The Tape Library - Archive of the Paranormal & the Unexplained - Playback | The Terrifying True Story of Sam The Clown

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Dive into the eerie past with the mysterious encounter of two children who stumbled upon Sam, a peculiar figure in the fields of Sandown during the 1970s. Join us as we piece together the chilling details and explore whether Sam was a ghost, an alien, or something else entirely. This is the story of Sam The Sandown Clown Support the channel with Patreon - www.patreon.com/thetapelibrary Do you have a supernatural story to share? Drop me an email at [e-mail] You can check out The Tape Library in audio form on all of your favourite podcast providers. Tiktok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thetapelibrary Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/people/The-Tape-Library/100094332411836/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thetapelibrary Archive of the Paranormal, the strange and the unexplained. The Tape Library brings you the creepiest stories, to keep you horror junkies up all night. True scary stories of ghosts, cryptids, UFOs and true crime. Additional footage and audio from Evanto, Singularity, Midjourney and Pexels. Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio and the youtube audio library. All other footage used under fair use. CHAPTERS 00:00 Welcome to Playback 02:06 Lights in the Sea 07:20 Welcome 08:11 All Colours Sam 17:13 Sams Hut 19:46 Mr Y 28:37 What really Happened? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are stories that fade with time, and there are those that linger. Playback is where we listen again, not just to remember, but to reconsider. What you're about to hear hasn't changed. Not really, but maybe you have. Welcome to Playback, a new series where we hit play on past entries into the tape library. The goal of this series is to revisit past cases that have stuck with you all, or maybe have become relevant again for some reason. Just before we begin, the next entry into the Tate Library's podcast feed will be a little delayed. There is a good reason for this, I'm working on something that I can't talk about just yet. But if you wait to listen to the podcast version of the new episode, you will be the first to know what that something is.

years. But once that short delay is out of the way, things will be much more regular here once again. So thank you for being patient with me. It genuinely feels like we're moving into a new chapter of the show, and I'm so excited to bring you guys all the cases I have planned over the next few months. Tonight we'll be hearing the story once again of Sam the Sandown Clown. This is one of my personal favourite tales of high strangeness that I have ever included in the archives. But more importantly, it appears that fresh information has surfaced about Sam, that maybe this wasn't a one-off occurrence. That maybe Sam came back. We'll be talking about these newer encounters in a few weeks' time. But for now, let's put the tape in and revisit one of

the strangest stories to ever be included into the tape library. On a March evening in 1972, a man was walking alone along the wet sand of Compton Bay in the Isle of White. It was a cool, crisp evening, but he was enjoying the peace and serenity as he walked out further due to the tide being low. He breathed in that cool air before noticing something even colder, hitting his ankle. It was a wave. Not anything significant, just a little splash of water, saturating the lower part of his jeans and shoes. The man looked towards the sea and realised the tide must be turning.

It was time for him to return to his car that he had parked just off the beach. But then another wave hit him, a little higher up his leg this time. Another quickly followed. He glanced out to see him. and could see the water moving much quicker than it should. This was a walk he was fairly familiar with and he was used to the changing tides, but instantly in his gut he felt that something wasn't right. It was when the next wave hit his knee that he started to panic. It was some sort of tidal surge. Something had started to push to water back to land, much quicker than usual.

He turned to start racing back to the beach. And that was when he heard it. A low droning sound coming from somewhere off out to sea. Almost like a siren, slowed down. He quickly moved, but by now the water was already getting higher and higher around him. Causing him to have to wade through the water. He was at risk of being cut off. The beach still some distance away.

He could swim, but each wave that came crashing down around him was more powerful than the last. He wasn't confident that whatever had caused these waves wouldn't drown him once the full extent of the surge caught up with him, which would surely happen before he reached the beach. He realised that just off to his left was a formation of rocks. High enough that he knew it normally poked comfortably out of the sea. The water was now high enough and he began to swim. like his life depended on it, which it very likely did. No one else was around. If he didn't reach the rocks in time, he wasn't sure how long it would take for anyone to even think about sending rescue.

Sure enough, he reached the rocks and began to climb, slipping multiple times as his wet hands grasped the smooth rocks, but after some effort he managed to pull himself to the top. He collapsed, breathing deeply and relieved that the ordeal was over. He glanced over the edge to see the waves crashing into the rocks below him. He quickly realised he had made the right call not to try and make it to the beach. The man sat up and glanced out over the darkened waters, wondering to himself what could have caused such a violent shift in the tides. A distant earthquake, maybe?

But then he heard his again. That low, droning sound, he was sure of it. It sounded like it was coming from beneath the water. He looked carefully and there, before his very eyes, something peculiar appeared. Two yellow lights, clear as they, were shining up through the water. The waves were distorting them, but he said they looked like they were only just beneath the surface, and only about 40 foot away from where he was perched on the edge of this small cliff. The man later described the yellow lights as eyes, or more specifically,

that they were, peering up at me, like the eyes of some horrible sea monster. They were only there for a few minutes before slowly disappearing off into the dark, murky depths below him. the droning sound began to fade vanishing off over the horizon as the sound and lights went so did the tide leaving the man shaken but able to get back to his car and drive home

this was not a one-off occurrence for this man the past couple of years he had been witnessing strange lights that almost seemed to be following him but he didn't know how to tell anyone what he had been encountering without sounding mad. It would be one year later,

when his daughter had her own even stranger experience, that the man would finally reveal his story. Welcome to the tape library, and have I got a wild one for you tonight? This is one of those cases I wanted to cover the second I started this channel, but it's just so out there that I was kind of nervous to try and put it together. Okay, let's get into tonight's story. As I said, this case is a really peculiar one.

While it could be chalked up to the fantasies of two children, there are just so many weird details about it that I think make it a fascinating case. And maybe the best example of high strangeness I think we've covered since the Sereachna whole episode. So get yourself a warm drink, dim the lights and get comfortable. It's time for the chillingly weird tale

of Sam, the Sand Down Clown. Faye, a young seven-year-old girl, was playing next to Lake Common in the seaside town of Sandown on the Isle of Wight. Spring was fully in the air on this warm May afternoon, as she was playing a game of hide-and-seek with a young boy around the same age. The afternoon was getting long, and at about 4pm the pair decided it was time to end their game and think about heading home for food. Before they could, however, something grabbed their attention. It was a sound, a sort of siren of some kind, a low wailing almost like an ambulance siren, somewhere off in the distance, but not too far. The two children listened carefully, and with a certain level of childlike confidence,

established that the sound could only be coming from one or two fields over. They had time, so why not investigate what it was? The area they were playing in backed onto a golf course, so they moved through the perimeter of the course towards the sound. They thought it was strange that none of the grown-ups playing their game seemed to be interested in the sound at all, but they still continued on. They reached the edge of the club and moved through a hedge into the swampy marshlands that surrounded the area, just opposite Sandown Airport.

A small and rarely used airport at the time. They were close now, and the sound was so loud, but they looked out across the marshland and couldn't see anything that could be causing the noise. Then it just suddenly... ...stopped. An eerie silence was cast across the field. They stepped out a little further into the marshland, confused by the sudden disappearance of the sound.

They began to approach a small wooden footbridge that would take them across. one of the brooks but as they began to cross Faye saw something that made her freeze there was a hand gripping the bridge from underneath wearing a blue glove with only three fingers from underneath the bridge the two children witnessed a strange figure step out from the shadows beneath them the person kept their back to the children they didn't get a good look at his face But they could instantly tell, even in its half-hunched-over stumbling movements,

that whoever was in the water was tall. He was also dressed, strangely. The tall man appeared to be carrying some sort of book that he dropped into the water as he stumbled out from underneath the bridge. He struggled to pick the book back up, splashing about as he did so, almost as if he wasn't fully in control of his hands, before moving along the brook in a strange hopping motion,

with his knees raised high as he moved. They watched as he moved towards a weird-looking metallic hut that had no windows. Before he opened the door and disappeared in sight. The entire incident was strange enough that the two children decided they should tell a grown-up and decided to walk back the way they came. As they had entered the field, they had spotted two men

fixing a fence post, so decided to head back to where they were. They had made it about 50 feet away from the bridge when they heard a noise behind them. They turned and saw the figure, standing not too far behind, staring directly at them. Only this time, he appeared to be carrying something new. He appeared to be holding what looked like a black microphone, with a white wire dangling from it. He didn't move. The children didn't move. Then suddenly the wailing siren kicked back in again. Only this time it was so loud it hurt the children's ears. The boy, terrified, began to run, but just as quickly as it started, the noise stopped, and the figure raised the microphone-looking object to his mouth. Both children claimed that

despite the figure being quite far away, they could hear his words as clear as they. He said, Hello? Are you still there? A strangely worded question being that the children were very much in his line of sight. But something about the figure's tone of voice instantly calmed both children, and they felt comfortable enough suddenly to approach the figure instead of continuing to run. It was as they got closer that they were. got a good look at what exactly he was. The following description is quoted from a UFO

publication that first investigated the story. Why it was a UFO publication, we will get into later. Faye described the man as follows. He was nearly seven feet tall and had no neck for his head appeared to be wedged straight onto his shoulders. He wore a yellow pointed hat, which interlocked with the red collar of a green tunic. A round black knob was affixed to the top of his hat, and wooden antennae were attached either side. The face had triangular markings for eyes, a brown square of a nose, emotionless yellow lips. Other round markings were on his paper white cheeks, and a fringe of red hair fell onto his forehead. Wooden slats protrude, from his sleeves and from below his white trousers. He had three fingers in his blue gloves

and had bare white feet, and also only had three toes. Despite having spoken to the children just moments ago through his microphone, his next attempt at communication came through writing. He pulled out a notebook and began scribbling away, then presented the book to the children, holding his finger up to each word, and gesturing them to read it aloud as he did. Fay did as he wanted and read out loud, Hello, and I am all colours Sam. The reason he pointed to the words interestingly was because they were not laid out in a simple sentence. Instead they were written in different places around the page. The children glanced around and could see not far from where

they were stood, the two workmen repairing the fence post, but neither of them seemed to react at the strange events that were taking place, as though they couldn't see Sam, or possibly even the children, for that matter. The boy was still nervous to be around this person, that they now would refer to as Sam, but Fay, on the other hand, didn't. She seemed to think he was friendly,

and gradually her confidence calmed the boy down. They crept closer still to Sam, who then revealed he, in fact did have the ability to talk without the aid of his microphone, though the children describe his speech as odd, his lips wouldn't move, and his voice was muffled, as though his mouth wasn't fully opening,

or it was obstructed in some way. Sam began to ask the children questions about themselves, and then asked them to ask questions back. Their first was about his peculiar clothing. His clothes were colourful, but ripped and torn. Sam stayed. that it was his only set of clothes that he had, so he had to wear them every day. They asked, due to his strange physical appearance, if he was a man. To this Sam laughed a little to himself,

before replying, No. The pair then asked him if he was a ghost, which got an even more cryptic response of, well, not really. But I am in an odd sort of. way. When the children pressed further to ask what he was, Sam simply replied that the children knew what he was. Despite introducing himself as Sam, he then claimed that he had no real name. Creeply, he told the children he wasn't alone, that there were others like him, even drawing a picture of what one of his companions looked like in the notebook. But Sam continued to paint himself as a harmless figure of sorts to the children. He claimed he was scared of people, scared that they would hurt him. He said that if he were to be attacked, he wouldn't fight back. So instead he just

kept away from people. That was when Sam asked the children to come back to his hut with them. The children followed Sam for a small flap in the side of his metallic hut that all three were forced to crawl through. Once inside, they saw it was actually. split into two floors, the lower of which was high enough that it allowed sand to stand up fully once through the hatch. As he did so, he removed his hat, revealing a pair of rounded white ears and a thinning head of brown hair. They described the downstairs as being covered in blue and green wallpaper and covered with dials. The furniture inside was all wooden, and there was a small electric heater in the corner of the room.

The second floor wasn't so spacious and had a cold metallic look to it much like the outside had Sam told the children that he didn't just stay on the island he often ventured to the mainland to collect berries from a second camp that he had there he claimed that he lived entirely on these berries he also said he could drink water from the brooks around his home

but only after he had cleaned it Sam had a peculiar way of eating which he demonstrated to the children. Sam picked up a berry and pushed it towards one of his ears. Before thrusting his head forward, the berry vanished, before reappearing moments later in his triangular eye. He then thrust his head forward again, and the berry appeared in his mouth, which he then ate.

The trio continued to talk in Sam's strange home for about half an hour more, before the children said their goodbyes and acted. through the hatch that they came through. What they discussed or did in that half an hour period, we don't know. They moved away glancing back at Sam's hut. He had not followed them. Something about stepping away from Sam's home seemed to bring the fear back into the children, and they ran back as quickly as they could to where they had come from.

The golf course now appeared to be mostly empty, but once they reached the lake, they had been playing at earlier. They excitedly recalled their story to the first grown-ups they saw. Two men who simply laughed at the children, told them to stop messing around and head off home. The mockery they received clearly made the children cautious to tell anyone else. Even for a seven-year-old, they could see how unbelievably strange the whole thing was, and neither Faye nor her friend told anyone else. That was until three weeks later, however.

On the 2nd of June, 1973, Faye's father, who has remained nameless, was growing concerned about his daughter. The past few weeks she had been quieter than usual, as though something was playing on her mind. She had simply dismissed it any time he had tried to inquire, but for some reason on this day, she decided to confide in her father, what had happened. She sat there and retold the story of that strange afternoon several weeks earlier. initially he too laughed it off and told her to stop making things up this response seemed to upset

Fay greatly another adult wasn't believing her but as they went back through the story something about it got under Fay's father's skin there was such a bizarre level of detail included that just seemed so uncharacteristically imaginative for his daughter she also seemed to be deeply troubled recounting the experiences, as though it had been something that had genuinely been playing on her mind for a while. The father, who in all reports, has referred to as Mr. Whye, was clearly convinced enough by his daughter's story that he believed something had happened. But he didn't believe her version of events. So his first step was to go and visit the boy she had been playing with that day. Interestingly, the boy was much more hesitant to talk about what had happened.

happened. But sure enough, he at least confirmed Mr. Wye that he had met a strange man named Sam in the field that day and backed up most of Faye's version of the events. Mr. Wye then headed to the brook where they claimed they saw Sam, but could find no evidence of any metallic hut being there. Mr. Wye couldn't shake Faye's story. He had her retell it multiple times and he wrote up a detailed document of all the events that both her and the boy recounted. He then got in touch with a UFO investigator at the organisation Bufora, who looked into the case and even reported the events in a detailed manner in one of the journals. He requested that both his identity and that had the children be kept secret. He wasn't looking to get any attention to this story.

He simply wanted someone to look into it. To tell him there was some. something to it. To tell him he simply wasn't going mad. But why had Mr. Wye decided to contact UFO investigators for this strange incident? Well to answer that we have to go back three years to the start of Mr. Wye's own encounters. Tuesday the 20th of October, 1970. Mr. Wye was alone driving to a friend's house on this dark autumn evening. He was passing through the village of Braiding. The roads were quiet. People were already home from work on this chilly night.

As he turned out of the village, he noticed something in the sky. A sort of aircraft. Very large in the sky just to his right over some fields. The craft was strange enough for Mr. Wyer to pull his car to the side of the road to try and figure out what he was seeing. He watched as the large craft hovered. Seven individual large lights glowed underneath it. Each a clearly defined sphere that resembled a glowing red cherry,

mixed with turquoise and white lights. Curiously, despite being close, the object made no sound. It just hovered there. Silently. When Mr. Wyer turned on his engine and began to slowly move down the road, The craft moved with him, hovering alongside, keeping pace with his car. It followed him further down the road before suddenly cussing across the road some 300 feet behind his car. Mr. Weyer stopped his car once again, and watched the object hover over some nearby fields.

It seems smaller somehow now. But this might have just been down to the fact that only four of the seven lights now appear to be lit up. He stepped out of his car and attempted to shine his torch towards the object, but it was too far over the field to really illuminate. He did continue to watch as it moved back and forth through the sky, as though it didn't seem to know what to do. After some time watching, Mr. Wyer got back into his car and continued on to his friend's house.

Hauntingly, the entire way there, he could see the red lights in his rear-view mirror, although they were visibly further away from him. It did appear that they were following. He entered his friend's house and he told them the strange encounter he had had that evening. After some time the pair stepped outside and sure enough both men saw the red lights, not too far off in the distance, moving back and forth.

Disappearing into the tree lines for short periods of time before seemingly peeking back out. Mr. Wyer drove towards his home, and while the lights did appear to follow for a short while again, they soon vanished completely from sight. Across the span of nearly two years, Mr. Wye would spot singular red lights in the night sky when he was out and about on multiple occasions.

He wouldn't see them for months at a time, and then suddenly he would be driving and noticed the red dot, following behind him, a strange occurrence, but not one that truly frightened him, until one evening in Compton Bay. The place our story started, and where Mr. Wyer claimed he was forced to climb a rock formation, to avoid what he was convinced were some sort of underwater craft causing a tidal surge, the creepy yellow lights in the sea, watching him, much of the water.

like the red lights in the sky had been in the previous years. While these incidents had made Mr. Wyer fascinated with the subject of UFOs, it wasn't a topic he would bring up with his family. Again, how did you explain that you are convinced you have been followed by glowing lights on multiple occasions, without looking insane? He had definitely never told Faye about his experiences, nor discussed it with her around. But it was his interest in UFO cases that had developed over the years he had his experiences that made him look at what happened to Faye from a different viewpoint. He saw similarities between her encounters and that of others who have reported alien abductions. Specifically when it came to those two workmen who seemingly could not see Sam,

Mr. Wires quoted as saying, I get the impression that Faye was somehow taken into a bubble of alien reality, created by this strange personage. He told them he had just made the hut. Also, Fay told me that while they were talking to this ghost, two workmen nearby were repairing a post. They paid no attention to the weird charade, as though they could not see it.

The story seems to me so wildly strange, and the two children never suggested that Sam was some sort of alien. They were convinced he was a ghost, or something that at least wasn't fully there. But there is something that maybe does add some credence to Mr. Wise's theory. Just a few years later, in a case we may very well get into in a future episode of the Table Library. There were numerous sightings across an area of Wales, of apparent UFOs. One of the most famous of which is the story of Broadhaven School, where a number of children began claiming to their teachers that they had seen a UFO in their school playing field.

Their head teacher not believing them, separated the children out, and asked them to draw what they had seen, expecting the visual representations to differ wildly. But they didn't. All the pupils drew a pretty similar image of what they had seen. Numerous pupils claimed to have seen a figure next to the craft, which was described as wearing a green and silver outfit, not too dissimilar from the costume. Sam was said to have worn. Some pictures also depict the figure wearing a pointed hat, much like Sam wore. So what can we take from this? The Sand Down Clown story is often described as one of the strangest UFO stories of all time,

and many peculiar details about it have kept the story tickling people's brains for decades now. On paper I initially dismissed it as simply the work of a child with an overactive imagination. But when you factor in the accounts of the father, of the father, which I wasn't familiar with initially. It does add a whole strange layer to the story. But did Mr. Wye encounter something strange himself and then simply impose his story onto the weird imaginative story his daughter had made up? Maybe the two aren't connected at all. After all, Mr. Wyer was not chased through the sea by a strange clown man with a microphone. But could the sound he heard have been the same wailing sound that Faye and her friend

heard in the field on that spring day. If it was simply made up, why did Fay wait three weeks to tell the story after being dismissed by the first grown-ups they encountered? And why, if they were doing it for attention, was the boy so reluctant to recount the story? Also, why was Sam so cryptic when asked about what he was? It's really interesting that the children themselves specifically said they thought he was either a man dressed up or a ghost. The referring to him as a clown seems to have come later as people read the story. The description the children gave almost makes him sound like a wooden marionette of some kind. That's the other element of this.

The strange mix of the natural and the high tech. His hut is metallic on the outside but has wooden furniture inside. His clothes are ragged and worn and he apparently had some kind of antenna. But that was made out of wood. There is of course a darker interpretation of this story. The descriptions of Sam do possibly suggest that he could have been a man in some sort of creepy mask, his muffled speech and non-moving lips, adding to this theory. This makes the whole idea of him leading the children back to his shack, all the more chilling.

Some have suggested that he could have been some sort of travelling entertainer, a magician of some kind, based on his peculiar trick with the berry, that this was in fact a very real encounter. with a very strange, but real human, that has been twisted with a child's imagination about something more magical. But other than feeling uneasy around him, both children painted Sam as a friendly person and did not suggest anything more happened to them beyond a conversation. Regarding his lips not moving, at no point did the children say he was wearing a mask.

If you want to get into wilder ideas about what Sam was, could he have simply taken on the form of something that he thought would be enticing to children? A sort of colourful character that might be seen on a children's TV show. But maybe that façade wasn't working quite right. Could this be the reason for his muffled speech and odd movements? Or even the reason why sections of his home seem to be decked out with wallpaper and furniture.

or others were cold and metallic. There certainly wasn't the same cultural uneasiness about clowns back then, as there is today. Was Sam portraying himself to the children in this way? Because he wanted them to like him. Or, to lure them in. We will never know what truly happened on that day. But nonetheless, the legend of Sam, the Sandown Clown, has at least left us, a strange.

story to share and a potential example of high strangeness taking place on a normal day. That's all for this entry into the tape library. I would love to know what you were made of Sam the Sandown Clown, a totally made-up story, a supernatural entity of some kind, or something in between. Drop me a comment below and let me know your thoughts. Thank you all once again to everyone who has subscribed to this channel. I very much was making these videos for myself when I started out, and to a certain degree, still am. It's a way for me to think about strange, creepy stories, and then edit them in a way that I personally enjoy.

I always assume my style would be kind of niche, so the fact that so many of you enjoy these two is genuinely touching. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I plan to keep bringing you these weird tales for a long time. Until next time. Pleasant dreams.