The Hatchet-Thrower in the Rabbit Suit and His Bridge
The Bunny Man legend has an unusually verifiable starting point. Late on October 19, 1970, Air Force Academy cadet Robert Bennett and his fiancee parked on Guinea Road in Fairfax County when a man in a white rabbit suit burst from the bushes, shouted that they were trespassing, and hurled a hatchet through the front passenger window; the hatchet stayed in the car and became police evidence. Ten days later, on October 29, security guard Paul Phillips found a rabbit-suited man chopping at the porch post of an unfinished house nearby, threatening to take heads if trespassing continued. The Washington Post reported both incidents, and the police investigation closed without a suspect.
Over the next three decades, retelling reworked the hatchet-thrower into a gory ghost story. The dominant version claims that a 1904 asylum transport overturned, that escapee "Douglas Griffon" survived in the woods eating rabbits, and that he hung skinned rabbits — later, trespassers — beneath the one-lane brick railway underpass on Colchester Road in Clifton, now called Bunny Man Bridge, returning each Halloween midnight to hang whoever lingers there. Fairfax County never had such an asylum, and Griffon is pure invention.
Brian A. Conley, historian-archivist with the Fairfax County Public Library, untangled the case in his study "The Bunny Man Unmasked," separating the 1970 police reports from the accreted legend — a model demonstration of how a documented oddity grows a mythology. Police still post officers at the underpass each Halloween to turn away carloads of legend-trippers.
