About This Episode
THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN
Episode Three: Midnight at the Overpass
By the 1990s, everybody in Northern Virginia seemed to know the rules.
Drive out to Bunny Man Bridge after dark. Wait until midnight. Turn off the headlights. Say his name three times. Maybe get out of the car. Maybe come on Halloween. Nobody could agree on exactly how you summoned the Bunny Man, but that hardly mattered.
Because everybody agreed that if you stayed beneath that railroad bridge long enough, something would happen.
In the final chapter of our three-part investigation into The Bunny Man, we follow one of America's strangest urban legends through its most important transformation. What began with two reported encounters with a rabbit-costumed stranger in Fairfax County in October 1970 eventually became something teenagers could actually participate in.
This week, we head back beneath the railroad tracks outside Clifton, Virginia, during an era when American suburbia was developing some very particular nightmares of its own. Stranger danger was reshaping childhood. Parents inspected Halloween candy for razor blades and poison. The Satanic Panic warned that secret cults might be hiding behind otherwise ordinary American life, while a new generation of slasher movies discovered that the safest-looking suburbs made particularly effective places for monsters.
The Bunny Man fit right in.
His rabbit costume corrupted something associated with childhood innocence. His axe gave him the silhouette of a horror villain. Better still, you didn't need to travel into some remote wilderness to find him.
You needed a car, a few friends and enough nerve to drive into the woods.
Folklorists call it legend tripping: traveling to a supposedly haunted place specifically to test the story. Haunted railroad crossings, Crybaby Bridges, cemeteries, abandoned houses and mirrors capable of summoning Bloody Mary all operate on variations of the same brilliant idea. They don't merely give you a monster to believe in.
They give you something to do.
Bunny Man Bridge became one of those places. Every group of teenagers who drove beneath the tracks created another opportunity for reality to misbehave. A deer moving through the woods became a person. A branch became a weapon. A reflection became a pair of eyes. Then a freight train thundered overhead, somebody screamed, and by Monday morning four people remembered the same ten seconds four different ways.
Then the internet arrived.
The Bunny Man had spent decades traveling through newspapers, playgrounds, school buses, parties and word of mouth. Home computers and dial-up connections suddenly removed geography from the equation. The abandoned asylum could be repeated from website to website. An escaped inmate could acquire a name, a biography and a body count. Eventually, repetition itself began impersonating evidence.
That makes the Bunny Man an important creature in the evolution of The New Monsters. He wasn't born online like Slender Man, and he wasn't collaboratively constructed on the internet like the Backrooms.
The internet didn't create the Bunny Man. It inherited him.
But before we leave Fairfax County, we return to the question buried beneath more than half a century of mythology:
Who was actually inside the bunny suit?
Strip away the asylum. Strip away the escaped inmates, mutilated rabbits, murders and supernatural bridge rituals, and two reported incidents remain. In October 1970, witnesses described a rabbit-costumed figure carrying weapons and angrily complaining about trespassing. During the first encounter, a hatchet reportedly came through the window of a car. Ten days later, a similarly dressed person was reportedly encountered near an unfinished house, again armed and again furious about trespassers.
Was it an elaborate Halloween prank that escalated? An attempt to frighten people away from private property? Someone angry about the relentless development transforming Fairfax County around him?
All are possibilities.
None is an answer.
More than half a century later, the person beneath those rabbit ears remains unidentified. And perhaps that's why the Bunny Man survives so well. Remove the supernatural mythology and the story doesn't become ordinary.
The strange part was there from the beginning.
A newspaper story became a playground story. The playground story acquired a bridge. The bridge acquired an asylum. The asylum acquired escaped inmates and murders. Teenagers turned the bridge into a pilgrimage site, and eventually the internet gathered every version into a sprawling digital mythology.
No single person created the Bunny Man we know today.
Thousands of people did.
NEXT TIME ON THE NEW MONSTERS
THE LOVELAND FROGMAN
Next time, we're heading west to Loveland, Ohio, where another distinctly American monster emerged along the Little Miami River.
The story begins with a murky 1955 account involving several short, upright creatures reportedly encountered near the river—one of them, wonderfully, supposedly holding something resembling a wand or metal rod that produced sparks. Then, in March 1972, a Loveland police officer reported encountering a strange leathery animal near the roadway.
Another officer would soon encounter something as well.
And this time, he shot it.
Decades later, that officer would insist the famous Frogman wasn't a monster at all. According to him, he'd encountered a large, tailless iguana, probably someone's escaped exotic pet.
That should have killed the legend.
It didn't.
Next time on The New Monsters: The Loveland Frogman.
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The Bunny Man: Episode Three — Midnight at the Overpass.
Relateret: flere episoder af showet, The New Monsters, The Bunny Man
