AUBURN — On the evening of Oct. 5, a Gamage Avenue woman had a showdown with a scary clown.

She was sitting on her porch, the woman reported at the time, when a clown appeared in the back of an SUV that pulled up in front of her house.

The clown smiled at her, made the shape of a gun with his fingers, and mouthed the word “Bang.”

“I picked up my 9 mm and said, ‘Back at ya, clown,'” reported the woman, who did not want to be identified.

The driver of that SUV sped off, and in the months since that encounter the Gamage Avenue woman has had no more problems with clowns. In fact, if anything, a local Clown Defense League was born.

“Most of my neighbors came over and thanked me,” the woman said recently. “Random people stopped by and shook my hand. I was afraid a bunch of clown imitators would bombard the house, but that never happened. And we didn’t have one clown on Halloween.”

The woman didn’t expect her clown standoff to turn into anything significant, but this was a period when the whole country seemed to be talking about scary clowns.

“What I thought was hysterically funny turned into a big deal,” she said. “My husband, the warehouse supervisor at a local trucking company, even said out-of-state drivers were talking about it from all over the country when they came in. His co-workers knew it was me, so when word got out, he got nothing but positive comments. Funny, but I haven’t seen a clown since and it quickly ended after that. I guess people finally figured out that eventually one of them was going to get his butt shot if he kept it up.”

mlaflamme@sunjournal.com

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