From the bbc: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7191721.stm
Pennywise…yeugh…that’s what made me scared of clowns. 
I think the popular fear of clowns made me uncomfortable around them. I’ve never watched It, just saw the trailer, and I didn’t like it, because I knew I would be scared (I was around 4).
I’m not scared of Clowns…but dolls freak me out. “Chucky” give me nightmares. I have this 3 foot high doll: I move it around the house every week or so and scare myself… and my kid!
Sometimes I think the whole “Clowns scare me” thing is just a fad among people and certain cliches in school.
Im not scared of clowns.
I’m not, but I know people who are deathly afraid of them… Though the cover to It creeps me out…
Dolls can get scary. Specially if they’re old and have some smudges on them. And little children, watching you silently, when you come around the corner. Mostly if there’s noone else around:D
YES Triball!!!
Little creepy kids! The little twin girls in “The Shining”, riding around the hall on their tricycles. Jeez, that’s it, now I won’t sleep tonight!
There are several sorts of clown. The white face, auguste, and tramp are the well known ones. Before them, there were characters like Harlequin. Right back into ancient Greek times, there were mimes who were part comical, and part “disturbing”.
It is only comparatively recently that people have “assumed” that clowns are meant to be funny, and meant to be for kids.
Give a thought to the economics of earlier societies, and you will immediately see that someone whose job was simply to entertain children would have made very little money indeed. It is only recently that the rights and desires (rather than the needs) of children have taken such a prominent place in our hierarchy of values.
So it should be no surprise that something rooted in ancient theatrical tradition should have a dark side that some adults and many kids find frightening. It was always meant to.
And the various recent films and books that have exploited this fact have not created a fear; they have tapped into one that was always ther, and then nurtured it.
Clowns are ok for me. What really gets me are mannequins and porcelaine dolls. Even today I can’t step into a department store without getting shivers, and if I know there’s a porcelaine doll in the house somewhere I have a hard time getting to sleep. I remember exactly why I’m afraid of those two things too… That old kid’s show where the mannequin mailman thing came to life and hosted the show (it started with a puppet old man janitor). Dolls from that one goosebumps episode where the main character get’s trapped in her own dollhouse and finds the other girl, also trapped in there. It’s when her hand falls off… shiver