Sam of All Colors
Straight from the Isle of W-why?!
Hey. It’s been a minute. Thanks for sticking around while I took some time off.
It’s been a rough week in America. Despair. Anger. Hopelessness. We’ve spent days starring into the ugly face of a real monster. I needed a distraction. So I dug deep. And I think you’re going to like what I’ve uncovered. Alien? Ghost? Elaborate performance piece? This is the story of Sam of All Colors, or, the Sandown Ghost Clown.
The world of high strangeness, like any subject worth learning about, has its levels of accessibility. On the surface, you have the rockstars. The cryptids everyone can name: Nessie, Bigfoot, Mothman. Dig a little deeper, and you have the more unusual. These are cult favorites like the Batsquatch, The Loveland Frogman, or the Wendigo. But unless you’re truly plugged in to the world of the unknown, it’s likely this one isn’t on your radar.
I first heard about Sam of All Colors on the Cryptonaut Podcast, from the Paranormal Sage himself, Rob Morphy. As a recovering journalist, I’ve always connected with Rob’s storytelling. My wife and I used to put the pod on in the car and drive around the dark backroads of rural Oklahoma. The night we heard the story of “Sam, the Sandown Ghost Clown,” we were sitting in the park eating a late dinner. It was early autumn and a heavy Oklahoma sky was threatening to open up and soak us. The perfect ambiance to hear about one of the most unique stories in ufological lore.
The Sighting
In January, 1978, the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) released their bi-monthly journal with the headline “Ghost or Spaceman.” The cover featured the uncanny image below.
The journal’s editor, Norman Oliver, had the lead feature: a four page spread recounting the strange encounter between two children and an entity of unknown origin. The tale had come from a Mr. Y. (a pseudonym) and involved his young daughter, Fay (also a pseudonym).
The story begins in the spring of 1973. It was early evening, and Fay was playing with an unnamed young boy near Lake Common Rd in Sandown, a small resort town on the Isle of Wight in England. Side note: it’s also home to the National Poo Museum. But I digest, er, digress.
It was a relatively suburban locale, located just behind the Shanklin & Sandown Golf Club. So what came next wouldn’t have been unusual: a wailing siren, similar to an ambulance. The sound seemed to be coming from the hedges just beyond the golf course. For reasons unknown, Fay and her friend decided to seek out the source of the siren.
According to the report, “They followed [the sound] across the golf-links and through a hedge leading to a swampy meadow adjacent to the little-used Sandown Airport.” It was there the noise ceased.
As the two friends crossed a small foot bridge, a blue-gloved hand appeared from below and wrapped itself around the handrail. A moment later, a strange figure emerged. The article described the visitor in detail:
”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 and motionless yellow lips. Other round markings were on his paper-white cheeks and a fringe of red hair fell onto his forehead. ‘Wooden slats' protruded from his sleeves and from below his white trousers.”
The stranger didn’t acknowledge the kids…at first. Instead, he appeared to fumble with a “book” which he dropped in the water before retrieving again. He then retreated some yards away into a small, windowless metal hut. According to the report, his movements were “strange,” closer to a hop than a stride. Naturally, the kids started to leave. Once they were about 50 yards away, the figure reappeared from the building carrying a microphone. And the siren sound returned. At this point, the young boy was scared and wanted to run. But then the wailing ceased again, and the figure spoke into the microphone. Despite being half a football field a way, the kids heard the voice as if it was right next to them.
“Hello, are you still there?”
According to the report, the voice seemed friendly. So, giving into curiosity — or perhaps some strange Pied Piper effect — Fay and her hesitant friend approached the entity. The stranger opened his book and wrote seven words in no particular order. He then pointed to the words one at a time, spelling out the following phrase.
“Hello and I am all colours, Sam.”
Why Sam, as he called himself, chose this method of introduction is unclear. He had already proven he could talk. And a moment later, he spoke again. This time without the aid of the microphone. Although his lips, quote, “did not move and the speech was unclear — rather like that of a person who does not open his mouth properly.”
Sam seemed keen to strike up a conversation with the two. He asked them about themselves, and in turn they asked about Sam. Fay was curious about Sam’s clothes, noting that they were torn and dirty. He told her they were “all he had.” Then, with all the precociousness of youth, she asked him a follow-up, “Are you a human.” To which he responded, “no.”
Fay’s next question followed the natural path of her curiosity, she asked Sam if he was a ghost.
“. . .Well, not really, but I am in an odd sort of way,” Sam replied.
Fay pressed him for more explanation, asking, “well what are you then?”
Sam’s reply was even more cryptic.
“You know,” he said.
According to the article, Sam revealed that he had no name — despite identifying himself as “All Colors, Sam”. He also told Fay that he was afraid of people, and that he wouldn’t — or couldn’t — fight back if they attacked him. And he wasn’t alone, apparently, mentioning that there were “others” like him. Though he didn’t say where.
You’d be forgiven for thinking we’d reached the climax of this strange tale. But things are about to get even weirder — Sam invited Fay and her friend into his hut. And again, as if compelled, they followed. Inside there were two levels. The first floor contained plenty of headroom, and was covered in a blueish-green wallpaper that was “patterned with dials.” Upstairs was less spacious and had a metal floor. The building was furnished with some simple wooden tables and chairs, as well as a small space heater.
He removed his hat revealing round, white ears and sparse hair. Sam told the children that he mostly ate berries and drank water from the stream that he “cleaned.” And it seemed that the Isle of Wight wasn’t his only place of residence, as he mentioned a “camp” on the mainland. He then “ate” a berry through his ears. Something the article referred to as a “bit of a magic trick.”
After talking to Sam for at least half an hour, the kids eventually said their goodbyes. Then, giddy with the uniqueness of their experience, ran back across the golf course — apparently telling the first person they met (presumably a very confused golfer) that they’d just hung out with a ghost.
But, despite that initial thrill, it was three weeks later when Fay finally told her father, Mr. Y, about the encounter with Sam of All Colors.
Mr. Y’s first instinct was to write Sam off as a product of his daughter’s imagination. But Fay insisted he’d been real, and that he was either a ghost or, perhaps more hauntingly, a stranger in the woods playing dress up. After much prodding from Faye, Mr. Y spoke to the young boy who, though wary, admitted that everything Fay had told him was true. At which point, Mr. Y’s thoughts turned to a potential hoax. But he dismissed that notion, too, based on how detailed and intricate the children’s story was. Including the fact that Sam only had “three fingers, and three toes, on each limb.”
Eventually, Mr. Y returned to the field where the children met Sam, though the article doesn’t mention how far removed this return was from the initial encounter. Regardless, he found it empty. No trace of Sam remained. Had he packed up and moved back to his “camp” on the mainland? Slipped back behind the veil of reality? Returned to his home planet? Been arrested for vagrancy? Whatever the case, Fay’s story left a lasting impression on her father. So much so that he eventually shared it with UFO researcher and author Leonard G Cramp. It was Cramp who encouraged Fay’s father to reach out to the journal.
Like Father, Like Daughter?
Minus one or two less consequential details, that is the complete report on the one and only known encounter with Sam of All Colors. If you’d like to read the whole thing for yourself, you can find it here.
Otherwise, that’s the end of Fay’s story. And, if you dig into the lore of the “Sandown Ghost Clown,” seemingly the end of the road in terms of research. But there is a broader context. One that is rarely discussed in the discourse around Sam. Which is strange, given that the original article lays it out in a preamble to the report.
See, Fay wasn’t the only member of her family to have an encounter with the unknown. In 1970, Mr. Y witnessed a UFO gliding over Sandown while out for a drive, just down the road from the golf course where his daughter would encounter Sam three years later. He described it as a strange aircraft with a ring of “bright red lights” that seemed to meander slowly alongside his vehicle as he drove. Though it eventually disappeared, he reported that, on several subsequent occasions, he saw “single balls of red light in the sky which would hang stationary or follow him along as though checking his movements.”
In 1972, he experienced another encounter. I’ve pulled the full text from the report below.
“It was between 9 pm and 10 pm and Mr. Y was perched on the cliffside at Compton Bay, having been driven there by an unexpected tidal surge seemingly caused, in part at least, by some form of droning underwater craft. From his vantage point, he observed two points of yellow light, ‘peering up at me like the eyes of some horrible sea monster.' He guessed the 'eyes' were not much more than 40 feet away and were just below the surface of the sea, like a sort of periscope. They disappeared and as the tide gradually subsided, Mr. Y was able to get back to his car and drive home. At no time did he tell his young daughter of anything he had experienced”
Despite the report’s claim that Mr. Y never mentioned his encounters to Fay, it’s hard to not infer that he at least thought they could be connected. Why else would he mention them alongside the story of Sam. And indeed when asked about what he believed Fay saw, his answer supports this inference.
“I get the impression that Fay 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 character, as though they could not see it,” Mr. Y said.
A “bubble of alien reality” is not the conclusion someone who believed his own UFO sighting was unconnected to Sam would make. At least in my opinion. This is, after all, purely conjecture. As far as my research has uncovered, no follow-up has ever been written. And no one has ever come forward claiming to be Mr. Y, Fay, or the unnamed boy.
What, or Who, Was Sam Of All Colors?
But of course, this hasn’t stopped folks from trying to figure out what exactly happened in that field back in 1973. The Occam’s Razor of it all points to this being nothing more than a childhood fantasy, taken in and believed by a father who himself was prone to flights of fancy.
But the work I do here at MOTW isn’t about dismissing accounts as lies. That’s what led me to reignite my research in the first place. Any encounter with the unknown can be dismissed as a fabrication. So each of these stories starts from a simple platform: believing the accounts as they are told, and trying from there to poke and prod at the truth until I have decided whether I believe in the creature in question or not.
There are of course theories. Sam told Fay that he was a “kind” of ghost. Was he speaking literally? Did Sam count himself among the ranks of the dead? Or was this a metaphor from the mind of a man who felt forgotten by society? Someone who had taken to living in the wilds as a way to survive. Who was afraid of people and what they might do, or perhaps had done, to him. While his outward appearance is certainly alien, his “home” seemed downright domestic — minus the weird wallpaper.
But Sam also answered “no” to the question “are you human.”
So was Sam an alien like Mr. Y claimed? And was he somehow linked to the UFO encounters that he’d had just a few years earlier? Sam gave no indication that he was of extraterrestrial origin. But this is one of the prevailing theories.
Others have wondered is Sam might have been something even more mystical. A fae. A time traveler. An extra-dimensional oddity. A robot. Or even a shared hallucination.
What I find truly interesting about Sam, is that nowhere in the original report is he referred to as a “clown.” And yet, he has taken on the mantle of the Sandown Clown, or, Sandown Ghost Clown, depending on who you ask. And the illustrations of him, based on his description, certainly do seem clown-like. Sadly, I don’t know where the phrase “Sandown Clown” originated. Likely it was picked up and circulated shortly after the journal’s publication, eventually making its way into the cultural lexicon.
Do I Believe?
Sam is weird. There’s no way around it. And the more you start to believe that Fay and her friend truly did encounter something in Sandown that day, the more disquieting Sam becomes. His odd appearance. The strange answers he gave. And his ability to seemingly coax the children into, not only sticking around to talk to him, but going inside his house. My heebies are well and truly jeebied.
I think those kids saw something. Something that disconnected them from reality in a way we will likely never understand. Be it from beyond the veil of our world, or an altogether more monstrous thing grounded in the darkest aspects of human nature.
Of course, there is still a hope that the story isn’t over. Some third-hand accounts have claimed that Fay was around the age of 7 at the time of her encounter. And while her age isn’t mentioned in the original report, it is possible that she was within the range of 7-10. If that’s true, Fay and her friend would likely be in their early 60s today. If they are out there, and they still stand by their story, then we could still shed more light on Sam.
So, Fay, if by whatever cosmic coincidence you happen to come across this story, my inbox is always open.
I’ll leave you with this. Whatever he may or may not have been, one thing is clear, on the Isle of Wight, Sam has been written into the local folklore. And in 2024, a statue of Sam was donated to Sandown. Who knows, perhaps this is a sign that he is slowly working his way up the ranks. In a few years All Colors Sam could be as recognizable as Bigfoot.
So, what did you think? Was Sam real? A hallucination? A hoax? Or something stranger still. Let me know in the comments!
Hey! If you’ve been enjoying Monster of the Week, could you do me a favor? Click the share button below, you’ll have my eternal gratitude. My break was much needed. But now that revisions on my book are in a good place, I’m thrilled to be back! And huge, huge shoutout to my wife, Danielle, for keeping things going while I was away.
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Excellent red circling!
I’ve never heard of Sam. I think so many stories shared by children likely have a grain of truth to it and then it begins to grow. I hope we hear from Fay and her friend!
Amazingly, I recognised the Sand down Clown immediately! Funny, the lore we pick up - I follow a YouTube channel (Cool Dudes Walking Club) and the guy lives on Isle of Wight. I don’t think he believes tales like this but he likes to share them