Ronald McDonald was named after serial killer from 1890s?

In August and September 2025, a story circulated online that a drifter named Ronald McDonald who killed 12 children at county fairs across the midwestern United States inspired the mascot of the McDonald’s fast-food chain.

A number of Snopes readers searched the website for information about the rumor as videos sharing the claim spread across social media.

For example, a video (archived) telling the purported tale on the Inspector Story Instagram page in mid-August had received millions of views. The clip’s caption read, “The real Ronald McDonald wasn’t selling burgers. He was hunting children. This is the dark true crime origin behind the fast-food mascot — twelve kids vanished before the summer of 1892 was over.” The affiliated Inspector Crimes Facebook page also hosted (archived) the video with the same caption, receiving around 6 million views.

Other users shared the rumor on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived) and Threads (archived). The video featured a narrator who told the story as follows:

This is the real Ronald McDonald. Not the one you remember from commercials. The smell of red paint. The silence of 12 missing children.

In 1892, a drifter named Ronald McDonald toured county fairs across the Midwest. Bright red coat. Yellow waistcoat. White gloves to the elbows. A painted smile so wide it cut into his cheeks. He called his tent, “The Happy Meal.” Admission was free for children. Inside, the light was dim. The air smelled of sweet bread and varnish. Each child got a small paper box, red, with a yellow emblem brushed on the side. Inside, a soft bun, a slice of cold meat, a hand carved wooden toy and a card. “Eat up. Come back tomorrow.” Parents saw nothing wrong but children stepped out pale and silent. Some wouldn’t eat for days. Some wouldn’t speak at all.

By summer’s end, 12 children had vanished from towns where his tent appeared. When the law searched his wagon, they found it empty. Except for a crate of red paint, yellow cloth and dozens of unused paper boxes, twenty years later, an advertising company in Chicago bought an old fairground poster to inspire a new mascot for a growing restaurant chain. They kept the name. They kept the colors. They kept the smile. And every time you’ve seen it since, you’ve been looking at a killer’s face.

However, the story was false. Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo located no news media outlets ever reporting about a 19th-century serial killer named Ronald McDonald. Historical archives, including literature on Google Books and old newspapers on Newspapers.com, also found no records regarding the rumor.

The Bing search did, however, display an AI-written description of the story, essentially a case of AI mistakenly helping to promote an AI-created tale as fact. Bing’s AI-written description cited Inspector Story’s podcast — which features an AI-generated script and several fake people’s voices discussing the matter — as its source.

Further, someone created the video with an artificial-intelligence tool. All of the images in the clip were fake. Also, the narrator’s voice resembled the sort of AI-created voice found on text-to-speech websites, such as ElevenLabs.io.

Snopes contacted the manager of the Inspector Crime and Inspector Story accounts, as well as the person running BURIED TRUTHS — a TikTok account mentioned later in this article — to ask about the origins of the story and video. We will update this article if we learn more information.

Ronald McDonald’s first appearance

According to Fandom.com, the late Willard Scott — who played Bozo the Clown and later worked as a “Today” show TV weatherman — first portrayed Ronald McDonald, the McDonald’s mascot, in TV advertisements in 1963.

The Chicago Tribune reported in 1972 that Scott not only donned the clown mascot’s costume but also created the character. The records compiled by Fandom.com users added that some people disputed Scott’s origin story. Even so, no part of the wiki website mentioned anything about the McDonald’s company creating the mascot thanks to inspiration from a man who killed a dozen children.

Looking for the original video

The BURIED TRUTHS (@buried__truths) TikTok account hosted possibly the oldest and original post (archived) of the video from Aug. 9, receiving more than 3.7 million views. The clip lacked extra elements appearing later in the Inspector Crimes and Inspector Story uploads, which featured a photo of the McDonald’s company’s Ronald McDonald face overlayed in the opening seconds, as well as a white border and louder music track.

For further reading, a previous fact check examined the claim that a video told the story of a vacuum cleaner salesman, Silas Reid, who killed 107 women in 11 minutes in 1942.