A white van with “FREE CANDY” in writing that appeared to be blood caused a panic in a Sacramento, California neighborhood.

The van had blacked-out windows and streaked hand prints in red paint below the lettering. It didn’t have a license plate.

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12-year-old Lawrence Bellow saw in parked outside his house in the Natomas neighborhood and took a picture.

“It looked too fake to be true, but I didn’t want to get a closer look for sure,” he tells CBS 13. “I was kind of nervous about it; I didn’t know what was going on so I just wanted to get evidence in case anything happened.”

He says his mother saw it the day before in a Walmart parking lot. Then it was on her street.

“It had handprints in red and it almost looked like—I think it was supposed to look like blood honestly; it just looked like the handprints were dripping down,” she said. “It just felt like they were trying to track kids and it just gave me a creepy feeling.”

A neighbor reveals she painted the van that way for her journey to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

“It was a joke,” Sierra Deblonk claims.

But many parents weren’t laughing.

“It’s nice to know that if was there actually a creepy white van around that people would be taking notice of that,” Deblonk says.