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New Jersey woman burns Pennywise doll after it mysteriously appears in her yard... Stephen King approves
We all float down here … even in New Jersey. Renee Jensen, a resident of Harrington Park, New Jersey, received a shock over the weekend when a Pennywise doll mysteriously flew through the air and landed in her backyard. She may have found the piece of It: Chapter Two merch cute, had its forehead not been covered in Satanic-looking scrawls.
"It came at an angle and didn’t hit any of the many, many trees in our yard," Jensen, who runs an Intuitive Healing Practice in Ridgewood, tells SYFY WIRE. "It just cleared our fence, hit the pine tree and fell to the ground. [My boyfriend, Alex, and I] both said, 'What the heck was that?' It looked as if a bird or something had just died mid-flight ... I saw the clown and the writing on the forehead and retracted my hand quickly. I jumped back and called for my boyfriend. He quickly came over and picked it up and brought it in to our backyard, which I was opposed to because my mind already started going to shadowy places."
Postulating that the marked doll's appearance could be "part of a publicity stunt" for Chapter Two, Renee and Alex consulted their friends and a community Facebook group for a logical explanation. When no answer—except maybe a possible drop from a passing drone—became available, they contacted local police. According to Jensen, they were also "totally creeped out and couldn’t figure out how it ended up getting into our yard because of the tree cover." In fact, they refused to even touch the thing.
Once the police were gone, Renee (agreeing with a suggestion from the cops) decided to become an honorary member of the Losers’ Club by burning the doll to a blackened crisp. After a few false starts, since the toy most likely had a flame-retardant coating or some such, she was able to set it ablaze by using newspaper.
That night, after making sure all the doors were locked up tight, Renee slept with a butcher's knife for added measure. Thankfully, Renee's kids were with their father in Georgia when Pennywise floated right out of nowhere.
"They eventually found out about it, and now the story has gone viral, so they aren’t creeped out as much as they were at the beginning. It’s amusing to them and everyone," she explains.
Based on this terrifying tale, we surmise that there are only two possible explanations: Either Pennywise is real and coming for us all, or Warner Bros. has embarked on an extreme guerrilla marketing campaign for It: Chapter Two. Let's hope to Maturin that it's the second one.
Pennywise’s creator, Stephen King, gleefully approved of the story, taking the time to give it (pun intended) a shoutout on Twitter with a post that reads: “We all float down here. You'll float, too.”
Scarily enough, Renee had a bit of a premonition about the event several days before it even happened.
"A couple of days before the incident, my girlfriend called me," Jensen says. "She wanted my expert opinion on a dream she had the night before. Her husband had been out of town and she woke up to what she thought was banging on her front door. She says she thought she opened her eyes and saw a clown standing at the bottom of her bed. White face. Red mouth. Black eyes. She said she wasn’t scared by what appeared to be a lucid dream, but wanted my opinion, even though dream interpretation isn’t my thing. A couple days later, Pennywise flew into my backyard. Totally disturbed, she was the first one I called after 'IT' happened."
Played by Tim Curry in the 1990 miniseries and currently portrayed by Bill Skarsgård, Pennywise the Dancing Clown is an inter-dimensional entity from King’s 1986 horror novel, It. Making its home beneath the sewers of Derry, Maine (a fictional town in the KingVerse), Pennywise snacks on the fear of others, taking the form of what others are scared of the most. Since children are most susceptible to this tactic, It most often kills and eats children, thus making the shape-shifting monster responsible for many of the unexplained deaths and disappearances that have taken place in the town since it was first founded in the 18th century. However, Pennywise also exerts a certain amount of magical hypnotism over the citizens of Derry, many of whom ignore the constant horrors taking place in their hometown.
It: Chapter Two opens in theaters next Friday, Sept. 6.
Written by Gary Dauberman and directed by Andy Muschietti, the sequel follows the adult members of the Losers, with the group headlined by James McAvoy (Bill Denborough), Jessica Chastain (Beverly Marsh), and Bill Hader (Richie Tozier).
