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CHAPTER 2

Bunny Man Bridge

FAIRFAX STATION

Over the years the story has evolved into a ghost story suitable for parties, camp outs, and any occasion that such tales are exchanged. It was at one such gathering in 1976 that [I] first heard it told…. I never saw the Bunny Man myself, but then I never strayed into the woods at night, especially not near the bridge ….

—Brian A. Conley, “The Bunny Man Unmasked: The Real Life Origins of an Urban Legend”

FOR THE PAST SEVENTEEN YEARS, I have lived about eight miles from what some people have claimed is not just one of the most haunted sites in the country but, according to a 2001 episode of one television show, one of “The Scariest Places on Earth.” Tens of thousands of people live within that radius of it in densely populated Fairfax County, so there is nothing strange there. What I found to be uncanny, however, was that I had never even heard about it until my friend Geoff Weber asked me in late 2007 if it was one of the sites I was planning to cover in this book.

I forgot that conversation until May 2008, when I stumbled across a reference to Bunny Man Bridge online, followed by several more when I started to poke around a bit. At that point I resolved to visit it as part of my fieldwork for this book and to ask Geoff—who is, among other things, a professional magician—if he wanted to accompany me. After all, I figured, it couldn’t hurt to have someone with ostensible influence over the spirit world along on a venture of this sort. And, as he had told me about the site, it seemed doubly appropriate.

A bit of online research prior to our visit yielded a number of Web sites with information about the site, including suggestions that the Bunny Man legend may have even influenced scenes in at least one movie, Donnie Darko, and one video game, “Manhunt.” I found one of these sources—a detailed essay called “The Bunny Man Unmasked”—to be especially significant and unique in a particular way, and not just because it was longer, more detailed, and better written than most. It was written by Brian A. Conley, a historian-archivist with the Fairfax County Public Library system and appears on the section of the Fairfax County government Web site devoted to that organization. This article is, in short, the only material I have found from a governmental source that addresses a possibly haunted site, and the legend behind it, in any sort of a substantive way (the official “Virginia is for Lovers” Web site mentions many sites, but only in a peripheral or inaccurate way).

The roots of the legend are supposed to date as far back as 1908, and it has verifiably been told in the Washington, D.C., area since at least the early 1970s. These tales generally tell of a maniac dressed in a bunny suit, armed with an appropriate weapon (e.g., axe, chain saw, butcher knife), who slays wayward adolescents who cross his path in the course of their disobedience. Perhaps predictably, the killer is often said to be an escapee from an insane asylum, sometimes cited as the Southwestern Virginia Mental Health Institute in the Virginia mountain town of Marion. Animal mutilations are among the additional crimes typically attributed to him.

Bunny Man stories have been set as far south as Culpepper and some versions have spread into Washington, D.C., itself and the adjacent Maryland counties. Year after year, however, the stories consistently come back to the same site, a railway overpass that is widely referred to as Bunny Man Bridge.

A great many of the online references to the bridge are devoted to debunking the legend of the Bunny Man himself. Whether the story is true or not, however, has nothing to do with whether the site is actually haunted. It is certainly possible, for example, that people might have sensed or come to realize that the bridge was haunted and, in the absence of any better explanation, created or appropriated the existing Bunny Man story for these purposes. My desire was not to confirm or refute the urban myth itself but to investigate the site to which it is commonly linked and see if it warrants attention from ghosthunters.

Bunny Man Bridge is often described in online accounts as being in Clifton. When I attempted to run directions from my home to Colchester Road in Clifton, however, the resulting map showed a short, deadend spur of a road that did not cross a railway track. When I ran directions to Colchester Road in Fairfax Station, on the other hand, the map showed me a four- or five-mile-long, north-south road that crossed a railway track near its southern end.

Directions aside, I was pretty much expecting Geoff to serve as our guide during the excursion we planned for the night of June 3, 2008, and to draw upon his memories of the nighttime automotive rambles that had led him to the bridge as a highschooler. And, when he showed up at my house around 9:30 P.M. on that night, he was armed with a handheld GPS unit to reinforce his possibly fuzzy memories of those visits to the bridge more than a decade before.

Unfortunately, I had not passed on to Geoff what I had learned when running directions to the site, and we did not go far up darkened Colchester Road before it ended in someone’s driveway and I realized he had keyed it in as a Clifton location. He reprogrammed the unit, and we followed our new directions, which guided us through the historic town of Clifton and to the Fairfax Station leg of the road.

I distinctly remembered my directions showing a right-hand turn onto the road, so that is the direction we went. It did not seem to get more isolated or creepier, however, and after a few miles Geoff said something did not seem right. After another mile or so the road ended at the intersection with an unmarked highway, and we realized we must have somehow gone the wrong direction. As we turned around and headed back down Colchester Road the way we had just come, both of us reflected that the evening was starting to feel an awful lot like a scene from The Blair Witch Project, and I started to wonder whether we were actually going to find the bridge at all.

“So how do you tell if a place you visit is haunted?” Geoff asked me as we worked our way back up the dark country road.

“Well, there are a lot of ways to tell if it might be haunted” I replied slowly while considering my answer. “Sometimes it is a gradual sort of thing and comes to you at a point after you get home and download and look at your photos, listen to your audio tape, and think over what you experienced. Your mind correlates all the different pieces and a shiver goes up the back of your neck as it just sort of dawns on you that you have spent time in a place that is occupied by ghosts.”

As we passed the point where we turned the wrong way, I realized the mistake I had made, which was based on having approached Colchester Road from the direction opposite from that I had thought. It was, indeed, getting creepier looking, and as the road bore to the left ahead of us, we saw the light-colored concrete of the bridge appear in the darkness. Bunny Man Bridge is not, in fact, really a bridge at all. From our perspective, it was actually a tunnel, and even from the perspective of train traffic it was not a load-bearing structure over a gap but merely a means of allowing road traffic to pass through the railway embankment.

With nowhere safe-looking to park near the north side of the structure, we drove on through it, went up to a spot where we could turn around, and parked at the left side of the road a few hundred feet from the bridge. We then got out of the car, collected our camera, recorder, and flashlights, and moved toward the bridge to examine it.

Graffiti is a perennial concern for the authorities in Fairfax County and, while Geoff remembered the bridge as being rife with such markings in the past, it had been all but stripped of them when we visited. One set of relatively fresh markings near the north entrance was all that we could see as we passed through one end of the one-hundred-foot-long tunnel and out the other.

We took a number of photos and then headed back through to the side where we had parked. It occurred to me at that point that one of the legends linked with the Bunny Man is nearly identical to those associated with “Bloody Mary” stories and movies like Candyman, namely that uttering his name three times while at the bridge will cause him to either appear or otherwise make his presence known. Geoff said he had heard that story as well, and proceeded to make the threefold invocation, pausing between the first and second utterances to ask me what was supposed to happen.

As he finished saying the name for the third time, I was stunned to see a glow appear in the tunnel! It was followed a few seconds later by a Crown Victoria sedan. As it passed by our vehicle, its rack of piercing blue lights began to flash, and it flipped a U-turn and then parked. Its door opened, and a police officer got out.

“So, did you see him?” she said.

“Nope,” I replied. “My friend said ‘Bunny Man’ three times, but then you appeared.”

“Well, maybe I’m the Bunny Man,” she said. I responded by telling her that I certainly hoped she didn’t have a set of rabbit ears and a chain saw in her police cruiser.

She was, in fact, Fairfax County Police Officer Kathryn Schroth, who told us that this was a popular spot for kids to smoke pot, and asked if we were carrying any. We said we weren’t, and explained our presence at the bridge. We chatted with her a few minutes and said we were planning on taking a few more pictures and then leaving. She said we looked “legit” and, after warning us to keep off the embankment itself and the private property at either side of the road, left us to our business.

Geoff and I decided to both try invoking the Bunny Man again, my sense being that interrupting the sequence to say something else might have invalidated the process. (Note that when I see people do things like this in movies I think they are pretty stupid to invite whatever hazards might be associated with such a ritual, but Geoff suggested that legitimate research made it okay).

Nothing seemed to happen. We walked back toward the car and got ready to leave.

Geoff got in the car before me, and, as I opened the driver’s side door to get in, I looked at the bridge once more. I took one more picture of it, and as I did, I heard the distinct snap of a branch in the woods just to my left.

“I think we’ve overstayed our welcome,” I said half-jokingly, and got in the car. We drove through the bridge, back up Colchester Road, and then home.

Other than the feeling of disquiet I had at the very end of our visit to Bunny Man Bridge, I did not get a sense that the site was much more than a place for kids to toke up and for cops to keep an eye on. So when I got home around 11:30 and downloaded my photos, I did not expect that any of them would reveal anything out of the ordinary. And on that account, I was very wrong.

Of the fifty-four pictures I took, more than twenty were simply black, revealing nothing, and about half of the others looked as if they had some merit. Two, however, were significant.

One, taken from the north end of the tunnel, showed at the left of the entrance a very clear, solid-looking, pale blue-green orb of the sort that is frequently taken by ghosthunters to be a manifestation of spiritual energy.

The other was even stranger. It was that last shot I had taken from the south end of the tunnel and showed a whole array of orbs in a variety of sizes that looked as if they were converging on the spot where I was standing. Most of these electronic phenomena were not very resilient, and when I zoomed in on them too much they broke up and became indistinguishable from foliage and other background elements: I probably would have just dismissed them as drops of moisture on my lens if any of my other shots had displayed similar effects. One of them, however, looked very strange to me and was, in fact, unlike any other sort of orb I had ever seen, and so like something else that it made me shudder. I resolved to show it to my wife the next day to see if she would see the same thing I had.

The following day, I asked Diane to take a look at the two images in which I had picked up the anomalies.

“That’s an orb,” she said confidently after scanning the first image and quickly spotting the detail in question. She moved on to the other one, noting the odd, pale orbs and then focusing on the one that had caught my attention.

“It’s a face!” she said, and that shudder ran across my back again, tingling even my face and scalp. And that is, in fact, what it looked like. More substantial than the others, it appeared to be about ten or twelve feet off the ground and to be about the size of a human head. When we zoomed in on it just enough—but not so much it began to pixilate—it looked like a small, pallid face, complete with eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.

Since then, I have opened that photo a few more times, but not often. That is because it bothers me to look at it and because it seems to me that something—the Bunny Man, or whatever it is that haunts that bridge so close to my home—had, in fact, apparently come in answer to our summons and made its presence known to us.