Scary stories

Bunny Man

This particular creepy folktale originates from Virginia, and while local Virginians are familiar with the story, it is less widely known in other parts of the US.

In 1904, a local mental asylum was shut down due to public outrage – nobody wanted to live near the asylum, and this damaged the reputation of the nearby area and hurt the local economy. The government made arrangements to have the patients in the asylum transferred, but the transfer bus crashed, and some of the inmates managed to escape into the forest, while others died at the scene. As the authorities acted quickly, tracking down all of the escaped patients except for two – Marcus Lawster, and Douglas Griffen. As the search continued, the locals who lived in the area began to find the carcasses of rabbits on the ground, and hanging from trees. These rabbits were skinned, and some of them seemed to have been partially consumed by whoever killed them.

The authorities eventually tracked down Marcus Lawster – or what was left of him. The corpse of Lawster was found in similar condition to the rabbits – hanging from a tree at at the entrance of a tunnel under a bridge. The police eventually did track down the killer, but he was hit by an oncoming train as he tried to escape the authorities. The killer was the other missing inmate – Douglas Griffen – and it was eventually revealed that he had been committed into the mental asylum because he had killed his own wife and children on Easter Sunday. The bridge was nicknamed The Bunny Man Bridge by locals, and the name persists today.

This is another urban legend that becomes creepier as you read around the subject. The bridge in question, actually called the Colchester Overpass, is still referred to as the Bunny Man Bridge by locals – and for a good reason. If there weren't any continued reports of strange activity in and around the Overpass, it is unlikely the original story would have survived this long. In 1970, there were reports of Virginians coming across a violent and aggressive man dressed in a bunny costume and wielding an axe. There were numerous reports of this occurring both before and after Halloween in 1970.

Throughout the years, there have been a number of reported sightings of this strange, axe-wielding man in a bunny costume in Virginia, and apparently there have been sightings as far away as Washington D.C.