughter Ellen (or Eileen) Bierley—from the neighboring village of Samlesbury. Tried at the same Lancashire hearing as the Pendle witches, the trio were suspected of witchcraft by Jennet’s 14-year-old granddaughter, and Ellen’s niece, Grace Sowerbutts. Her grim testimonial accused the women of everything from shape-shifting (Jennet had reportedly transformed herself into a dog right before Grace’s eyes), to cavorting with demons (“black things going upright, yet not like men in the face,” as Grace described them), to cannibalism (the three women had supposedly abducted a young baby from a local merchant, Thomas Walshman, and drank blood from its navel; when the baby died a few days later, they were accused of robbing the grave and cooking the remains).

Unlike the trial of the Pendle witches, however, the Samlesbury trial was quickly turned on its head. With the evidence against them concluded, Jane, Jennet and Ellen were finally given the chance to speak and immediately pleaded with the judge not for clemency or mercy, as might have been expected, but to force Grace to tell the court who had coerced her into making the accusations against them. Grace’s immediate look of guilt raised the judge’s suspicions, and he ordered her to be taken from the court and interrogated by two justices of the peace. When they returned, it emerged that the entire grim story had been concocted by a local priest who—at a time of considerable religious upheaval in Britain—had strong-armed Grace into incriminating her Protestant relatives. All three women were acquitted.