NOTE: This is the first in a three day series of scary urban legends in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. Unlike our typical journalistic pieces of hard news and fact-based evidence, this is an intentionally tongue-in-cheek presentation based on lore, rumor and innuendo. Enjoy.
WASHINGTON — Reader beware: what you are about to read might give you nightmares.
Just in time for Halloween, we present the Virginia legend of The Bunny Man, the scariest thing with two ears and a sadistic cotton-tailed fiend who’s more Donnie Darko than Harvey.
The legend goes like this.
In 1904, a bus of convicts was traveling from an asylum in Clifton, Virginia to a nearby prison.
When the bus crashed, police managed to catch the escaped convicts — except one.
Read other spooky local legends
As detectives searched for the fugitive in a massive manhunt, they found half-eaten bunnies littered across the woods and rows of hare carcasses hanging from Fairfax Bridge.
Exactly one year later on Halloween night, several teens thought it’d be fun to hang out under the same bridge — a.k.a. “The Bunny Man Bridge” — and were found dead the next morning.
In 1970, police received numerous reports of people being threatened by a man wearing a white suit with bunny ears. He reportedly held an ax, which he threw at some witnesses.
Today, folks claim to see a dead rabbits and a white figure late at night under the bridge.
Legend has it that if you hang out under the bridge on Halloween night, you’ll die, too.
‘Hoppy’ Halloween!
