Wrinkles the Clown: The True Story, the Documentary and the Number

Is Wrinkles the Clown real?

Wrinkles the Clown is a performance. The phone number, the stickers and the viral videos were real, but the clown who crawls out from under a child's bed was acted.

In a November 2015 Washington Post profile, Wrinkles said he was a 65-year-old military veteran from Rhode Island who would scare misbehaving children for "a few hundred bucks cash". The 2019 documentary showed that biography was invented. According to Wikipedia's summary, the character was created by an unidentified performance artist as part of an art project, and the videos of him frightening families were staged.

Who is behind Wrinkles the Clown?

Two key figures appear in the film, and neither is named as the creator. The man the crew follows for the first half is an actor, listed in the cast as D.B. Lambert. Midway through, the film reveals him as a stand-in, and the real creator speaks with his face hidden and his voice disguised.

Nobody has publicly identified that creator, and this site will not guess. The age of 65, the Rhode Island past and the veteran story belong to the invented character, so the creator's real age is unknown.

The timeline: from a 2014 video to Netflix

• 8 November 2014: the first "caught on CCTV" video, a clown crawling out from under a child's bed, goes up on the HvUSeen Wrinkles YouTube channel (The Ghost In My Machine). The Daily Mail also puts the start around 2014. Wikipedia gives 2015 for the video, so the date is disputed, but two sources point to 2014.
• By 3 May 2015: the channel's own tweet shows a sticker with the phone number (The Ghost In My Machine).
• Autumn 2015: the story goes viral, and the Washington Post profile follows in November.
• 4 October 2019: the documentary is released in the US.
• April 2026: the documentary arrives on Netflix in the US.

Three things probably made the story spread. The video looked like a real security clip. The stickers gave everyone a number to try. And each dare video sent new callers, who made new videos. Some early "news" was not news at all: The Ghost In My Machine's analysis found that several 2015 posts that looked like articles from big websites were written in those sites' open community sections under the channel's own name.

What the Wrinkles the Clown documentary reveals

Wrinkles the Clown is a documentary directed by Michael Beach Nichols (IMDb) and released in the US by Magnet Releasing on 4 October 2019. Halfway through, the film turns the story around. The man it had been following is an actor, and the creator says the clips used actors and that he never took a job to scare a child in person. It also plays voicemails left on the line, including angry threats, and, according to Wikipedia, talks to folklore experts and puts the story in the context of the 2016 clown scare.

So is the movie based on a true story? Partly. The videos, the stickers and the calls all happened. The clown who scares children for money did not.

Wrinkles the Clown's phone number

The number is 407-734-0254. Wrinkles' own contact page lists it, next to an email address and a shop selling stickers, signed prints, postcards and paid personalised video messages. We last checked the page in Oct 2026. The listing shows who published the number and says nothing about what a caller hears today.

The owner publishes it as the contact line for a real performer. If a person answers, apologise and hang up.

What happens if you call Wrinkles the Clown?

The newest calls to Wrinkles the Clown's number reached a recorded greeting, not the man himself. Here is what callers heard, newest first.

Fast Company says callers might also reach Wrinkles himself. The Ghost In My Machine adds that he rarely picks up, and he told the Washington Post he gets hundreds of calls a day.

These are the callers' own accounts. We review public call videos and dated reports like these; we do not call the number ourselves.

Should you call Wrinkles the Clown?

Calling Wrinkles the Clown for fun is a bad idea. We have not confirmed whether a call costs anything, the newest calls reached a recording, and the line belongs to a real person who has said some callers threatened him. The Daily Mail reported in October 2019 that the film plays voicemails in which an angry caller shouts he will beat the clown's brains in. Repeated or group calls to a real person's line can count as harassment, depending on where you live, and our guide to whether prank calling is illegal explains where the line sits.

Our pages on the echo test line and the Boothworld Industries line cover numbers built to be called, and each page shows its own status. To see which numbers can cost money or reach strangers, read phone numbers you should never call. If an unfamiliar number rings you first, the FTC's guide on how to stop unwanted calls explains blocking and reporting, and our page on what to do when an unknown number calls covers the rest.

What callers report

Beyond the calls above, written reports are thin. On Reddit's r/creepyphonenumbers, a post says the line asks you to leave a message. Several readers of a 2019 Monsters and Critics article say it goes straight to voicemail, and one says he got a call back. Since September 2025, TikTok creators have posted videos of themselves calling, and one from October 2025 says in its caption that the number is real.

A recent post on r/horror says the film shows children saying his voicemail is scary but shows no conversation with Wrinkles. That probably fits the timeline above: the fear came from the videos and the stories around the number.

Killer clown mix-ups: Wrinkles, Gacy and Hollywood

Searches such as "Is Wrinkles the Clown a killer?" mix several stories together. John Wayne Gacy was a real serial killer who performed as a clown and was nicknamed the "Killer Clown" (Wikipedia). According to Wikipedia, the documentary also looks at the 2016 creepy-clown scare, and film villains such as Pennywise and Art the Clown have their own phone-number stories on our page about clown lines.

None of these is Wrinkles. The documentary shows the clips were staged, and we saw no report of harm by Wrinkles, the creator or the actor.