Episode 47: Clown Shack

Chris and Tom investigate the legend of Mushy the Clown, a mysterious one-armed mummer who haunted the town of Cornish in 2012. Who was Mushy and what did he want? Where did he go in the winter of 2012 and is he still around? Tom talks to some locals and investigates the remains of a building in the woods purported to be the shack the deranged clown used.

Content Warning:  clowns, reports of child abuse, self mutilation, doomsday prophecies, 2012, mental illness

Host: Chris Estes
Writer: Chris Estes
Senior Investigator: Tom Wilson
Sound Design: Chris Estes
Producer: Megan Meadows

Transcript

Malevolent Maine

Episode 47: Clown Shack

Malevolent Maine is a horror podcast, and may contain material not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

INTRO: 

LUCAS: A mysterious sigil found in an unlikely place. A teenage robbery with horrifying results. And a lost Maine settlement. These are the stories we’re preparing for you in the coming episodes.

Hi everyone, it’s Lucas. We’re almost halfway through season 3, and we hope you’ve enjoyed it so far. We’re hard at work on the second half already, and we’ve got some wild things coming up. Don’t forget to follow us on social media for news and updates. Episode 2 of Cardinal Sins is out over on Patreon, and episode 2 of Witch’s Mark will be out soon. If you want to hear those side stories, plus have early access to episodes and a variety of excerpts, sneak peeks, and extras, head over to patreon.com/malevolentmaine and for a small monthly fee you can join our Malevolent Mob. Thanks for all your support.

He stands there, silent and unmoving. Your eyes travel up, starting at the heavy black boots he wears on his feet, then to the dirty, stained coveralls. Three drooping red pom poms run down the chest. One hand wears a dingy white glove with holes where dirty skin can be seen beneath. The other hand is a large, blackened blade. It looks rusty, but has been sharpened to a razor’s edge. On his head is a rubber mask, the skin a cracked and peeling off white, the eyes blank, dark slots, and long, matted red hair hangs down past his shoulders. The face is warped, seemingly collapsing in on itself, like it’s melting. Suddenly this twisted, almost dissolving clown reaches for you.

This is Malevolent Maine.

TITLE SEQUENCE

Beep, beep, MMers. Today’s story takes us back to 2016 and the hysteria that surrounded what was perceived as an invasion of evil clowns. Many of our listeners will remember the increased reports of clown sightings all over the United States. People dressed as scary clowns were said to be lurking on the outskirts of public places, attempting to lure children into the woods. There were internet rumors of a clown purge that was supposed to happen on October 30, 2016, where mobs of costumed assailants would attack anyone they could find. Many schools and communities went so far as to ban clown costumes.

Much of this hysteria was just that - extreme, uncontrolled emotion. There were some clown sightings that turned out to be a viral marketing campaign for an upcoming horror movie. Others were simply people jumping on the bandwagon and enjoying the idea of scaring their neighbors and friends. Much of it was manufactured by a population already on edge.

Now, obviously no clown purge ever occurred, and once the 2016 Halloween decorations were packed away the clown craze dried up. 

That’s not to say that reports of evil clowns, often wielding some sort of weapon, haven’t popped up. In fact, each year, usually around late September, the stories crop back up. But today’s story goes back even further than 2016, and it supposedly takes place in a neighborhood close to us.

Here’s Tom to explain.

TOM: So Chris and I grew up in the same small town in southern Maine. He was a few years older than me in school, but we knew each other a little. Now, it just so happens that there has been a story about a creepy clown from one town over, in Cornish.

Cornish, Maine is often nicknamed the Crown of York County, though this has more to do with its location as one of the northernmost towns in the state’s southernmost county than anything else. First established as a trading post, not far from where the Ossipee River joins the Saco River, Cornish is a small town of only about 1,500 people. It has a downtown village area with many antique shops and local restaurants giving it a strange mix of rural living and old time, small town charm. 

It is also, supposedly home to a man who prowled the woods around town dressed as a clown.

TOM: In the summer of 2012 there were multiple reports about a clown appearing on the edge of Thompson Park in downtown Cornish, as well as in some of the forested areas near the elementary school and along the Ossipee River. They described the man as wearing coveralls like a mechanic or janitor might wear, but with red pom poms sewn down the front. He wore a dirty white glove on one hand and the other hand was missing. In its place was a knife or some sort of blade. The man wore a clown mask with the eyes blacked out. It was bald, with long, lanky orange hair hanging to his shoulders. The latex or the paint of the mask was peeling and the mask itself was misshapen and deformed, looking almost melted. The locals began calling him Mushy because of his spongy appearance. 

Mushy the Clown was seen over twenty times during the summer of 2012. Many times he would be seen standing at the edge of Thompson Park, right where the trees touched the park edge. He would stand there, not moving, arms hanging limply by his side. He didn’t move or wave to anyone. He just stood there. If he was approached, he would retreat into the woods. The police were called several times, but by the time they arrived Mushy had disappeared. 

There were also reports of Mushy being seen along the Ossipee River, sometimes under the bridge on River Road, other times standing along the shore. Again, he never moved, never signaled to anyone who saw him, but would eventually move off into the woods and seemingly disappear.

We spoke with a representative from the York County Sheriff’s Office, who wished to remain anonymous. They said as summer turned to fall that year, the calls about Mushy began to increase. People were saying he was in their backyard, at the elementary school, even lurking in the darkened parking lots of local businesses after hours. When we asked if there were ever any reports of Mushy the Clown actually attacking anyone or doing anything ever than standing still, our contact said no. As far as the police were concerned, Mushy never overtly caused harm to anyone, and the only crime they could ever tie him to was trespassing. Even that was spotty.

Our contact said that they doubted that all of the calls about Mushy were authentic. “No doubt the clown was real,” they said. “And there were many authentic sightings of him, but I think a lot of time the idea of Mushy had gotten into peoples’ heads. They were paranoid and started seeing him around every corner and in every shadow.”

Mushy the Clown became infamous, a dark celebrity figure in Cornish, and soon social media groups and websites began popping up. At first it was just concerned citizens. People complaining about the man in the clown suit. But, as is often the case on the internet, these things grew. Entire forums were dedicated to Mushy - where he was, what he wanted, and who he really was.

TOM: The Mushy the Clown Facebook group has been taken down in recent years, after nearly a decade of inactivity. However, I remember following the group back in 2012. I actually saved some of the posts from the time. One user wrote, “Mushy wants to kill and eat kids.” Another one posted, “I know who Mushy really is. He lives in a shack in the woods by Ossipee River. I heard he was a war vet.” A third wrote, “He used to be a janitor (LOOK AT THE CLOTHES) at Cornish Elementary School, but he was fired for doing things to the kids. Now he’s back for revenge.”

Over the summer and fall of 2012 a detailed backstory of Mushy began to emerge. Locals and so-called fans alike began adding bits of information that they knew or had heard. It fell to Sadie McFarland, then a twenty-two year old college student at nearby St. Joseph’s College, to compile these pieces into one comprehensive piece. She became something of the de facto expert on Mushy the Clown. 

And it just so happened that we had a personal connection to her.

TOM: My sister played soccer in high school. She is the same sage as Sadie McFarland, and they played against each other for years. They also happened to be teammates on a regional AAU team. Rachel was able to get me Sadie’s contact info and we reached out to her with a few questions.

Sadie McFarland is married now, and she didn’t want us to use her married name. She says she’s put all of the Mushy the Clown stuff behind her, though she admits the whole thing still fascinates her. When we asked her if she knew the complete history of Mushy, she said she thought she had the original document where she typed it all up somewhere. A few days later she sent us the file. We’ve asked Lucas to read it:

LUCAS: Mushy the Clown worked for years as a custodian at Cornish Elementary School. He was well loved by the students and staff alike. He would often take a few of the older children around with him to help maintain the school. When the school got a new principal, he was tasked with trimming the budget. This man had been hired for his ruthless nature and was well known for cutting corners to get the job done. He determined it would save the school significant money to get rid of Mushy and replace him with a part-time, less experienced custodian. This principal also knew how popular Mushy was with the community, so he concocted a story about Mushy abusing children, both in the basement of the school and after hours. On these fabricated grounds, the principal fired Mushy, and the community rejoiced at a monster being removed.

Of course, these accusations were made up. Mushy had never done anything inappropriate to a child, and he never would. He loved the children at CES and would never hurt them. The town believed him to be a predator however, and no place would hire him. When he was unable to pay his mortgage the bank took his home. They say he built a shack out in the woods somewhere by the banks of the Ossipee River from materials he scavenged from the local dump after hours.

He grew more and more depressed. Some say he started drinking. Others say that the strain of all the hatred broke his mind. He took to walking the streets of Cornish. Everywhere he went, people gave him dirty looks, called him names, and crossed to the other side of the street. Sometimes they threw things out the windows of the cars at him.

One day, lost and alone, Mushy was walking along the banks of the Ossipee when he saw something that had caught on the rocks of the shore. It was a soggy and misshapen clown mask. No one knows where the mask came from, or what happened to it to become so deformed, but that’s when Mushy knew what he had to do. If everyone thought he was a monster, he would become one. He would pay back all the people who had made him a pariah. If they thought he hurt children, then he would hurt their children. 

He went back to his cabin and sewed bright red pom poms on his custodian’s uniform and became Mushy the Clown. They said he had touched children, so with a sharp knife, he removed his own hand, replaced it with the very same blade. Now his touch wouldn’t hurt, it would kill. He began lurking on the edges of town, watching, waiting. And soon, he would begin to take his revenge.

The story has all the good makings of an urban legend. A nebulous background that could take place in any year, a slighted misfit who becomes a vengeful creature, and the underlying fear that we make our own monsters, often for the most selfish reasons. 

Of course, what it lacks is any concrete details. For example, Mushy’s real name. Nowhere in the supposed history do we have a real name we can compare to actual school employment records.

What we do know is that Fred Babcock was the custodian at Cornish Elementary School for twenty-five years, retiring in 2014, just a few years before they closed the school for good.

TOM: We contacted Fred and asked him if in his time at CES there was ever a popular custodian who was fired or accused of inappropriate behavior. “Not at all,” he told us. “I was the only one for my entire twenty-five years, and the guy before me, Bob Hatch retired at sixty-eight.”

We checked the records and as near as we could tell there was only one custodian at the Cornish Elementary School who left before retirement age, and he left on his own because he was moving to Massachusetts. We also checked surrounding schools, looking for stories about custodians fired or let go. We couldn’t find any information that would corroborate such a tale. 

Then there’s the implausibility of someone cutting off their own hand in a forest shack. The likelihood of that happening seems negligible, and the chances of surviving such an amputation seems slim. 

The supposed “history” of Mushy the Clown seems more like a collectively developed urban legend, similar to Slenderman or other Creepy Pasta characters. Something Sadie McFarland agrees with. “Most of it is probably fiction,” she told us. “It sounds compelling when you put all the pieces together, like a real life Stephen King novel, but I’d bet most of the facts we collected were works of imagination from rabid fans.”

Mushy the Clown had a little more than 15 minutes of fame, at least in the area surrounding Cornish. By the fall Mushy sightings were up. Local police issued warnings for citizens to be on alert and to report any misbehavior. Two high school kids dressed like scary clowns were arrested by police for scaring younger kids walking home from school, but charges were dropped and they were let go with a warning. As Halloween approached, there were bans on clown costumes at the local schools and several community events banned clown costumes altogether.

There were stories of a manifesto found deep online, buried in a Reddit subgroup that supposedly outlined a plan of attack on Halloween night - that Mushy the Clown would be  quote, “playing tricks while the little kids were collecting treats” and that “the wails of the people would drown out the dying screams of the little ones.” This turned out to be fake, the work of an aspiring writer from nearby New Hampshire. 

It was enough to put everyone on edge, and many families stayed home on Halloween night. When the holiday came and went and there were no signs of the vicious attacks promised by various online groups, many thought Mushy sightings would die down.

If anything, they increased during the month of November. Local hunters arranged “clown hunting parties” with the plan to canvas the wooded areas looking for the man in the clown suit and to bring him to justice for terrorizing the town. None of these turned up anything, if they ever happened at all.

Mushy was seen every day in November of 2012, though he had moved all over the town, not just his usual haunts. Some believed the increase was due to imposters or impersonators, but most believed he was gearing up towards something larger. The rumors of future attacks increased, as did a few other stranger theories, namely that Mushy was waiting for someone or something, he was a signal to something else more dangerous, and that he was a sign of worse things to come.

After Thanksgiving, however, Mushy the Clown disappeared altogether. Maine Novemebers can get quite cold. The average temperature that year hovered just around the freezing mark, and December got even colder. Many speculated that Mushy simply got too cold and gave up whatever bizarre game he had been playing.

TOM: The last reported sighting of Mushy the Clown was November 21st 2012, the day before Thanksgiving. No signs of the man in the clown costume have been seen since. For all intents, Mushy the Clown was no more.

In and of itself, the story of Mushy the Clown is an interesting one. Like many of the urban legends that sprung up in the late 2000s, early Twenty-Tens, it appears to be the work of groupthink, a sort of crowd sourced boogeyman. Except, by many, many reports, this one was actually real. Who was behind the mask, and what their true purpose was, was never discovered. Was this a sick individual trying to torment the community? Was it some sort of weird performance piece? A protest of some kind? Just a bored individual with too much free time? We don’t know.

But what makes Mushy’s story a little more interesting is the time period in which it took place. For those that remember, there was a low level hysteria about the year 2012. It coincided with the end of a long cycle of a Mayan calendar, which many misunderstood to indicate the end of the world.

Many of the perpetrators and victims of the YDK scare, readily jumped to the 2012 Apocalypse racket. This one was founded in a little less realism than Y2K, but plenty of Americans began preparing for an End of Days scenario. The belief was that on December 21, the world would end, the earth would reverse polarity, human society would crumble, and most would die. Sales of private, underground bunkers or shelters rose significantly in the years between 2009 and 2012, and many reported significant increase in stress and anxiety that the world was coming to an end. Of course, as we all know, much of this was unfounded, or targeted fear-mongering. Even as scientists and experts explained that nothing was going to happen, countless people fed into the end of the world paranoia.

One of those, at least according to Mary Parkman, long time resident of Cornish, was her neighbor, Leo Stratton. 

Mary is 58 and lives on the South Hiram Road. She says that for years, her neighbor, Leo Stratton had a large sign nailed to a tree outside of his home that read: 12/21/12: The End is Coming. R U Ready?. She said that STratton would often sit out at the end of his driveway in a camp chair and shout to passing drivers.

“He was always going off about conspiracies,” Mary Parkamn told us. “Government cover ups, secret social experiments, even aliens. He believed in all of it.”

We checked with several others in the area, and they also remember Stratton’s sign and his antics. One person, who asked to remain anonymous, says they remember the sign went up around Christmas 2009. Others thought it was early 2010. They also said that sometimes the message would change, but they all seemed to have apocalyptic messages. One resident said the sign once said, “Beam me up, please!” apparently a plea to the aliens to take Stratton away.

Mary also said that Leo Stratton could get mean. Sometimes he would run down the road chasing cars, screaming his conspiracy theories at them. Other times, he simply hurled obscenities at passersbys.

Leo Stratton appeared to believe the world was actually going to end in December of 2012. Mary Parkman said her husband, John, went over to speak with Stratton at one point, in hopes to get him to calm down a little. She said he came back with wild stories about government plants in small towns who were trying to pacify the population, that great machines had been buried in the ground, supposedly part of urban renewal construction projects that would cause earthquakes when they were triggered on December 12. Stratton talked about chemtrails and alien technology that had been recovered from Roswell, New Mexico used to influence the minds of world politicians, subliminal messages hidden in popular websites that would insight worldwide violence, and chemicals in energy drinks to turn the population sterile.

According to those who knew him, or at least knew him enough in passing, Stratton was convinced the end of the world was coming. He would talk at length about reverse geomagnetic polarity, how the planetary conjunction that was going to happen on December 21, would cause a black hole to appear somewhere around the orbit of Venus which would destroy the Earth. 

He began preparing for the coming doomsday, his neighbors said. He added more signs, began stockpiling nonperishable food, he even took to wearing some form of modified body armor, which he claimed would keep him safe in the coming Food Wars that would happen once the Apocalypse began.

Leo Stratton was just one person who believed the end of the world was coming, and while a more extreme case, many people were also on edge to lesser extents. Couple that with the Mushy the Clown sightings, and it’s easy to see why the people of Cornish were on high alert.

At first glance it may seem these two hysterias - the 2012 end of the world and a potential killer clown - are two unrelated fears, but it was when talking to Mary Parkman, specifically about Leo Stratton, that we began to think these two things might be linked.

TOM: Mary told me that Leo Stratton was about her age, maybe a year or two older. He had long graying hair and a long beard. He seemed to wear a hodgepodge of clothing styles - military combat boots and bermuda shorts, ripped Disney hoodies and dress pants. He often tied a bandana around his head like a headband. She also mentioned that Stratton was missing his right hand and about half of his forearm.

Transradial amputation is when an amputation occurs somewhere along the radius and ulna, the two bones of the forearm. We did some digging, but we were able to confirm that Leo Stratton had this procedure when he was in his young twenties, after a motorcycle accident damaged his right hand and part of his arm beyond repair. 

This is important because as you will recall, Mushy the Clown was described as missing one hand and having a knife or blade of some kind in place of it. We asked Sadie McFarland if she knew which hand Mushy was missing. 

“The right,” she wrote back immediately. “Lots of people thought it might have something to do with that Bible verse about cutting off your right hand if it causes you to sin.”

Mushy the Clown was missing his right hand and so was Leo Stratton, but the connections didn’t end there. His neighbors say Stratton became more and more erratic as the months went by in 2012. They said they saw him outside less and less, and that sometime around September he seemed to disappear all together. Mary Parkman said they noticed there were no lights on at his home and she never saw any smoke coming from his chimney. She said there were signs that he was around - from time to time things in his yard would be moved and the sign changed one last time just before Halloween, she said. However, it was clear he was no longer living at the home. When winter came the driveway was never plowed and Mary said she never saw any footprints around his property. 

“To put it mildly, he was sort of a nuisance,” Mary said. “We kept an eye out for him, to keep us safe, you know. We noticed when he was gone.”

Mary told us she had the police perform a wellness check on the home, but police did not find anything to indicate where Stratton had gone to or what had happened to him.

The time period Mary Parkman states Stratton went missing coincides with the rise in appearances of Mushy the Clown. Remember that by Thanksgiving, Mushy disappeared, and around this same time, Mary Parkman notes that Stratton was definitely gone for good. As winter began both men disappeared completely.

We believe that Mushy the Clown was actually Leo Stratton. The radical beliefs, the missing hand, and their disappearance at the same time all seem to indicate the two of them being one and the same; a theory made only more likely when we were called by Jack Verlander. 

TOM: Mr. Verlander called us because he said he spoke with Mary Parkman one Sunday after church. They both attend the Cornish United Church. She told him about our investigation into Mushy the Clown and Leo Stratton. Jack owns ten acres of wooded area a few miles from where Mary lives on the South Hiram road. He said his house is at one end, closest to the road, but the forest goes back a good long way, all the way to the banks of the Ossipee River, and while he knows the area fairly well, he doesn’t always go out surveying the total area. He says just a few weeks back, during a stretch of nice, almost spring weather, he was out walking his dog Blue when he came upon the remains of what he believed to be a shack. He’d never seen the shed before and was completely unaware it was on his property. 

Admittedly our interest was piqued. The stories of Mushy the Clown stated that he lived in a ramshackle cabin he’d constructed out in the woods from materials he found or stole. The descriptions and the pictures Verlander sent us seemed to indicate this shack matched the description.

If Leo Stratton had been Mushy the Clown, could this have been the hiding spot he retreated to when the police or others approached him? Could this be where he went when he disappeared from his own home?

Knowing this could be the piece that cracked this case wide open, we sent Tom up to investigate.

TOM (in the field): Okay, so I’m out in the woods behind Jack Verlander’s house. He didn’t want to come back out here - he said the place gave him the creeps - but he let me borrow his 4 wheeler to get out here. The cabin or shed or whatever you want to call it is about fifty or sixty yards from the Ossipee River. You can’t really see it through the trees, but you can hear it. The shack is…or was maybe ten feet by ten feet. Maybe a little smaller. It’s hard to tell because part of the roof has collapsed, and one of the walls has fallen in on itself. I’m going to try to…sift through the detritus, I guess, and see what I can find.

The shack was made from scraps of plywood, much of which had become soft and rotten over the years. Part of one wall was made from a large orange metal road sign that said, Utility Work Ahead. Another part seemed to be made from a large kitchen table with its legs removed. The entire structure had been spray painted with greens and browns in a kind of homemade camouflage, and tangled up in the debris was a length of netting designed to resemble leaves, commonly used for hunting blinds. 

The end of the shack that served as the entrance had fallen in on itself, so Tom was forced to climb over the tar paper roof to where the cabin was open and exposed.

TOM(in the field): So there’s a lot of litter in these remains. Tin cans, ripped and peeling apart cardboard, dented and smashed Diet Coke cans. I don’t see a stove or any other means to cook, but there is what appears to be a cot by the back wall. I’ve got to be careful here, I don’t know how structurally sound this cabin is. It looks like it could fall down at any minute. 

To cut to the quick, Tom did not find any human remains in the shack. He also didn’t find any of Mushy the Clown’s costume or the knife that was strapped on in place of his hand. Tom didn’t find anything to link the shack to Mushy at all. 

He did, however, find something that connected the broken down shed to Leo Stratton.

TOM (in studio): I tried to pry up the collapsed roof, and after using a broken two by four as a lever, I was able to look underneath. There wasn’t much there, just more trash, but I did see a black and yellow coffee can. I don’t know, but I fished it out and was surprised to hear something shifting around inside it. When I opened it I found a sheet of notebook paper, folded into a tiny square. 

There was a message written on the paper. We’ve asked Lucas to read it to you.

LUCAS: THEY don’t understand, but THEY will. I have to make THEM. I will make THEM. It’s coming and THEY laugh in the face of the cosmic inevitable. The WORLD will be ripped in half and only those READY for it will survive. THEY are not afraid. But I can make THEM. I will open THEIR EYES. Twelve Twenty-One TWELVE. The MESSAGE has been here all along and it has been RECEIVED. It makes me LAUGH but it will make THEM cry. I don’t do this to be EVIL. I am not EVIL though THEY may think so. I do this to save THEM. When the WORLD is gone only those that know THE TRUTH will survive. I have the skills. I have the PURPOSE. IT is coming. I am READY.

The references to December 2012 seem to indicate that this message is from Stratton. We weren’t able to find much to compare it to. His home was repossessed and sold to a new family that has no connection to its previous owner. It has been gutted and completely redone. Mary Parkman was able to provide us with a few pictures she took of Stratton’s roadside signs. The pictures are a little grainy, but the message is quite easy to read. One of them says, “Don’t drink the Water.” Another reads, “THEY are lying to You.” The handwriting sample is too small for a complete comparison, but they do appear similar. It’s also important to note in the message Tom found that any time the word “they” or “them” or any variation of it was used, the author capitalized the entire word. The same is true of the pictures Mary sent us of the signs. 

Jack Verlander, following our suggestion, has contacted the authorities, who are searching the shack, trying to determine who secretly built it and for what purpose, but as of this moment, the investigation is ongoing.

It’s important to note that all of this is just a working theory, but we now believe that at some point Leo Stratton lost his grip on reality. He began to believe the stories about the end of the world. From his note in the coffee can, it sounds like he believed he was on a mission to save people from or prepare them for the coming armageddon. We believe he adopted the guise of Mushy the Clown to somehow accomplish this task. There’s nothing concrete to confirm this, but he writes about laughing in his final note, something, as we all know, clowns are meant to do.

We think Stratton used the shack as a base of operations for his hijinks as Mushy. He most likely kept the costume out there and used it to hide from the town. At some point, however, the cans of food and cot seem to imply that Stratton moved out to the shack full time. This would coincide with the time Mary Parkman says he disappeared from his home. 

It’s curious to note that he attempted to hide this cabin, and for whatever reason believed it to be a better shelter than his own home. Stratton’s basement was fully stocked with cases of food, weapons, and other gear to outlast the apocalypse he believed was coming. The shack, by comparison, was flimsy and not designed to last. It seems odd he would abandon his home, but for whatever reason, we believe he did just that.

He terrorized the town as Mushy the Clown, but around Thanksgiving something happened and he stopped. In the weeks before the 21st of December, Stratton disappeared completely. 

TOM: Perhaps he fell into the Ossipee River, hit his head and drowned. Maybe he suffered a heart attack somewhere out in the woods and his remains are yet to be discovered. Maybe he was attacked and killed by an angry victim of his. Maybe he simply left town, deciding to weather the coming destruction somewhere else. We just don’t know.

For now, we’re going to label the story of Mushy the Clown case closed. When and if the police uncover anything that would connect Stratton to Mushy more clearly, we will let you know, but we’re fairly confident in our theory. In 2016, when the clown frenzy reached its peak, there were some mentions of Mushy or Mushy-like clowns, but none of these were verified or corroborated. Many people, like Mary Parkman and Sadie McFarland believe Mushy is long gone, whether dead or just left town. And we for one, believe them.

We don’t know why Leo Stratton decided to put on a clown mask and scare his neighbors, and we don’t know what made him stop. Maybe someday, someone will uncover another letter written by Leo Stratton’s or perhaps someone will stumble on his remains somewhere in the woods surrounding the Ossipee River. Perhaps he’ll be wearing a rotting custodian’s coverall with soggy red pom moms sewn into it. Maybe he’ll be wearing a slightly melted-looking, misshapen clown mask. 

Then again, maybe not. Maybe the mask - and the man who wore it - will show up somewhere else, ready to terrorize a new town.

Stay safe out there, Maine.

Malevolent Maine is Lucas Knight, Tom Wilson, and myself, Chris Estes.

If you’d like to read more about our investigations check out our website at malevolentmaine.com

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Thank you for listening to Malevolent Maine.

And as always, stay safe out there, Maine.