Had that been the end of it, we might not have the legend of Bunny Man Bridge that we do today. However, just ten days later, another event occurred.

In Kings Park West, also along Guinea Road, a security guard named Paul Phillips was patrolling an under-construction housing development after dark when he came upon a man in a bunny costume who was standing on the front porch of an unfinished home, chopping at the porch post with a hatchet or a long-handled axe.

This time, Phillips emphatically described the man as wearing a “white bunny suit with floppy ears,” as one contemporary newspaper account reported it. When Phillips approached, the man threatened him, “You are trespassing. If you come any closer, I’ll chop off your head.”

What happened next? “The strange figure then turned and hippity-hopped off into nearby woods,” according to an October 31, 1970 press clipping from The Minneapolis Star. Each of these stories on their own might have been quickly forgotten, but the two together—with their unusual shared details: the hatchet, the accusations of trespassing, and the possible bunny costume—were more than enough get an urban legend going.

Nor did it stop there. The Fairfax County Police opened an investigation, and were flooded with more than fifty reports from people who claimed to have seen the “bunny man.” This drew the attention of newspapers from all over the area. Besides the aforementioned Minneapolis Star, other major outlets like the Washington Post ran repeated stories throughout October and into November concerning the Bunny Man, including a claim that he had actually eaten one man’s missing cat.

If a man with an axe in a bunny costume eating a pet cat isn’t enough to get an urban legend going, we don’t know what is. Even in those early newspaper accounts, considerable variation in the tales had already begun.

Indeed, in 1973, just a few years after the incidents themselves, a student at the University of Maryland submitted a research paper in which she counted some 54 variations on the two incidents.

The Bone-Chilling Legend of the Bunny Man Under the Bridge

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