Bunny Man

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The "Bunny Man Bridge" in daylight

The "Bunny Man Bridge" at night

The Bunny Man is an urban legend that probably originated from two incidents in Fairfax County, Virginia in 1970, but has been spread throughout the Washington D.C. area. There are many variations to the legend, but most involve a man wearing a rabbit costume ("bunny suit") who attacks people with an axe. Many variations occur around "Bunny Man Bridge", the concrete tunnel of a Southern Railway overpass on Colchester Road in Clifton.^[1] Story variations include the origin of the Bunny Man, names, motives, weapons, victims, description of the bunny suit, and the possible death of the Bunny Man. In some accounts the Bunny Man's ghost or aging spectre is said to come out his place of death each year on Halloween to commemorate his untimely demise. In some accounts, victims' bodies are mutilated.

1 Origin
2 The legend
3 Victims
- 3.1 Debunking the myth
4 Popular culture references
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Origin

Fairfax County Public Library Historian-Archivist, Brian A. Conley, has conducted extensive research on the Bunny Man legend. He has only located two incidents of a man in a rabbit costume threatening people with an axe. The vandalism reports occurred a week apart in 1970 in Burke, Virginia.

The first incident was reported the evening of October 20, 1970 by USAFA Cadet Bob Bennett and his fiancée, Dusty, who were visiting relatives on Guinea Road in Burke. Around midnight, while returning from a football game, they parked their car in a field on Guinea Road to talk. As they sat in the front seat with the car running, they noticed something moving outside the rear window. Moments later the front passenger window was smashed and there was a white-clad figure standing near the broken window. Bennett turned the car around while the man screamed at them about trespassing, including "You're on private property and I have your tag number." As they drove down the road they discovered a hatchet on the car floor.

When the police asked for a description of the man, Bob insisted he was wearing a white suit with long bunny ears, but Dusty remembered something white and pointed like a Ku Klux Klan outfit. They both remembered seeing his face clearly, but in the darkness they could not determine his race. The police returned the hatchet to Bennett after examination. Bennett was required to report the incident upon his return to the USAFA.

The second reported sighting occurred the evening of October 29, 1970, when construction security guard Paul Phillips approached a man standing on the porch of an unfinished home in Kings Park West on Guinea Road. Phillips said the man was wearing a gray, black and white bunny suit and was around 20 years old, 5 feet 8 inches (1.7 m) and weighing about 175 pounds (79 kg). The man began chopping at a porch post with a long handled axe saying "All you people trespass around here. If you don't get out of here, I'm going to bust you on the head." The man then ran into the woods.

Both incidents were investigated by Fairfax County Police. The investigations were eventually closed for lack of evidence. In the weeks following the incidents, over 50 people contacted the police to report sighting the "bunny man". Several newspapers reported the incidents, including the following articles in The Washington Post:

"Man in Bunny Suit Sought in Fairfax" (October 22, 1970)
"The 'Rabbit' Reappears" (October 31, 1970)
"Bunny Man Seen" (November 4, 1970)
"Bunny Reports Are Multiplying" (November 6, 1970)

In 1973, University of Maryland student Patricia Johnson submitted a research paper that chronicled more than four dozen variations on those two events.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] The legend

The legend has circulated for years in several forms. A version naming a suspect and specific location was posted to a web site in the late 1990s by a "Timothy C. Forbes". This version states that in 1904, an asylum prison in Lorton, Virginia was shut down by successful petition of the growing population of residents in Fairfax County. During the transfer of inmates to a new facility, the transport carrying the inmates crashes; some prisoners escaped or were found dead. A search party finds all but one of them.^{[citation needed]}

During this time, locals allegedly begin to find hundreds of cleanly skinned, half-eaten carcasses of rabbits hanging from the trees in the surrounding areas. Another search of the area is ordered and they locate the remains of Marcus Wallster, left in a similar fashion to the rabbit carcasses hanging in a nearby tree or under a bridge overpass—known locally as the "Bunny Man Bridge"—along the railroad tracks at Colchester Road. Officials name the last missing inmate, Douglas J. Grifon, as their suspect and call him "the bunny man".^{[citation needed]}

In this version, officials finally manage to locate Grifon but, during their attempt to apprehend him at the overpass, he nearly escapes before being hit by an oncoming train where the original transport crashed. They say after the train passed the police said that they heard laughs coming from the site. It is eventually revealed that Grifon was institutionalized for killing his family and children on Easter Sunday.^{[citation needed]}

For years after the "Bunny Man's" death, in the time approaching Halloween carcasses are said to be found hanging from the overpass and surrounding areas. A figure is reportedly seen by passersby making their way through the one lane bridge tunnel.^{[citation needed]}

Conley says this version is demonstrably false. Among other inconsistencies, Conley notes that "there has never been an asylum for the insane in Fairfax County" and that "Lorton Prison didn't come into existence until 1910, and even then it was an arm of the District of Columbia Corrections system, not Virginia's." Court records show neither a Grifon nor a Wallster and, writes Conley, "there is not and never has been a Clifton Town Library."^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Victims

In the legend, Bunny Man's purported victims typically are disobedient children or kids that are investigating the legend or behaving mischievously away from adult supervision. Groups are separated from one another and one group that returns to the bridge, seemingly not lost, while no trace of the other group can be found. Upon returning the next day they locate their lost friends hanging from the train bridge overpass with the same modus operandi of the "Bunny Man". Bunny man is said to hang his victims by their necks. These victims are usually taken at night.^{[citation needed]}

One girl, Adrain Hatala, had stayed a good distance from the bridge enough to get away she said she saw a light and then it got dark and saw her friends hanging dead. She was charged with the murders of her friends and later died in an asylum in Lorton from shock.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Debunking the myth

1. There has never been a town library in Clifton, Virginia. There is one in Clifton Forge, but these are not the same towns—or anywhere near each other.^{[citation needed]}

2. There has never been an asylum of any type in Fairfax County, Virginia of which Clifton is a part.^{[citation needed]}

3. Lorton Prison, which is now closed, opened in 1910, as a District of Columbia facility. Versions of the story include it (as an asylum) as early as 1903. Back then it was a wooded, swampy area, not a prison. Today, South County Secondary school, along with a golf course and other things, stand on the property. Portions of the prison's buildings remain, and may be turned into a commemorative museum, depending on whether Fairfax County approves the concept.^{[citation needed]}

4. Many of the referenced incidents cannot be proven, or simply couldn't have happened:

a. The bridge is too high for corpses and rabbit carcasses to "dangle" in front of passing vehicles. It's some 12+ feet from the bottom of the bridge to the top of the pavement below.^{[citation needed]}

b. None of the "attacks" have been recorded in County police records as having been reported and/or investigated. While it is possible bodies may have been located, there's no proof anybody in a "bunny costume" is the perpetrator of anything criminal. Any criminal activity is likely just that—a crime—if it ever happened. Furthermore, any incidents through time—if they happened—are easily explained away as copycats playing upon the story, or the result of an overactive imagination. The story began over 100 years ago, and has been re-told since then, as if it's new or current which is just impossible.^{[citation needed]}

c. Note the stereotypes. Halloween gore and horror, midnight freakiness, dark roads, crimes, and axes, along with the image of a gentle rabbit that's gone mad. These are the red flags we look for when determining whether a story is real or simply a stereotypical legend told to scare people.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Popular culture references

Donnie Darko takes place in the town of Middlesex, Virginia. The film features Frank, an ominous character, dressed in a bunny suit.
The PlayStation 2 video game Manhunt, set somewhere in the Southern United States, features a similar character, a shotgun-toting man in a bunny suit, in the stage "Kill the Rabbit", set in an abandoned insane asylum.
Podcaster Mike Edwards claimed to be the latest incarnation of "Bunny Man" on the October 16, 2007 edition of In My Room. He tells that Cerphe Calwell, an afternoon DJ on 94.7 The Globe, had passed the mantle on to him after years of dressing in a bunny suit and scaring motorists.
In 2006, Luis Larrea, an Art Institute of Washington student, interviewed Brian A. Conley regarding information about the Bunnyman Bridge.^[2]