when one considers how Lee is generally regarded by people in North and South alike today. After all, the spirits of heroes who believe they have done the right thing have little inducement to lurk about after death making things go bump in the night.
But the Lee familiar to most people today bears little resemblance to the real man, and is little more than a sentimentalized, two-dimensional construct created by maudlin writers who treat the worst event ever to strike the United States as if it were some golden age. In reality, Robert E. Lee had grave reservations about the legitimacy of the Southern cause and his role in it, as evidenced by his own writings, and knew that he was a traitor to his country, the oaths of military service he made before God, even his own father.
“Our national independence, and consequently our individual liberty,” wrote Revolutionary War hero Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, father of Robert E. Lee, in 1799. “Our peace and our happiness depend entirely on maintaining our union. In point of right no state can withdraw itself from the union. In point of policy, no state ought to be permitted to do so.” Robert E. Lee did everything he could to destroy the legacy his father had struggled to create and in which he had so fervently believed.
And maybe it is the fact that Lee has been so mischaracterized, that he has been made into a sort of hero and the home where he lived turned into a memorial to him, that has led to his haunting the site—not because it is the home where he once lived, but because it is surrounded by the graves of men who he knows would likely never have been killed in a bloody civil war if he had been true to his country, his word, and the ideals of his forebears. He will likely never rest while people continue to invoke his name and treat him as something he did not believe himself to be.
Arlington National Cemetery has always had somewhat of an otherworldly feel to me, and I have little doubt that it is, in fact, a haunt for spirits, of both those who have betrayed their country and those who have given all they had in its service. Whether a visitor senses a negative presence or a positive one while visiting the site will depend on which they happen to encounter and, possibly, to the spirit with which they approach this most hallowed site.
CHAPTER 2
Bunny Man Bridge
FAIRFAX STATION
Over the years the story has evolved into a ghost story suitable for parties, camp outs, and any occasion that such tales are exchanged. It was at one such gathering in 1976 that [I] first heard it told…. I never saw the Bunny Man myself, but then I never strayed into the woods at night, especially not near the bridge ….
—Brian A. Conley, “The Bunny Man Unmasked: The Real Life Origins of an Urban Legend”
FOR THE PAST SEVENTEEN YEARS, I have lived about eight miles from what some people have claimed is not just one of the most haunted sites in the country but, according to a 2001 episode of one television show, one of “The Scariest Places on Earth.” Tens of thousands of people live within that radius of it in densely populated Fairfax County, so there is nothing strange there. What I found to be uncanny, however, was that I had never even heard about it until my friend Geoff Weber asked me in late 2007 if it was one of the sites I was planning to cover in this book.
I forgot that conversation until May 2008, when I stumbled across a reference to Bunny Man Bridge online, followed by several more when I started to poke around a bit. At that point I resolved to visit it as part of my fieldwork for this book and to ask Geoff—who is, among other things, a professional magician—if he wanted to accompany me. After all, I figured, it couldn’t hurt to have someone with ostensible influence over the spirit world along on a venture of this sort. And, as he had told me about the site, it seemed doubly appropriate.
A bit of online research prior to our visit yielded a number of Web sites with information about the site, including suggestions that the Bunny Man legend may have even influenced scenes in at least one movie, Donnie Darko, and one video game, “Manhunt.” I found one of these sources—a detailed essay called “The Bunny Man Unmasked”—to be especially significant and unique in a particular way, and not just because it was longer, more detailed, and better written than most. It was written by Brian A. Conley, a historian-archivist with the Fairfax County Public Library system and appears on the section of the Fairfax County government Web site devoted to that organization. This article is, in short, the only material I have found from a governmental source that addresses a possibly haunted site, and the legend behind it, in any sort of a substantive way (the official “Virginia is for Lovers” Web site mentions many sites, but only in a peripheral or inaccurate way).
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,
