Gloopy, a very tall clown with a red tunic and purple trousers, holds a purple balloon on the lawn of a blue house in autumn.

Welcome

Gloopy the clown on a sunny autumn lawn holding a big bunch of birthday balloons with numbers on them.

Gloopy the Birthday Clown

Gloopy loves birthdays and may show up at your next birthday party to give you a balloon.

Play the Trick or Treat game below and you may see Gloopy.

Gloopy at night in front of the house, lit from below, holding a bunch of birthday balloons while a skeletal shadow hand reaches across the wall.

The kids called him “Gloopy” But we didn’t know his real name because no one ever got close enough to him to ask. In fact, he was never seen by more than one person at a time, and never for long. You might turn the corner on a dark street to find Gloopy half illuminated by one of the town’s few streetlights – staring back at you with his big unblinking eyes. Look away nervously for just a moment and he would be gone again by the time you looked back.

Over the years, Gloopy sightings happened often enough in Montclair that we could no longer chalk it up to folks’ imagination. So, we just took to calling him Gloopy, which was as good a name as any for a 12-foot clown.

One thing’s for sure, Gloopy loves birthdays. You would always see him happily holding a bunch of birthday balloons. Funny thing is, the balloons would be for kids of all different ages – Happy 5th Birthday!, Here’s to 7, Look Who’s Turning TEN! Odd to have all these different balloons in the same bunch.

People speculated that Gloopy was just delivering balloons to many different kids as a surprise on their birthday. Only thing is, no one ever claimed to receive one. After a while a different, darker rumor began to take hold. People whispered that Gloopy wasn’t giving balloons to kids but taking them from them. And that he was somehow connected to the string of unsolved birthday disappearances over the years in Northern New Jersey.

But talk is cheap and I never subscribed to this defamation of Gloopy. It’s fine to gossip about angry clowns that steal children from their birthday parties, but that’s not Gloopy.

Gloopy is a happy clown.

Inspirations

To get to our inspirations page please solve the following equation

Actual Circles of Hell×Faces of Eve+Stages of Grief−Rules of Fight Club−Degrees of Separation

The answer to life, the universe and everything×US tariff on Canadian hockey sticks+Angry Men+Horsemen of the Apocalypse

A pumpkin with a question mark carved into it.

A father and his daughter stand on their front lawn looking up at Gloopy, the very tall clown, in front of their blue house.

Thank you for visiting our site.

Every year or so, we try to create a different Halloween display using random junk we have in the garage. Note: my wife would probably like to add that she does not support this and is not involved.

With limited time this year we just turned last year’s scary pumpkin man into a clown. But given that some houses are really upping their game (e.g. the pirate ship on Bellevue Ave), we decided to give our clown a digital backstory.

While this is just a big clown, it was largely inspired by the new film, “You Can See Everything”. We genuinely wanted to make a happy clown, but since perception is reality, my happy clown is invariably someone else’s creepy clown. I can’t control that, so this site explores that duality.

The introduction to the book, “Cruel Shoes”, by Steve Martin was also an inspiration.

Happy Halloween!

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