Urban Legend: The Bunnyman

Virginia Urban Legend: The Bunnyman

A video on the Virginia Urban Legend, The Bunnyman

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The Bunny Man Unmasked: THE REAL LIFE ORIGINS OF AN URBAN LEGEND

​INTRODUCTION

​There is a story that a man dressed as a bunny haunts the residential neighborhoods around our nation's capital. Silly as this may sound at first, the Bunny Man has been a fixture of local legend for at least 30 years. By 1973 the so-called "Bunny Man" had been reported in Maryland, and the District of Columbia. His infrequent and widespread appearances tended to occur in secluded locations and usually tell of a figure clad in a white bunny suit armed with an ax threatening children or vandalizing property. By the 1980s the Bunny Man had become an even more sinister figure with several gruesome murders to his credit. Although he has been reported as far south as Culpepper, Virginia. his main haunt has been the area surrounding a railroad overpass near Fairfax Station, Virginia frequented by party goers, the now infamous "Bunny Man Bridge."

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​The True Story Of The Bunnyman, Northern Virginia’s Most Gruesome Urban Legend

On Halloween night, don't go near that bridge in Clifton — you could get snuffed out by the Bunnyman.

The bridge is where I meet journalist Matt Blitz. He heard the Bunnyman legend as a teenager growing up in Fairfax County. The story as he tells it is that in 1904, there was an asylum not far from this bridge. Clifton residents didn’t like the idea of mental patients near their new homes, so they got it shut down, and all the patients were taken by bus to Lorton prison.

“Then the bus swerved and crashed,” Blitz says. “They were able to locate all the inmates that were on that bus, except for one.”

The escaped mental patient was named Douglas Griffon. After the crash, he disappeared. Weeks passed, and rabbit corpses began appearing in the woods. Douglas was apparently eating bunnies to stay alive. This went on for a while.

Then one Halloween night, a group of kids were hanging around the bridge. “They reported seeing some sort of bright light or orb,” Blitz says, “and then in a flash, they’d all been strung up like [the] bunnies — gutted and hanging from this bridge.”

The missing mental patient was, of course, assumed to be the killer.

“And the rumor goes, if you come here on Halloween night at midnight, you’ll end up just like those kids and those bunnies,” Blitz says.

This all sounds unlikely. For one, there was never an asylum in Clifton, and for another, 1904 was an awfully early time for buses to be on the roads. But it’s been said that every urban legend is based on a kernel of truth. And Brian Conley is the guy who set out to find that truth.

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​The genesis of an urban legend

Conley is an archivist for the Fairfax County government. In the 1990s, he worked for the county’s library system as an historian, and people kept coming in and asking if the Bunnyman was real.

“We simply got tired of having to say, ‘I don’t know,'” Conley says.

So Conley started digging, and he found what he calls the Bunnyman legend’s genesis event. Here’s what he discovered: In 1970, a couple was parked in a driveway not far from the train overpass, when they had a terrifying encounter.

“Someone appeared very quickly, yelled something having to do with trespassing, and threw a hatchet at the car,” Conley explains. “They did not get a very good look at the person. … All they really got was ‘dressed in white or light-colored clothing, and may or may not have had something on his head.'”

When the story made the papers, that “something on his head” became bunny ears.

From there, the archivist says, the story started to morph quickly.

Within a few years, children were swapping stories about a man in a bunny suit chasing kids through the woods with a hatchet. The version journalist Matt Blitz heard involved a guy eating bunnies. Like a game of telephone, the story went from one person to another, taking on increasingly imaginative details.

Today, the Bunnyman legend has traveled far beyond Fairfax County. There are Bunnyman T-shirts. Bunnyman beer. And a Bunnyman horror movie franchise.

As Conley’s research on the true story of the Bunnyman has circulated online, some refuse to believe he’s telling the truth.

“There are some people out there that are convinced that the story, as it is told, is true,” Conley says, “and that myself and Fairfax County are trying to cover something up.”

​While it’s fun debunking the Bunnyman legend, Conley says, it’s even more fun to believe it.

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