The Bunny Man Hatchet and Axe Attacks on Guinea Road, Burke, Virginia

Fairfax County, Virginia. Autumn 1970. In Burke, the Kings Park West subdivision was under construction along Guinea Road. New houses stood unfinished. A private security guard watched the site for the construction company.

Sunday, October 18, 1970. Shortly after midnight. Robert Bennett, a first-year cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy, was visiting an uncle on Guinea Road. He and his fiancée had been to a football game. Now they sat in a parked car across the street from the uncle's house, motor running. A man ran from the nearby bushes. Bennett saw him dressed in a white suit with long bunny ears. His fiancée saw something else. A white capirote of some sort. A peaked hood. The Washington Post put him at about 5-feet-8, 160 pounds, in his early 20s.

"You're on private property and I have your tag number," he shouted. Then the hatchet came through the right front car window. Glass sprayed into the car. The fiancée was not injured. Years later she said it took them hours to pull all the glass out of her hair. Across the street, Bennett's aunt remembered combing it out.

Thursday, October 29. About 10:30 p.m. At 5307 Guinea Road, an unoccupied house under construction about one block from the first site, guard Paul Phillips found a figure in a furry rabbit suit with two long ears. Gray, black and white. "All you people trespass around here… If you don't get out of here, I'm going to bust you on the head." "I started talking to him," Phillips said, "and that's when he started chopping." Eight gashes went into a porch post. Phillips walked back to his car to get his handgun. But the "Rabbit", carrying the long-handled ax, ran off into the woods.

The Washington Post followed every turn. More than 50 people reported sightings. Fairfax County Police investigator W. L. Johnson took the case. Then a caller who named himself "the Axe Man" phoned him. His complaint: "you have been messing up my property, by dumping tree stumps, limbs and brush." He proposed a meeting. Police staked out the spot. Nobody came.

Johnson noted that the only people who had seen the figure were "children of rather young ages, and the complainant in this case." On March 14, 1971, he wrote his summary: "After a very extensive investigation into this and all other cases of this same nature, it is still unsubstantiated as to whether or not there really is a white rabbit." The case went inactive. No one was ever identified or charged.

The likeliest answer is a local man in costume, angry about trespassers and suburban development. Fairfax County Public Library archivist Brian Conley began digging in 1992. He found the couple, still married. They confirmed the story. They still have the hatchet. Conley's reading: "Being forced to watch helplessly while the face of your community changes around you can elicit strange behavior in some people."

Around 1999, a user named "Timothy C. Forbes" posted a darker history online. A 1904 asylum-bus escape. A convict named "Douglas J. Grifon." 32 victims. Conley's finding was blunt: "all of the specifics given in the Forbes version are false."

The legend moved anyway. It settled on the Colchester Overpass near Clifton, the "Bunny Man Bridge," miles from Guinea Road and never the site of either attack. Police have controlled access there at Halloween since 2003. Conley traced it all back to one autumn. "I can find no evidence that the story was ever told before 1970."