Posted by The Bunny Man is a Virginia urban legend: a man dressed as a rabbit who kills with an axe near the Colchester Overpass in Clifton. The story of the asylum and the escaped patient Douglas Grifon is made up, but in October 1970, in Burke, a man in a rabbit costume really did threaten people with an axe on two occasions. He was never identified.
The Bunny Man is an American urban legend that has been going around for a few decades. But is there any truth to it?
The legend of the Bunny Man
The Bunny Man legend has existed for some decades, but it appeared online in the late ’90s. It was posted by a “Timothy C. Forbes”, who told it like this.
In 1904, in the town of Clifton, Virginia, residents signed a petition to close a criminal asylum near the town. The petition was granted and the inmates were transferred so that the building could be demolished.
During the transfer, one of the vehicles crashed. The driver and some patients died, while others managed to escape. Within a short time police recaptured all the fugitives but one.
In the following days the people of Clifton made strange discoveries: rabbit carcasses began to appear on some trees near a railway underpass. The patient police never found was named Douglas J. Grifon, and after these discoveries he was nicknamed “The Bunny Man”.
In this first version of the legend the Bunny Man is found by police but escapes. During the chase, though, he is hit head-on by a train. After his death the reason he was in a criminal asylum is revealed: Grifon had killed his family and some children on Easter Day.
Although this story is made up (there was never a criminal asylum in Clifton, only a prison set up in 1910, and no inmate there was called Douglas J. Grifon), the Bunny Man legend has become famous even outside the United States.
But where does this bizarre story come from?
The Bunny Man attacks of 1970
Fairfax County Public Library historian and archivist Brian A. Conley researched the legend thoroughly and found two real incidents, in 1970 in Burke, Virginia, in which a man dressed as a rabbit threatened people with an axe.
The first dates to the evening of 19 October 1970. Robert Bennett, an Air Force Academy cadet, and his fiancée were visiting relatives on Guinea Road. Around midnight, returning from a football game, they parked in a field near an uncle’s house and stayed in the car with the engine running.
Suddenly they noticed something moving behind the rear window. A moment later a man “dressed in a white suit with long bunny ears” ran out of the bushes and started shouting:
You’re on private property and I have your tag number!
Then he threw a hatchet through the passenger window, shattering it, and ran off. The two fled unharmed, with the hatchet still on the floor of the car.
When police asked for a description of the attacker, Bob insisted he was wearing a white suit with two long rabbit ears. His fiancée, however, remembered a pointed white hood, like those worn by the Ku Klux Klan. Both said they saw his face clearly, but in the dark they could not tell his race. Police examined the hatchet, but with no other leads the case was closed.
The second sighting
The second incident happened on the evening of 31 October 1970, Halloween night. Paul Phillips, a security guard at a building site in Kings Park West, also on Guinea Road, saw a man standing on the porch of an unfinished house.
He was wearing a grey, black and white rabbit costume, was about twenty years old and about 1.73 metres tall. Phillips approached and started talking to him, and that is when the man began chopping at a porch post with a long-handled axe, shouting:
You’re trespassing. If you come any closer, I’ll chop off your head!
Phillips ran to his car to get his gun, but when he came back the “rabbit” had vanished into the woods.
In the following weeks more than 50 people called the police saying they had seen the Bunny Man. The Washington Post ran several articles on the case, even reporting that the Bunny Man had eaten someone’s cat. A construction worker said he had been phoned by an “Axe Man” who accused him of dumping logs and branches on his property and asked to meet him that night. Police staked out the site, but the man never showed up. The Bunny Man was never identified.
The Bunny Man today
Today the urban legend tells of a madman dressed as a rabbit who kills passers-by with an axe near a bridge: the Colchester Overpass, a railway underpass near Clifton now known to everyone as the “Bunny Man Bridge”. According to some versions, every Halloween the Bunny Man’s ghost returns to the place where he died, and the bridge has become a destination for the curious and for ghost hunters.
The legend became so famous that in 2011 it inspired the film “Bunnyman” (with the sequel “Bunnyman Massacre” in 2014).
🦋 Emadion lives through its readers. If this story kept you up at night, buy me a coffee: it helps me bring you the next nightmare.
☕ Support Emadion on Ko-fi
