Since the mid-1970s the urban legend of the Bunny Man of Clifton Bridge has been circulating, telling of an axe murderer dressed in a bunny costume who killed two children and left their bodies hanging from a covered bridge in Virginia. The story has grown in the telling and has gone on to inspire at least one horror film series as well as being the likely inspiration for the sinister rabbit man in the deeply fortean 2001 film Donnie Darko, but does have its roots in real incidents that took place in Fairfax County, Virginia, in 1970.
The Bunny Man made his first appearance in October 1970. Air force cadet Robert Bennett was sitting with his fiancé in a car on Guinea Road, Fairfax, when a man “dressed in a white suit with long bunny ears” ran
