Bunny Man

Also Known As: also the Bunnyman; called only “the Rabbit” in the 1970 newspaper reports
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: An unidentified man in a rabbit costume who accused people of trespassing and swung a hatchet or an axe at their cars and houses, and who grew in the retelling into a killer of children.
Role in Mythos: He is Northern Virginia’s homegrown boogeyman, the figure invoked to keep teenagers away from dark dead-end roads and the railroad underpass that now carries his name.
Relation to Humans: In the documented incidents the Bunny Man threatened people and destroyed property but injured nobody, and the two encounters on record lasted less than a minute each. In the versions teenagers have traded since, he hangs his victims from a bridge, which is why cars still creep down Colchester Road every Halloween.

Shortly after midnight on a Sunday in October 1970, a wooden-handled hatchet came through the right front window of a parked car on Guinea Road in Fairfax County and clattered onto the floorboard in a spray of glass. The man who threw it was wearing a white suit with long rabbit ears. He had come out of the bushes shouting that the car was on private property and that he had its tag number, and the moment the hatchet left his hand he turned and skipped off into the dark. Inside the car were an Air Force Academy cadet named Robert Bennett and his fiancee, in the area for the Air Force and Navy game and parked across the street from his uncle’s house. Neither of them was hurt. An aunt spent part of that night combing broken glass out of the young woman’s hair.

The Washington Post ran the story four days later, and the reporter clearly expected not to be believed, because after the sentence about a man who likes to wear a white bunny rabbit costume and throw hatchets through car windows he added a single word of his own: Honest. Police had the hatchet. They had nothing else.

Eleven days later, at half past ten on a Thursday night, a private security guard named Paul Phillips was watching an unfinished, unoccupied house at 5307 Guinea Road, deep in a new subdivision called Kings Park West, when he found a man standing on the front porch in a furry grey, black and white rabbit suit, holding a long-handled axe. Phillips started talking to him. That, he said afterwards, was when the man started chopping. The axe went into a roof-support pole eight times while its owner explained the situation: all you people trespass around here, and if you don’t get out of here, I’m going to bust you on the head. Phillips walked back to his car for his handgun. The rabbit shouldered the axe and ran for the woods. Six officers answered the call and found a splintered pole and no rabbit at all.

What followed reads less like a manhunt than a slow dissolve. An investigator from the county’s Criminal Investigation Bureau went out to the construction offices, and shortly after his visit somebody there took a telephone call from a man who introduced himself as the Axe Man and complained that tree stumps, limbs and brush were being dumped on his property, and that everything could be made right if they met that night and talked it over. The police set up a stakeout. Nobody came. A woman rang in to say her son knew who the Bunny Man was; the son was eight and had only heard the name at school, from the other children. So had every other child they asked. In March 1971 the investigator wrote that after a very extensive investigation it remained unsubstantiated whether there really was a white rabbit, and marked the case inactive. Two nights is the whole of it.

By then the story had already left the county and stopped needing him. Around Halloween 1970 a University of Maryland student named Patricia Johnson heard it for the first time. Two and a half years later she wrote it up for an introductory folklore class, interviewing thirty-three teenagers across Prince George’s County in Maryland and collecting fifty-four versions from them. They put him in fourteen different places. Eighteen had him chasing or frightening people, usually children, with a hatchet or an axe. Fourteen involved attacks on cars, nine of those on a couple parked in one. Five had him wrecking houses. Only three mentioned a murder at all. One seventeen-year-old said she had picked it up from the television news, and her telling still had the hatchet in it, and the parked couple, and the accusation of trespassing.

After that the body count climbed with the distance. He was being reported in Maryland and the District of Columbia by 1973 and eventually as far south as Culpeper. Versions collected in the 1980s gave him one to three victims, usually children. By the end of the 1990s an account posted to a ghost-story website and signed Timothy Forbes gave him thirty-two, together with a proper origin: inmates escaping during a transfer to Lorton Prison in 1904, one of them, Douglas J. Grifon, murdering his fellow fugitive Marcus Wallster and living wild in the woods afterwards, leaving a trail of half-eaten rabbits strung up under a railroad bridge. The account closed by daring readers to go and confirm it at the Clifton town library.

Almost every specific in it is checkable, and almost every specific in it is false. Fairfax County has never had an asylum. Lorton did not exist in 1904, and when it did exist it belonged to the District of Columbia rather than to Virginia. Neither Grifon nor Wallster appears anywhere in the county’s court records. There is no Clifton town library and there never has been one.

The bridge is innocent too. It is a single-lane railroad underpass on Colchester Road near Fairfax Station, at the end of a dead-end stretch of road, low and damp and narrow enough that the noise of an engine changes pitch as a car goes through. Teenagers were parking there long before anyone attached a rabbit to it, and a legend looking for a haunted place found one already built. A Fox Family Channel programme put it on national television in 2001. By Halloween 2003 county police were barricading the road to keep the crowds off the neighbours’ driveways, and one sergeant, watching carloads arrive from three counties away, called the whole thing Fairfax County’s Blair Witch Project.

What the Bunny Man has instead of powers is a vacancy. He appeared twice, said very little, and left no face behind the ears, and an absence like that invites filling. He travels by rumour, by school yearbook, by a driving instructor killing time on a back road, by television, and he picks up a fresh atrocity at every handoff. His weakness is the archive. Police files, court indexes and a run of old newspaper pages shrink him back down to a young man in a costume who was furious about something, and the historian who did that work, Brian Conley of the Fairfax County Public Library, thinks the something was the bulldozers. All three encounters, the cadet, the guard and the phone call, turn on trespassing and property. Kings Park West alone was more than fifteen hundred houses going up on ground that had been farmland inside living memory, and the county would not adopt a comprehensive land use plan until 1975. Conley allows one other possibility, that a family had recently lost the old man who owned the land the couple were parked beside, and that somebody younger took up his quarrel.

On the one question everybody actually wants answered, the costume, he declines to speculate at all. He wrote that he was not prepared to even hazard a guess.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Bunny Man?

The Bunny Man is a Northern Virginia urban legend about a man in a rabbit costume who attacks people with a hatchet or an axe. He is based on two real incidents in Fairfax County in October 1970, in which a costumed man threw a hatchet through the window of a parked car and later chopped at the porch of an unfinished house. In the versions told since, he became a murderer who hangs his victims from a railroad bridge.

Did the Bunny Man really exist?

A man in a rabbit suit really did appear twice on Guinea Road in Fairfax County in October 1970, reported in the Washington Post and investigated by county police. He was never identified, and in March 1971 the investigating officer wrote that it remained unsubstantiated whether there really was a white rabbit and marked the case inactive. The mass murderer of the modern legend is invention layered on top of those two nights.

What is Bunny Man Bridge?

Bunny Man Bridge is a single-lane railroad underpass on Colchester Road near Fairfax Station, Virginia, which legend says the Bunny Man haunts. It has no documented connection to the 1970 incidents, which happened elsewhere in the county on Guinea Road. It attracts Halloween crowds large enough that Fairfax County police have barricaded the road to protect the residents nearby.

Is the asylum escape story about the Bunny Man true?

No. The widely circulated version claims that inmates escaped during a 1904 transfer to Lorton Prison and that one of them, Douglas J. Grifon, killed a fellow escapee and became the Bunny Man. Fairfax County has never had an asylum, Lorton did not exist in 1904 and belonged to the District of Columbia when it did, and neither Grifon nor the supposed victim appears in the county court records.

What did the Bunny Man look like?

The only detailed description comes from security guard Paul Phillips, who put the man at about five feet eight, 160 pounds, and in his early twenties. On the first night the costume was described as a white suit with long bunny ears, and on the second as a furry suit of grey, black and white with two long ears. Nobody ever described his face.