Bunny Man at Halloween: What the 1970 Police Files Say

On the eve of Halloween, one of America’s most-told cryptid stories has a feature that almost none of the others do: it starts in a police file. The Bunny Man, said to haunt a railroad overpass near Clifton, Virginia, grew out of two real incidents in Fairfax County in October 1970. This week the Fairfax County Public Library updated its historian’s detailed research page on the case (marked Oct. 29, 2026), and the Baltimore Banner ran a “Spooky Maryland” feature on the legend’s Baltimore-area versions on Oct. 25. Here is what the records say and what the legend added. Our Bunny Man field guide has the full entry.

What the 1970 record shows

According to the library research by Fairfax County historian-archivist Brian A. Conley, the first incident came shortly after midnight on Sunday, Oct. 18, 1970. Air Force Academy cadet Robert Bennett and his fiancée were parked on the 5400 block of Guinea Road in the Burke area when a man in a white bunny-style costume ran out of the bushes. Bennett told police the figure said, “You’re on private property and I have your tag number,” then threw a wooden-handled hatchet through the car’s right front window. Neither was hurt, and police recovered the hatchet. The Washington Post reported it on Oct. 22 under the headline “Man in Bunny Suit Sought in Fairfax.”

The second incident came on Oct. 29, at about 10:30 p.m. A construction security guard named Paul Phillips told police he found a figure on the porch of an unoccupied new house at 5307 Guinea Road. “I started talking to him and that’s when he started chopping,” Phillips said, according to the library research. The man whacked eight gashes in a porch pole, the page says, and reportedly complained that “all you people trespass around here.” When Phillips went back to his car for his handgun, the figure ran into the woods. Six officers responded, and Phillips described the man as about 5 feet 8 inches tall, roughly 160 pounds and in his early 20s.

The investigation went nowhere. Per the library page, police set up a stakeout after a caller claiming to speak for “the Axe Man” asked to meet, but no one showed. A March 14, 1971 summary by police investigator William L. Johnson, quoted on the library page, said it “is still unsubstantiated as to whether or not there really is a white rabbit,” and the case was marked inactive. No one has ever publicly come forward as the Bunny Man, Washingtonian reported in 2015. Conley has floated, as theories only, that a younger relative of a landowner who had died a year or two earlier might have taken up his cause (Washingtonian), or that the man was “disturbed by the development of the area” (library page); nothing in the file confirms either.

How a trespassing scare became a horror story

The legend most people know is far larger than those two reports. A University of Maryland student, Patricia Johnson, collected the story in 1973 for a folklore class and recorded 54 variations from 33 Prince George’s County students aged 15 to 18, according to the library. Only three mentioned a murder. A widely shared website version from about 1999 added an escaped asylum inmate, a prison-bus crash in 1904 and a string of killings under a railroad bridge. Conley checked each claim. The library page says Fairfax County never had an insane asylum, that Lorton Prison opened after the date the story uses, that neither named person appears in county court records, and that no Clifton library ever existed. He reviewed more than 550 mentions of killings in local newspapers from 1872 to 1973 and found none that were likely candidates.

The bridge itself, a railroad overpass on Colchester Road near Fairfax Station, is not where either 1970 incident happened; both were on Guinea Road in the Burke area. Conley told Washingtonian he thinks it was a local teen party spot and a creepy-looking structure that got folded into the story. A 2001 episode of Fox Family’s “Scariest Places on Earth” gave the legend wide recognition, according to the library.

Halloween at the overpass

The visitors have a long record. The Connection Newspapers reported that on Halloween 2003, Fairfax County police barricaded the Colchester Road segment off Fairfax Station Road and did not allow roadside parking, while still letting people walk down to the bridge. “Every Halloween people do venture down there in large groups,” Sgt. Jeff Gossett of the Fairfax County Police told the paper. “It’s a concern to the neighbors.” He also said flatly, “This is an urban legend.” Residents live along the road, so check current local guidance before visiting. By 2015, Washingtonian reported, the town of Clifton had “fully embraced the legend with T-shirts and a haunted Halloween attraction.”

The Maryland version

The Banner found that the Bunny Man took on a life of his own in Baltimore. Reggie Graves, now 52, told the paper that he and friends cut through Hanlon Park in West Baltimore in the late 1980s, spotted a man in the woods, assumed it was the Bunny Man, threw rocks and sticks and ran. “We thought we had escaped the Bunny Man,” he said. The article does not cite any police report of a costumed man in Baltimore.

Mike Olmert, who taught English at the University of Maryland, College Park, for more than 30 years, offered the paper a general explanation for why such tales spread: “Life is so confusing. You make stories to make sense of it because that seems to give you some control.” More legends are on our Virginia and Maryland pages.

What remains unexplained

The two Guinea Road incidents are documented by newspaper reports and a police investigation. Who wore the costume, and why a bunny, is not known. The asylum and the bridge killings appear to have come later. The record points not to a monster but to a man in a costume who threatened two people over trespassing in 1970, and a story that has grown for five decades.