Informant Background:

This informant is a senior at USC in the Naval ROTC program. The daughter of a navy chaplain, she spent a lot of her life traveling. Despite having to move, she still claims she had a every enjoyable childhood and made many lifelong friends because of it. She can easily recount the many games and stories her and her friends would play.

Informant’s Story:

“I used to live in Northern Virginia for a bit, and there was story that always freaked me out, but at the same time really interested me. So there’s this bridge in NoVa [northen Virginia] called “The Bunny Bridge”, Where apparently some escaped mental patients escaped from the local insane asylum. I dont know how he got the stuff that he got, but really that’s not important, just know that he’s a dangerous insane person. Apparently, people started finding mutilated animal corpses along the road, like cats and rabbits. When someone stopped at the bridge to check it out, a crazy guy wearing a bunny costume came out of the woods with a bloody hatchet, yelling at him at him to get off his property, and the person sped off in their car before the bunny man could get to him. Legends says that if you stop at the bunny man bridge you can still be confronted by the bunny man yelling at you to get off his property, while waving a hatchet. I never went there but a lot of people I used to know would go there on Halloween. I was kind of a chicken.”

Analyses:

The legend of the Bunny Man Bridge is incredibly intriguing as it has a large element of possibiliy. Timothy Forbes actually signed a descriptive story that there actually was a local asylum for the criminally insane, in Fairfax Virginia, which was in the process of being shut down. The story goes that in 1904, a bus transferring some convicts crashed, killing all but 10. Eight were caught, but two were still at large at this time; Marcus Wallster and Douglas Grifon. shortly after, locals in the area of the crash reported finding half eaten rabbits being strung up in trees and on the bridge which would later be known as the bunny man bridge. Things took a turn  when the remains of one of the two still missing convicts, Marcus Wallster, hanging in a tree nearby the bridge. It is assumed that the two were traveling together before Grifon turned on his companion. As it turns out, this story and it’s details are false. It is important to note the importance of the fact that a company like Forbes wrote a story like this, however. In writing this story in such a way that it used descriptive details, those local to the area could figure out it was fake, but to those who dont know the are very well, these details provide believably and perpetuates it as a true story. The events that inspired this story, could have been several real accounts in that occured in the 1970. One story is about an Air force cadet and his fiance were parked near the location of the bridge, talking, when a figure shattered the passenger side window. The cadet claims that the the figure was wearing a bunny suit yelling at them to get off his property, to which the cadet  obliged, flooring the car all the way to the police. A hatch was found on the floor of the car where the glass was shattered. This is just one of over 50 accounts that occured in this area in 1970, and adds evidence as to how this legend came to existence.