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 based in Clifton in Fairfax County, Virginia. The stories in the legend can be wide in variance from the origin of the killer, names, transportation changes, the killer's motives, the weapon(s) of choice, the design or color of his bunny suit, and the possible demise of the killer. The killer's ghost or aging spectre is said to come out to the "Bunny Man"'s place of death each year on Halloween to commemorate his untimely demise. Sometimes, victims' carcasses are said to be left in varying states of death, sometimes having been skinned or gutted, and some victims appeared with horns fashioned out of deer antlers or sticks protruding from the heads.

1 The legend
2 Victims
3 Investigations
4 Fallout
5 Popular culture
6 External links
7 References

[edit] The legend

In 1904, a mental institution in Clifton, Virginia, is 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 patients escape or are found dead. A search party finds all but two of them.

During this time, locals 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".

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. It was finally revealed that Grifon was institutionalized for killing his family and children on Easter Sunday.

For years after the "Bunny Man"'s death, in the time approaching Halloween carcasses are found hanging from the overpass and surrounding areas. A figure is said to have been seen or heard by passersby making their way through the one lane bridge tunnel.

[edit] Victims

In the legend, Bunny Man's purported victims typically are disobedient children or young adults investigating the legend or behaving mischievously away from adult supervision. Groups are separated from one another and the group that returns to the bridge, seemingly not lost, leaves the other members of the group to be stranded without transportation as a joke. 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".

[edit] Investigations

While the legend has circulated for years in several forms, the version naming a suspect and specific location was posted to a Web site in the late 1990s by a "Timothy C. Forbes". Fairfax County Public Library Historian-Archivist Brian A. 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."

Still, Conley persisted with his investigation and learned of two sightings in 1970 of an ax-wielding man in a bunny suit; in one case, the man chopped at a wooden column and threatened the witnesses, while the other had the man throwing the ax through a car window. Police closed the case after identifying only one adult witness and several children having reported seeing someone in a bunny suit. A university student later presented a paper on local legends that chronicled more than four dozen variations on those two events.

[edit] Fallout

Recently, the so-called "Bunny Man Bridge" has been updated with signs that inform people in the area that they are under camera surveillance. During Halloween, county police patrol the area around the bridge to ward off trespassers.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Popular culture

Donnie Darko takes place in Middlesex, Virginia. The film features Frank, an ominous character, dressed in a bunny suit.

The PS2 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.