Who was the Bunny Man of Fairfax County, Virginia
At 6498 Colchester Road in Fairfax County, Virginia you’ll find a seemingly ordinary one-lane concrete tunnel. In any other state, in any other county, on any other road; this overpass, once known as Colchester Bridge, would go as unnoticed as the ground below it.
But here, in Fairfax County, stop by on the wrong night and you might find yourself face-to-face with an ax-wielding individual in a bunny costume. One with a hunger for blood and for the desire to hang its victims from the bridge under which it stands.
PART 1 - The Legends of the Bunny Man
“Last night I saw upon the stairs a little man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. Oh, how I wish he’d go away…”
William Hughes Mearns
The Heartbroken Hunter Version
Our first story begins in the mid-1800s when the town of Clifton, Virginia was just getting its feet off the ground. At the time, the civil war had taken its toll on the population creating a challenging environment for many. Due to this, it wasn’t uncommon for many to leave home for hours at a time to hunt just to supply their family with food.
One day a man kissed his wife and child goodbye and went out to hunt for that day's meal. After several hours he returned expecting to find everything just as he had left it, but to his shock, he was greeted with the mutilated bodies of his wife and child.
In a panic, he got in touch with the local sheriff and after some investigating, the sheriff came up empty-handed. This led him to believe the man himself had murdered his wife and child. Despite his denials, he was arrested.
The mental toll of losing his family and being accused of the horrific crime was too much for the man and he was placed in a mental institution. Still, he vowed to escape and get his revenge on those who came his way.
Escape
Sometime later he fulfilled his first promise and escaped the institution returning to the town. But word spread quickly of a violent killer escaping the mental institution so the man was forced to hide out in the woods, ending up near the bridge.
As the days went on, he hunted rabbits eating their insides and using their skin as clothing. Locals found eviscerated rabbit carcasses around the woods, hanging off the branches of trees, and seeing this, they gave him the nickname, “the bunny man.”
Soon the interest in this bunny man led children to want to witness the crazed individual themselves. But when these children began disappearing, the local sheriff was asked to investigate.
Upon arriving at the bridge the sheriff was met with a horrific yet familiar sight. Hanging from the trees and parts of the bridge were the dead bodies of the children. Mutilated in the same fashion the man’s wife and child had been years before.
The laughter of the bunny man caught the attention of the sheriff who was just in time to watch the bunny man meet his end from an oncoming train ending his life but, not the legend.
It’s said to this day, you can still hear the bunny man’s laughter through the trees near the overpass. And if you look close enough you can see the marks the ropes used to hang the bodies of the children left on the overpass itself.
Escaped Mental Patient Version
The second story of the bunny man takes place in the early 1900s. There is said to have been an insane asylum buried deep in the woods of the Clifton wilderness.
After the civil war, many people began building a town in Clifton. As the population grew they enjoyed their picturesque way of life and the beauty their town had grown into. The only thing that kept the townsfolk up at night was the nearby insane asylum.
In 1903 a petition was signed to move the patients in the asylum to one much farther away at what eventually became the Lorton Reformatory. The petition passed and in 1904 the patients were packed into a bus to be driven there.
Moments into the drive the bus driver lost control of the bus and smashed into a tree, though many were injured those that weren’t, escaped the bus running into the woods. Police arrived hours later searching for the men missing.
Douglas J. Grifon
After four months the police had found all except two, Marcus A. Wallster and Douglas J. Grifon. During their search, they kept coming upon the dismembered, half-eaten bodies of rabbits. In some cases, they were strung up on trees as if to showcase the killer’s work.
For some reason, the local townsfolk attributed “the bunny man” nickname to Marcus, believing he killed and ate the rabbits found in the woods. The police started to give up hope in finding the men, believing they had fled the area. But during a search of the bridge, they found the body of Marcus skinned and half-eaten.
It was here the police and townsfolk realized the true bunny man was Douglas J. Grifon. The police searched for several more days but after finding no more dismembered bodies of bunnies, or any other clues that Douglas was still in the woods, they ended their search.
The Bunny Man Returns
Three months later, in April of 1905, the townsfolk began finding dismembered bodies of dead rabbits all throughout the town. Fear of the bunny man spread through the town followed by reports of a man in white clothes lurking in the dark.
But as the months went on and no one was hurt or attacked, the fears faded yet again. On Halloween 1905, several kids went out drinking and hung around near the bridge where the body of Marcus had been found.
Around midnight, all but three had left, and by morning those three would wish they had joined their friends. As the sun rose, their bodies were found hanging from the bridge, throats slashed, and their bodies gutted for all to see.
From then on the bridge became known as the Bunny Man’s Bridge.
Another Killer?
A year later in 1906, the legend of the bunny man garnered the interest of local teenagers. A group of seven including Adriana Hatala decided to visit the bridge on Halloween night for fun. Adriana was wary of staying under the bridge at midnight and tried to convince the others to leave but they all refused thinking the legend was just that, a legend.
As midnight approached Adriana left her friends for her own safety but after a few feet, a light above the bridge caught her eye. She could see what looked like a man holding a light walking towards the bridge from the top while her friends stood chatting away in the overpass.
Before she knew it, the man and the light were above her friends and a flash blinded her. As her eyes adjusted she heard shrieking and horrific cries. When she could finally see, she caught the last few moments of their bodies being hung from the bridge, swaying lifelessly in the dark.
She ran home as fast as she could but told no one as the shock had rendered her mute. The townsfolk put the story together the next day, but as there had been no evidence that the bunny man was still around the town in the last year, they believed her to be the killer.
Adriana was charged with the six murders and placed in the insane asylum.
A Cursed Bridge
The town was quiet for the next few years and they believed the horrific deaths were all over, until 1913 when the bodies of nine teenagers were found murdered in the same way, hanging from the bridge on Halloween night.
The town knowing they had made an error charging Adriana, dropped her sentence but it was too late. Adriana had been affected from the last 7 years in the institution and lost her mind. She died in 1953 still in the asylum, the cause of death was listed as “shock while sleeping”.
Murders under the bridge would continue to happen for years to come, on Halloween of 1943 six teenagers were found dead. In 1976, three more. In 1987 four more dead, with one catatonic witness.
Legend says if you take a walk to the bunny man’s bridge on Halloween night and you see a dim light walking the tracks above the bridge, that’s the soul of the bunny man waiting and hoping for victims to enter the tunnel below him.
Those were the two most prominent legends about the bunny man but seeing as they both share similarities they both can’t be true, right?
PART 2 - Unraveling the Terror
“Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up”
Joe Hill, from the novel "Horns”
Legends and scary stories are fun and interesting to listen to, some even have a lesson to learn or a warning to heed but, the two stories above seem to be only built to scare.
Let’s break down what’s true and false in the story before we can determine what really built the story of the bunny man.
The Hunter
The first story seems pretty hard to disprove at first glance but also makes it hard to believe. The man in question has no name; his wife and child are also not given a name, therefore, making it difficult to say if they really existed.
The town of Clifton was established after the civil war for a railroad siding that was built there for the Orange and Alexandria Railroad to make it easier to deliver supplies to the Union Army.
With the land being cleared of trees and wood it was then used to build up a settlement, but it wasn’t incorporated fully as a town until March 9th, 1902. Meaning no real town existed in the mid-1800s or at least not one to have its own sheriff.
Mental Institution
There actually wasn’t a mental institution anywhere near Clifton, the closest mental institution at the time the story allegedly happened was the Central State Hospital, back then known as the Central Lunatic Asylum, a hundred and twenty-five miles away.
This also disproves the second predominant legend of the bunny man. Especially since there are no records of an insane asylum transferring their patients in 1904 to what eventually became known as the Lorton Reformatory.
Another piece of evidence against that specific piece of the story is the Lorton Reformatory wasn’t built until 1910, 6 years after the story takes place.
Real People?
And as far as the two main characters in the second story? There are no records of Marcus A. Wallster or Douglas J. Grifon. No matter how you search for the names, birth, death, or other records, all seem to be linked only to the bunny man legend, and none point to them being real people who existed.
There are also no records of a group of kids being killed and strung up on the bridge in any of the years listed in the stories.
As well as, no record of Adriana Hatala anywhere in the Virginia death records. I tried different variations of the name as some stories have her name being Adrian Hatala, yet no variation gave me records of her death or even existence.
Other Versions
It seems to me as the stories of a bunny man spread more and more people started adding their own little flair to the stories. Adding pieces, people, and events that they knew others would go check, which is what all urban legends really are.
In researching the legend of the bunny man, I found plenty of variations to the stories we went over, some are a mix of the two. Some say the bunny man was given the name because he murdered his family on Easter.
Some variations say it was Douglas who killed his family after the civil war and was placed in an insane asylum, never once mentioning Marcus. While other variations place the stories in the mid-1900s instead of the late 1800s or early 1900s.
So that’s it, Bunny Man never existed and this has all been urban legend after urban legend about a creepy overpass in the woods… right?
PART 3 - The True Mystery
“Hell is empty. All the devils are here.”
William Shakespeare, from the “The Tempest”
In researching this legend I didn’t expect to find a true story. I believed it was all just an urban legend, instead what I found was a mystery that spawned a myth.
The Real Bunny Man
The true story of the Bunny man comes from the hard work of Fairfax County Archivist Brian Conley who after years of responding, “We don’t know where the legend comes from.” took it upon himself to do extensive research into the legend.
In 2002 he published a paper laying out the truth of what actually led to the creation of the urban legend.
Here is the true story of the Bunny Man:
On the cold evening of October 18, 1970, Air Force Academy cadet Robert Bennett and his fiancée were sitting in a car on the 5400 block of Guinea Road near the home of Bennett’s uncle.
The hour was closing in on midnight near Bennett’s uncle’s home when a man dressed in, what appeared through the darkness to be a grey or white suit, walked out from the woods. Bennett claims the man had what appeared to be bunny ears on his head.
But what Bennett didn’t notice at first was the wooden hatchet the man carried in one hand. The man yelled at the couple, screaming they were trespassing on private property.
The couple, clearly shocked, didn't react at first but then the man lifted his arms with the hatchet above his head and threw it with such force it smashed through the front window.
Neither were hurt but they quickly reversed leaving the crazed man and watching as he disappeared into the woods.
But that wasn’t the last sighting. Two weeks later on October 30th, people began reporting seeing a man in a bunny costume hacking away at a newly built house on Guinea Road just a block away from the original sighting.
A private security guard Paul Phillips spotted the man standing on the front porch of one of the homes. He approached him asking what he was doing. The bunny man began hacking at the pole of the porch in front of him yelling “All you people trespass around here. If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to bust you on the head.”
Paul turned around to get the weapon out of his car but when he turned around the bunny man was gone and caught a quick glimpse of him running into the woods.
Investigation
The Fairfax County police conducted an investigation into the events looking for a male possibly in his late teens or early 20s with a bunny costume but, weren’t able to turn up anything conclusive. Eventually, the police deemed the case inactive.
Since then there haven’t been any other sightings or clues as to who was the bunny man. As for the bridge, he was never seen near or around the bridge but the underpass of that bridge has always been a hangout spot for kids and a bit creepy.
Some speculate with the urban legend of the bunny man growing, someone took the creative license to incorporate the bridge into the legend.
Theories of who was in the costume are far and few between as there are no clues or leads. Was it a man who owned some property nearby? Someone angry at the new development happening in his town?
It’s a mystery that might never be solved but if he was a 20-year-old back in 1970, he might still be around today and the bunny man just might make another reappearance this Halloween.
