The Bunny Man: Virginia's Axe-Wielding Rabbit Legend

Park under the Colchester overpass near Clifton on a dark night, the way high-schoolers dare each other to every October, and the story insists a figure in a rabbit suit will step out of the dark with a hatchet. Linger too long, cross onto the bridge at midnight, and he will hang you from it. The tunnel is narrow, the trees close in, and the legend has been polished by so many retellings that the details vary with whoever is scaring you.

Strip away the campfire version and something unusual survives: this urban legend has a documented seed. In the fall of 1970, Fairfax County police took reports of a man in a white rabbit costume who threatened people with an axe or hatchet near Clifton, Virginia. In one incident he confronted a couple in a parked car; in another he was seen chopping at the porch post of a house under construction, telling onlookers they were trespassing. The reports were real enough to make the local papers. The man was never identified, and the case simply faded.

How a police blotter became a ghost

What happened next is a case study in folklore forming in real time. The two mundane incidents grew, over decades of retelling, into a mythology. A backstory was invented: an asylum inmate, often named Douglas Griffon, supposedly survived a bus crash while being transferred, escaped into the woods, and lived on rabbits and on the people who wandered near, hanging his victims from the overpass. None of that backstory has any basis in record. There was no such asylum transfer, no such crash, no bodies on the bridge. The name and the biography were grafted on to explain a costume nobody could explain.

The librarian who checked

Much of what is reliably known comes from Brian A. Conley, a historian with the Fairfax County Public Library, who dug into the original 1970 police reports and newspaper coverage and separated the documented incidents from the accreted legend. His work is the reason we can say confidently which parts are on the record and which are pure story. The answer is deflating in the honest way real research usually is: two strange encounters with an unidentified man, and an enormous, ever-growing myth built on top.

Why it keeps growing

The Bunny Man endures because it has the perfect ingredients: a real, unexplained figure; a specific, findable place; and a costume that turns something harmless into something wrong. A man in a rabbit suit with an axe is uncanny in a way a plain attacker is not, which is exactly why the story travels.

The record explains the legend. It is quieter about the original man, who was real, never caught, and never accounted for, and about the visitors who still swear the overpass feels watched. Those are the cases that keep the bridge on the map.

Below, readers have filed their own Bunny Man Bridge experiences and dares, voting each True, Fake, or Not sure. Visit if you must, then decide.