Woman burns Pennywise the clown doll, sleeps with knife under her pillow after it mysteriously winds up in yard
A New Jersey woman found herself so unsettled by a Pennywise clown plush doll from It landing in her yard on Saturday that she set it on fire and then slept with a knife under her bed.
Renee Jensen was in her backyard in Harrington Park, N.J., with her boyfriend when she noticed an airborne object heading into her yard, according to NJ.com.
At first, she assumed it was a bird that may have died while flying, but when she approached the object that landed in her yard, she realized it was a doll of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, from It, Stephen King's iconic horror novel which was made into a miniseries in 1990, adapted for film in 2017 and has a sequel, It: Chapter Two, which hits theaters Sept. 6.
While the doll appears cartoonish and not nearly as frightening as Bill Skarsgård's depiction of the cosmic evil that prays on children approximately every 27 years, the doll's mouth was reddened with fake blood and featured writing on its forehead.
“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," Jensen, 42, told NJ.com.
She has one neighbor nearby, and they were not around to have pranked her with the scary doll. The experience left her shaken.
She took to a local Facebook page to share images of the doll, in which social media users urged her to contact authorities. Soon, two Harrington Park police officers arrived at the scene.
“They were hysterical,” Jensen told the news outlet. “They wouldn’t touch it. They were totally creeped out too. It was so funny.”
The police could not come to a reasonable explanation as to how, or why, the doll floated down into Jensen's backyard, and ultimately suggested she get rid of it.
Jensen, the owner of a reiki and intuitive healing business in Ridgewood, N.J., set out on burning the doll. It would not set on a fire alone, possibly due to a flame retardant on the toy and she had to use newspaper as kindling to destroy Pennywise.
That night, she slept with a knife under her pillow and her bedroom door locked. As an extra precaution, she burned sage around her property, NJ.com reported.
Jensen did not immediately respond to Yahoo Lifestyle’s requests for comment.
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