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 were 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
