When you watch a horror movie it helps quell the fear when you remember that what you’re watching isn’t real and that nothing like this will ever happen in real life. That only works until the terror of the movies seems like it's spilling into real life, like when a Pennywise doll – fit with Hellish writing scribbled on it – flew into the yard of New Jersey resident Renee Jensen.
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As first reported by NJ.com, Jensen was spending a lovely Saturday afternoon in the backyard of her Harrington Park home with her boyfriend, Alex, when soon she noticed an object near a side gate, and that it appeared to be airborne. After it fell to the ground, she noticed it was a doll of the vicious clown from Stephen King’s classic IT story and the upcoming second part of the new movie adaptation. Written on the forehead was indecipherable and off-putting writing, with the mouth having fake blood on it. Making matters all the weirder is the fact her home is surrounded by a thick layer of trees, making it near impossible for someone to simply throw things into her yard.
“It came at an angle and I just watched this thing, it didn’t hit a single tree and went straight over, just cleared the gate and hit the pine branches and hit the ground," she said. When asked if it could be her neighbors at a nearby house, she said, “there’s no way they could have launched this thing from their house.”
After she and her boyfriend ruled out all possible scenarios, they called the police to see if they could help them figure it out – to no avail. “They were hysterical,” Jensen said. “They wouldn’t touch it. they were totally creeped out too. It was so funny.”
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When the police couldn’t help and the mystery of the scary doll continued, Jensen came to the only reasonable conclusion: kill it with fire (above; photo by Renee Jensen). She lit the doll on fire, and when recalling the incident to SyFy Wire, said she hoped it would remove any bad mojo the doll brought with it.
"It isn’t really about being superstitious. I'm a Reiki Master and work with energy. When a Pennywise clown with what appeared to be culty writing on its forehead drops out of the sky, I did what anyone would have thought about doing. I burned it and its possible bad energy out of existence … just in case."
She then went to sleep with a butcher’s knife nearby, just in case the fire didn’t end up being enough. The story then went viral, and after writer Meg Gardiner tweeted out the story, King himself responded with a playful message of approval.
IT: CHAPTER TWO is in theaters September 6, but in the meantime watch out for flying dolls.