Is Laughing Jack real? The creepypasta clown's origin, explained

What the Laughing Jack legend says

The story is told by a single mother. Her five-year-old son, James, plays alone in the back garden and one day tells her about a new friend: a clown with long hair, a big swirly cone nose, long arms, baggy trousers and stripy socks, who always smiles. She takes it for an imaginary friend. That night she dreams of a derelict black-and-white amusement park, stuffed animals hanging in the game huts, and the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel played on a squeezebox, before a crowd of damaged children closes in on her.

Small things start happening in the house, and James blames them all on the clown. He comes home with a pocketful of hard candies he says the clown gave him. One night the kitchen is wrecked, the family dog is killed and the same candy turns up with it; the police find no sign of a break-in. The mother sets up a baby monitor and sleeps with a knife. On the last night she hears the laugh from her dream through the monitor, runs to her son's room and finds him mortally hurt, with the clown standing over him. She lunges with the knife, Laughing Jack vanishes in black smoke, and the blade goes into her own son. The story ends with her in a hospital for the criminally insane, hearing Pop Goes the Weasel outside her window. The ambiguity, whether the clown was real or the mother was ill, is the point.

Where it started: who made Laughing Jack

The Laughing Jack origin is unusually clean for a creepypasta, because the author never hid. The story was submitted to DeviantArt on 3 March 2013 under the account SnuffBomb, filed as literature, with a one-line note from the author saying this was his creepypasta and inviting readers to enjoy it. The account's profile page from the time gives the artist's name as Steve Aikins, a film and animation student in the United States; by December 2014 the story page had logged more than 31,000 views and the account more than 5,000 watchers. A copy of the page was also hosted on the Creepypasta Wiki, where by the end of 2014 it carried 377 reader comments.

The author returned to the character the same year. The Origin of Laughing Jack was submitted to DeviantArt on 13 December 2013. It opens on Christmas Eve in nineteenth-century London, where a lonely seven-year-old named Isaac, poor and frightened of his drunken father, wakes to find a hand-painted box at the foot of his bed labelled as a jack-in-the-box, which plays Pop Goes the Weasel when cranked. In this telling the clown begins as a bright, kindly toy sent by a guardian angel. Isaac is blamed for the pair's games and sent away to boarding school; when he returns as a violent adult, the clown watches, learns, and takes on his cruelty. That prequel is where the candy, the monochrome colours and the hatred of children get their explanation, and the UK Horror Scene's 2017 guide to creepypasta names the boy as Isaac Grossman.

How the Laughing Jack creepypasta grew

Dictionary.com, which keeps an entry on the character, dates the original post to 3 March 2013 and says its success is what prompted the December 2013 origin story. The clown then spread the way creepypasta characters do: fan art, readings, games and crossovers. On 9 August 2014 the channel Epic Rap Battle Parodies put the clown up against Eyeless Jack, and a 2015 Listverse list of home-invasion creepypasta judged him about as popular within the community as Jeff the Killer and Slender Man. Fan wikis have since written continuations in which the clown replaces his victims' organs with sweets, which is a fan addition rather than part of the author's two stories.

The author's own statements are brief but consistent. Writing as SnuffBomb on Twitter in April 2017, he described the clown as his story and character and noted that a popular narrator had only picked it up because of the 2015 case. He has never claimed any of it was true.

Which details hold up

The internet history holds up: the DeviantArt submission dates, the author's note, the Creepypasta Wiki copy and the prequel are all on the record. The story's own claims do not. The mother, the son, the neighbours and the hospital are inventions, no town or year is given, and there is no Laughing Jack true story in any police file. The Creepypasta Wiki itself later moved on: its log shows an administrator deleting both the story and its prequel on 28 August 2015, with a pointer to a sister site that hosts stories the main wiki no longer keeps.

One real event is often attached to the name, and it should be described carefully. In November 2015 Fox News and WGN-TV reported on a court case in Indiana in which a twelve-year-old girl was accused of killing her stepmother; court filings quoted by both outlets said she had acted on the orders of Laughing Jack, the fictional creepypasta character, and three doctors found her unfit to stand trial. That is a case about a child's illness, not evidence that the clown exists, and Real or Legend does not repeat the names involved.

Verdict

Laughing Jack explained in a sentence: a monochrome clown invented by one DeviantArt artist in March 2013, given a Victorian backstory that December, and carried onward by fans. The Laughing Jack legend has an author, two dated texts and no event behind it. Real or Legend files it as fiction.