Hoaxes have been known as being over-the-top rumors, and especially getting close to a holiday as big as Halloween, anything can be a hoax.
But what about a story that originally came from South Carolina? According to several different news reports, a man dressed in a clown suit in Greenville, Spooky Carolina, was allegedly attempting to lure children in the woods.
This spurred a number of copycat reports and wild rumors that spread across the country, but after weeks of police reports and investigations, some clown “hoaxes” actually turned out to be real.
According to one report, an alleged attack left two victims wounded and one dead in Pennsylvania.
One of the victims was 16-year-old high school student Christian Torres. Some reports claimed that Torres was wearing a clown mask, but a subsequent investigation revealed the mask was placed on his face by suspect Valentin-Bair–a 29-year-man that lived in the same neighborhood as Torres.
What some readers found interesting was that Torres was attacked on his own porch.
Whether he was provoking the situation or it was an unexpected attack nobody really knows, but Valentin-Blair stated, “this was a neighborhood argument gone terribly wrong.” His fiancee later said that, “he turned himself in to show that he’s innocent, and I hope that everybody else can see that, too.”
Torres had allegedly been scaring the neighborhood children with a mask from the film The Purge.
This case seems to be related to the national rumors over clown hoaxes because Torres thought it was funny to scare small neighborhood children.
And some rumors hit much closer to home. Earlier this month there were rumors about these clowns who called themselves “Irvine Clowns”.
The group had their own Twitter page dedicated to the clowns. There were even rumors about them personally tweeting people and threatening them.
Before their page was blocked, they were also tweeting about going to Tustin Unified School districts such as Pioneer Middle School, Orchard Hills Middle School, Foothill High School, Tustin High School, and Hillview.
Now, no one can identify who they were or if they are still out there because Twitter recently blocked their Twitter page.
People often dismiss stories on social media as hoaxes, but often there are elements of truth of these widespread rumors. The important thing is to learn how to tell rumors from fiction.

How to Tell Fact From Fiction

Know who your source is (don’t trust Twitter–trust the New York Times or the OC Register)
Put logic into it. If your friend says that Starbucks is having a BOGO deal, but you’re only hearing about this now, then it’s probably not happening.