The Bunny Man: How a Two-Week Scare Became a Bridge Legend (2026)

A folklorist traces the Bunny Man from two documented nights on Guinea Road in 1970 to the railroad underpass he now haunts, and the murders the story added on the way.

What this episode follows

In October 1970, two reports came out of Guinea Road in Fairfax County, Virginia. A man in a white bunny costume threw a hatchet through the window of a parked car. Eleven days later, the same kind of figure was seen chopping at a house under construction on the same road. Police worked the case for months and never identified anyone. 1

The Bunny Man story is what happened after that: how two weeks of odd reports became a monster, a bridge, a Halloween tradition, and a brewery.

What the record actually contains

The two newspaper accounts from October 1970 are the starting point. The Washington Post reported the first incident on October 22, 1970, and the second on October 31, 1970; Conley reproduces both in his study. 1 The case file belongs to the Fairfax County Police Department, where the investigation was closed as inactive on March 14, 1971. 1

The earliest evidence that the story had left the road is a 1973 student paper. Patricia Johnson, a University of Maryland undergraduate, interviewed thirty-three students in Prince George’s County and collected fifty-four tellings of the Bunny Man; only three of them mentioned a murder. Her paper is held in the Maryland Folklore Archive. 1 Conley described that research at a library lecture in 2017, where he dated the legend’s first telling to 1970. 2

Where the barnacles came from

The asylum, the prison transfer, the hanging, and the victims are later additions. Conley checked each one and found no asylum in Fairfax County, no Lorton Prison in 1904, and no matching names in county court records. 1 The version that spread furthest online, posted in 1999 and known as “The Clifton Bunny Man,” added named escapees, dates, thirty-two victims, and a suggestion that readers verify it at the Clifton Town Library. 1

By 2003 the story was drawing crowds to the Colchester Road underpass, and the county was closing the road to parking on Halloween night. 3 That year a Washington Post feature described the legend’s civic life — the driveway signs, the yard decorations, the visitors who arrive because of television — and quoted the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand on why stories like this keep their audience. 4

Present life

The legend is now a local brand. Bunnyman Brewing opened in Burke in 2021 and added a second location in a former prison building at the Lorton Workhouse in 2023. 5 The brewery’s own site tells the legend and prints Conley’s findings beneath it. 6

A note on evidence

This episode separates two things that are usually blended: what was reported in 1970, and what the story became. Conley’s study is the documentation for the first; the newspapers and local reporting describe the second. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s definition of an urban legend describes the category the Bunny Man now belongs to. 7 Folklore researchers describe visiting such a site as legend tripping; a casebook on the practice notes that participants are not only teenagers. 8