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 wer
e 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.
CHAPTER 3
Gadsby’s Tavern
ALEXANDRIA
To the memory of a Female Stranger, whose mortal suffering terminated on the 4th day of October, 1816.
This stone is erected by her disconsolate husband in whose arms she sighed out her latest breath, and who under God did his utmost to soothe the cold dull hour of death.
How loved, how honor’d once avails the not, to whom related or by whom begot, a heap of dust remains of thee ’tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.
—Inscription on a tombstone in St. Paul’s Cemetery, Alexandria
ESTABLISHED AROUND 1785, Gadsby’s Tavern has been a quintessential Alexandria watering hole throughout most of U.S. history. And, as with most places over a certain age, it has a number of ghost stories associated with it and is one of the stops on local ghost tours.
Today, Alexandria is probably most distinguished as the home of more trade, professional, and nonprofit associations than any other city in the country, with the possible exception of nearby Washington, D.C., which is located just across the Potomac River. In the early years of the republic, however, especially prior to the founding of the capitol city, Alexandria was a vibrant port city, and Gadsby’s Tavern played host to many of the most important people in the country. George Washington celebrated his birthday at the tavern in 1797 and 1798; Thomas Jefferson held his inaugural banquet there in 1801; and the tavern served as a hub of political, business, and social interaction for many years.
Ironically, despite having lived less than seventeen miles from the tavern for more than two decades, I never found an opportunity to visit it before I started writing this book. Not until a cool, gloomy day in March 2008, after attending a luncheon in Old Town, did I actually ask for directions to the place and walk the four blocks to it from where I had been conducting my other business.
Gadsby’s Tavern consists of two separate buildings and two separate establishments. One is a museum, located in an older, two-story building, and the other a restaurant, located on the ground floor of a three-story building built as an expansion to the original structure in 1792 (at the time dubbed the City Tavern and Hotel). Having just come from a dry event, my inclination was to visit the latter.
A number of stories about incorporeal spirits, rather than the liquid ones it has traditionally served, have developed about Gadsby’s Tavern, and I had heard a number of them over the years. The most famous involves a beautiful young woman who died at the establishment nearly two hundred years ago and whose specter is sometimes purportedly still seen there.
As a common version of the story goes, the young woman and her husband arrived at the port of Alexandria in October 1816 from points unknown. She was very ill and was taken to Gadsby’s Tavern, where she received treatment from a doctor and a number of nurses. Despite their best efforts, however, she died on October 14. For reasons still unknown, her husband made everyone they had dealt with swear that they would never reveal her identity, had her buried in nearby St. Paul’s Cemetery beneath a nameless tombstone, and, soon after disappeared without paying any of his bills, including $1,500 for the stone.
Since then, visitors have reported seeing the ghost of the “female stranger” standing near her headstone, wandering the halls of Gadsby’s Tavern, or peering out its windows while holding a candle (and, possibly, awaiting the return of her apparently deadbeat husband). Explanations for who she is have included the ward of an aging English aristocrat who was accidentally slain by her lover, with whom she fled to America; the daughter of Aaron Burr, who gunned down Alexander Hamilton in a duel; and an orphan, separated from her three siblings at a young age, who inadvertently married her brother. Die nameless and leave bills behind and, specifics aside, the stories about you are pretty sure to be sordid.
Other ghost stories associated with the tavern are fairly typical of those associated with haunted sites in general, and include candles or lanterns that appear to be burning, but, upon examination, have not been recently lit.
Glancing at the upper-story windows of the buildings as I approached them, I did not see anything out of the ordinary.
The first thing I learned upon being greeted inside the entrance to the restaurant by a distinguished-looking older gentleman is that it is no longer traditional to drop in off the street for just a cold one at the tavern—the norm being to partake of a meal as well—and that I would be better served for those purposes at a nearby Irish pub (of course!). Upon seeing my disappointment, however, he graciously relented, showed me to a two-person table in the dining room, and asked his waiter to bring me a beer.
Gadsby’s Tavern and Museum
“Are you the manager?” I asked him.
“Sometimes,” he replied somewhat cagily (demonstrating a dry sense of humor that was revealed when I eventually obtained his business card and read upon it the title “General Manager”), and introduced himself as Paul Carbé. I introduced myself and briefly explained my interest in his establishment.
“Oh, you want the museum next door,” he said, crushing any hopes I might have of encountering spectral spoor at his establishment. I decided to just enjoy my Gadsby’s ale and the ambience of the place, which included wait staff dressed in garb reminiscent of the Colonial era, pewter place settings on the tables, and dark wood paneling that in some cases dates to 1792.
“That’s original,” Carbé said, indicating the wooden fireplace mantle in the first of several tidbits of information that he congenially bestowed upon me on his way back and forth from the back of the restaurant and the front, where he dutifully greeted everyone who came through the door. Eventually, however, he decided to bestow something more substantial upon me.
“Come with me,” he said, and led me to the back of the restaurant and into its kitchen. There, he proceeded to tell me about three strange episodes that some would take for evidence of a
ghostly presence—all of which had occurred in the previous month!
In the first, he said, one of his waitresses walked into the kitchen and asked if anyone knew where beverage napkins were. As if in response, a package of beverage napkins pitched off a nearby shelf and landed on the counter next to the stunned young woman.
The second incident took place in a dining room that had been set up for a dinner party. With no apparent cause or prompting from anyone, a spoon from one of the place settings slid off the table and clattered onto the floor.
And, in the third incident, three or four of the wait staff were working in the tavern after it had closed when they all distinctly heard a candle in the main dining room—where none of them were—being blown out.
As is the case with most ostensibly haunted sites, none of these incidents necessarily mean anything in and of themselves. Even when they are considered as elements in an ongoing pattern of similar incidents, they prove nothing. But they do reinforce to those willing to acknowledge them that there is more in this world that can easily be explained by most philosophies, to paraphrase a famous playwright.
That was what I thought to myself, in any event, as I finished up my pint of ale and snapped a few more pictures of the tavern. Collecting up my things, I thanked Mr. Carbé for his helpfulness and stepped outside into a late afternoon that had turned from gloom to drizzle.
Turning back toward Gadsby’s Tavern as I walked away from it, I looked up at some of the upper-story windows, hoping I might catch a glimpse of the ghost of the “female stranger.” But I did not prolong my gaze. After all, if you stare at something long enough, you can end up seeing just about anything, whether it is really there or not.
CHAPTER 4
Ghosthunting Virginia Page 3
