Laura Wright 
Urban Legends
“Bunny Man” legends have spread through numerous states, but many people have no idea where the story began. Who was the Bunny Man? Was there ever a real Bunny Man?
The answer is both yes and no.
The legend originated in Fairfax County, Virginia, home of the infamous Bunny Man Bridge. Because so many places now claim versions of the story as their own, tracing the original legend can be difficult. The bridge most closely associated with the tale, as well as the events surrounding it, is located in Clifton, Virginia.
Today, trains cross above the site while motorists pass through the long, narrow tunnel beneath the tracks.
And according to legend, something else may be waiting there.
Who Is the Bunny Man?
Depending upon which version of the story you hear, the Bunny Man is either a murderous lunatic or a vengeful ghost.
One detail remains remarkably consistent: he carries a weapon.
Most accounts describe him wielding an axe, although other versions give him a butcher knife, chainsaw, or some other brutal instrument. He is generally described as being at least six feet tall and dressed in a white rabbit costume.
Sometimes the Bunny Man merely terrorizes people and defaces local buildings. In darker versions of the legend, he murders anyone unfortunate enough to encounter him.
The story became familiar enough that some parents even harnessed the legend for themselves, warning misbehaving children that the “Bunny Man will get them” if they were naughty.
The Asylum Escape Legend
There are nearly as many variations of the Bunny Man story as there are places now claiming the legend. One of the most elaborate versions begins in 1903.
According to the tale, Marcus Wallster and Douglas Griffin were patients in a Fairfax mental asylum. The facility was in the process of transferring its patients elsewhere, and authorities transported those requiring continued confinement to the new Lorton Reformatory.
Wallster and Griffin escaped.
The future Bunny Man had supposedly been institutionalized after murdering his entire family on Easter Sunday.
Griffin is generally a secondary character who is killed soon after the escape. In some variations, however, Griffin himself becomes the Bunny Man while Wallster assumes the secondary role.
The Dead Rabbits
Authorities searched for the escaped men but found no trace of them.
Instead, they discovered the bodies of partially eaten rabbits.
In some versions of the story, the rabbit carcasses had been skinned. Other versions go even further, claiming the fugitives fashioned clothing from the dead animals.
Then one of the men was found.
His body was hanging from the bridge.
According to the legend, the corpse still clutched a crude axe fashioned from a tree branch and sharpened stone. Attached to the body was a note:
“You’ll never find me no matter how hard you try! — The Bunny Man.”
But the deaths supposedly did not end there.
Halloween at Bunny Man Bridge
The bridge became the center of an increasingly elaborate series of Halloween horrors.
Three teenagers were supposedly found hanging from the old bridge the following Halloween. Before being hanged, they had been eviscerated.
Halloween brought more deaths the next year.
Seven teenagers gathered at the bridge. According to the story, six were hanged within seconds. The seventh managed to escape but was so traumatized by what happened that the survivor had to be institutionalized in the Lorton asylum.
Six more teenagers were supposedly killed at the bridge on Halloween in 1943.
Another three were killed on Halloween in 1976.
Then came the story of the Bunny Man’s last known victim.
The Story of Janet Charletier
According to the legend, Janet Charletier visited the infamous bridge with four friends in 1987.
Around midnight, the group walked through the tunnel beneath the bridge. Suddenly, the lights became intensely bright.
Janet looked down and saw the skin on her chest beginning to tear.
She bolted from the tunnel but collided with a hanging body and lost consciousness.
When Janet awoke, her hair had turned white.
According to the story, she now spends her days sitting on a bench in front of her house, staring toward Bunny Man Bridge.
It is a wonderfully gruesome urban legend.
But how much of it actually happened?
The Bunny Man Enters Modern Folklore
The Bunny Man urban legend became publicly recognized during the 1970s, although the story was evidently older.
The first official police report involving a Bunny Man occurred in 1969. By 1970, Fairfax County police had received approximately 50 calls reporting Bunny Man incidents.
That suggests the Bunny Man was already becoming a legend.
Other stories also began accumulating around the mysterious figure. Several versions claim that the Bunny Man murdered two disobedient children. In this variation, he is a hermit who catches the children trespassing and hangs them from the bridge.
A version of the Wallster and Griffin story was even presented on Fox’s Scariest Places on Earth in 2001.
Unfortunately, the elaborate asylum legend is wholly unsubstantiated.
To understand the Bunny Man, the story has to be picked apart carefully to determine what might be true and what belongs entirely to folklore.
Separating the Legend From the Facts
None of the people named in the traditional asylum account ever existed.
There were no mass murders at Bunny Man Bridge. Marcus Wallster and Douglas Griffin do not appear in the records, and there is no record of the mental facility supposedly located in Clifton or Fairfax County.
There is another major problem with the chronology.
The legend claims the inmates were transferred to Lorton Prison in 1903, but Lorton did not open until 1916.
The traditional origin story, therefore, cannot have occurred as it is usually told.
This is where the Bunny Man mystery enters a more interesting gray area.
Could Another Institution Have Inspired the Story?
Although the asylum described in the legend apparently did not exist, there were places in Fairfax County that might have been used to hold people who were eventually destined for an asylum or other institution.
One possibility is Ivakota Farm.
Ivakota opened in 1904 and remained in operation until the latter decades of the twentieth century. It housed single and unwed mothers as well as female criminals, and it is suspected that some of the women confined there actually belonged in an asylum.
The institution became known more as a home for “wayward girls” than a facility exclusively intended for women.
Facilities of this type have an unfortunate history of abusive staff. That raises an intriguing possibility: if there was an original figure behind the Bunny Man legend, perhaps he was not an escaped patient at all. He could have been a guard, employee, or worker.
Fairfax County also had a poor farm near the railroad tracks, and the area contained a train station during the Civil War.
None of this proves the existence of the Bunny Man.
It does, however, provide the sort of historical landscape from which legends can grow.
The Murder of Eva Roy
The supposed victims of the Bunny Man may also have been influenced by genuine crimes committed in the area.
One occurred in 1918.
Fourteen-year-old Eva Roy helped tend her father’s cattle. On the morning of August 8, 1918, she went out to assist with the herd.
Eva did not return home that evening.
Her body was discovered the following morning. She had been tied to a tree using her own apron strings.
Her murder was never solved.
The Murders of Loretta and Catherine Ridgeway
Another horrifying crime occurred on the evening of March 4, 1927.
Minnie Ridgeway was at home with her two young daughters, seven-year-old Loretta and five-year-old Catherine, when Louis Boersig broke into the house.
Boersig beat Minnie until she lost consciousness and then bludgeoned the two little girls.
Both children died.
Minnie survived the attack and was able to identify their killer.
Louis Boersig was eventually executed in the electric chair on July 7, 1927.
The Murder of Frances and June Holober
Another tragedy occurred in February 1949.
Frances Holober was traveling with her eight-month-old daughter, June. The following day, mother and child were discovered in a shallow grave.
Frances had been beaten and shot in the chest and head.
Her infant daughter had been buried alive and suffocated.
Frances’s husband, Charles Holober, was apprehended and confessed to the crime. He was subsequently ruled insane and institutionalized.
Was There Ever a Real Bunny Man?
The elaborate story of escaped asylum inmates, rabbit carcasses, Halloween massacres, hanging teenagers, and Janet Charletier cannot be substantiated.
Yet the Bunny Man did not emerge from a historical vacuum.
Fairfax County had institutions, poor farms, railroad lines, unsolved murders, terrible crimes, and eventually genuine reports involving someone identified as the Bunny Man. Over time, real history may have become tangled with rumor, local fears, and increasingly elaborate storytelling.
Perhaps the legend began with nothing more than a strange encounter.
Perhaps genuine crimes were gradually absorbed into the story.
Or perhaps there really was an individual whose behavior provided the first grain of truth from which everything else grew.
We may never know why the Bunny Man wears a rabbit costume.
And we may never know who, if anyone, the original Bunny Man really was.
Bunny Man Trivia
Fans of Donnie Darko may be amused by a possible connection. The film features a sinister spirit named Frank who appears dressed as an evil rabbit.
Writer and director Richard Kelly is a Virginia native.
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