On the evening of October 19, 1970, an Air Force Academy cadet and his fiancée parked near a relative's house in Burke, Virginia. A man in a white suit with long bunny ears ran from the bushes shouting "You're on private property and I have your tag number," then threw a hatchet through the passenger window. Twelve days later, a construction security guard at an unfinished house in Kings Park West encountered a man in a gray, black, and white bunny costume chopping at a porch post with a long-handled axe. "All you people trespass around here," the man said. "You're trespassing. If you come any closer, I'll chop off your head." He disappeared into the woods. Both cases were closed without charges.
Over the following weeks, more than 50 people contacted Fairfax County police claiming Bunny Man sightings. By 1973, a University of Maryland researcher had documented 54 distinct variations on the two incidents. The most widely circulated version — posted to the website Castle of Spirits in 1999 — attributed the Bunny Man to a convict named Douglas J. Grifon who escaped a prison transport in 1904 and committed a series of murders near the Colchester Overpass in Clifton, Virginia.
Fairfax County archivist Brian Conley later found that "all of the specifics given in the Forbes version are false": the murders never happened, the prison bus never existed, and the institution cited as the source — the Old Clifton Library — never existed either.
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