Video: Creepy Clown Breaks Into Cemetery—Then Waves Slowly
By Emma G. Gallegos in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 24, 2015 5:35PM
Cell phone video captured an eerie scene at a Victorian Era cemetery on Chicago's North Side earlier this month: a clown breaking into a cemetery and then waving very, very slowly to passers-by.
Julia Graham and her husband spotted a strange figure in shiny pants scaling a 7-foot-tall fence at Rosehill Cemetery around 10 p.m. while they were driving by one evening, CBS Chicago reports. At that point, the cemetery had been locked up for the evening. Her husband snapped a photo.
“When we get closer, we realize it’s a clown, which is super weird,” she says.
The couple realized it was a clown staring right at them and waving. They pulled out a cell phone to capture the bizarre scene. Rosehill Cemetery didn't offer comment to CBS on the clown, but said it hasn't noticed any vandalism in the cemetery since it heard the report.
Rosehill Cemetery is the final resting place of many notable Chicagoans, including retailers Richard Warren Sears, Aaron Montgomery Ward, John Shedd of the Shedd Aquarium, and Vice President under Calvin Coolidge Charles Dawes.
That's because the graves of legendary Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse, Oscar Mayer, ad exec Leo Burnett, Shedd Aquarium founder John Shedd and two retail giants—Richard Warren Sears and Aaron Montgomery Ward—sit yards away from a planned nature preserve. The 20-acre wooded site neighboring Rosehill Cemetery on the North Side will open to the public next summer.
Clowns have been creepy since basically forever, but clowns doing bizarre things have been going super #viral in the last year. Last October, a clown (or clowns) carrying balloons in California's Central Valley blew up on Instagram and achieved urban legend status just in time for Halloween. Last summer clowns popped up in a cemetery in New York during daylight hours as well. Graham hadn't heard about these clowns but she thought such stunts disrespected the dead.
"I just think it’s creepy and wrong," Graham says.
Here's the newscast that contains the cell phone video from Graham: