The story of the Bunny Man of Fairfax County in Northern Virginia is one I’ve been hearing about for many years. There’s a few different variations and tales, but we’ll try and bring you what we’ve heard that seem to be the most common of these tales.
Sometime around 1904, a bus transporting prisoners from an asylum crashed, and all of the inmates escaped. The local police were able to capture all but two of them. They were named Marcus Wallster and Douglas Grifton.
During the hunt for the two men, the police found the half-eaten bodies of nearly a dozen rabbits. Eventually, they found Marcus Wallster’s body at a railway bridge. This bridge later became known as the Bunny Man Bridge. Wallster’s body was cold and stiff, but the police noticed he was holding something in his hand with a tight grip—it was a hatchet.
About a year or so later, on Halloween night, a group of teenagers were said to be seen hanging out at the Bunny Man tunnel. They never returned that night, and their bodies were supposedly found strung up on the bridge looking like they had been hacked up by a hatchet. It’s also said that a similar incident happened a few years later. After this, the locals began to avoid the area. One of my listeners even said that, as far as he knows, the police still block off access to the bridge on Halloween.
Years later in 1970, a young couple parked outside a family member’s house one night, very close to the Bunny Man Bridge. They claimed to see something moving in the rearview mirror. Before they could get out of the car, there was a loud crash and a man shouting at them that they were on private property. The man floored it out of there and went to the police. Where they later found a hatchet in the car. The couple said the man looked to be wearing a white outfit with what looked like a hood or bunny ears.
Just a few weeks later, right before Halloween, only a few blocks away, a construction security guard was out on patrol. He came up on a man wearing, what he described as, a gray or white bunny suit on a front porch. The man in the bunny suit told the security guard he was trespassing and that if he came any closer he’d hack off the security guard’s head. He then pulled out a hatchet and began chopping away at the wooden post on the porch. The security guard ran to get a weapon, but the man was gone when he got back.
Sometime after this sighting, the construction company working in the area got a call from someone claiming to be the Bunny Man. He said that if they did not stop leaving trash and materials on his land that he was going to visit them personally to hack them up. The police were called, but the man or entity was never found.
This story came from one of our viewers:
Hi Spooky Appalachia, I saw your post asking for Bunny Man stories. I lived in Fairfax as a kid in the ’90s. One fall afternoon, I was walking home from school when I passed someone walking down the street in a Bunny Man suit. I would like to say the story ended there, but it didn’t. I kept noticing out of the corners of my eyes they were behind me. When I would turn around, they were just standing there staring. Eventually I realized they were following me, so I ran the rest of the way home and locked the apartment door. I never saw the person again, thank God! I don’t know if it was a person in a suit just trying to copy the popular legend or if it was the ghost of the Bunny Man that people talk about.
To this day, people in Fairfax and all over the area still talk about the Bunny Man. Some believe it’s a ghost, others a cryptid, or even just a legend.
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