8 Terrifying Local Legends From Around The U.S.

The Bunny Man

In Fairfax County, Virginia there’s a local legend of a man in a bunny suit who carries an axe.

Here’s a day-time picture of the bridge where he is spotted:

The first reported encounter with The Bunny Man occurred just before Halloween in 1970:

Cadet Bob Bennett and his fiancée who were visiting relatives on Guinea Road in Burke. Around midnight, while returning from a football game, they parked their car in a field on Guinea Road to talk. As they sat in the front seat with the car running, they noticed something moving outside the rear window. Moments later the front passenger window was smashed and there was a white-clad figure standing near the broken window. Bennett turned the car around while the man screamed at them about trespassing, including “You’re on private property and I have your tag number.” As they drove down the road they discovered a hatchet on the car floor.

When the police asked for a description of the man, Bob insisted he was wearing a white suit with long bunny ears, but his fiancee remembered something white and pointed like a Ku Klux Klan hood. They both remembered seeing his face clearly, but in the darkness they could not determine his race. The police returned the hatchet to Bennett after examination. Bennett was required to report the incident upon his return to the Air Force Academy. It was later confirmed in Fairfax Police records that the man was wearing a bunny suit with ears, not Ku Klux Klan robes.

Locals believe The Bunny Man may be a man named Timothy C. Forbes who escaped from a nearby asylum prison in 1904. The first indication that something bizarre was happening was the appearance of hundreds of skinned and partially eaten rabbit corpses. The corpses were found hanging from trees in the area, but when police tried to capture him he was struck by a train near the “Bunny Man Bridge” pictured above.

Legend has it that the original reason The Bunny Man was in the asylum was that he killed and ate his family on Easter Sunday.

The Goatman of Maryland

At the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland there was once a devoted scientist who was experimenting with goats. Something went wrong and now he is a rogue half-man, half-goat creature that occasionally attacks cars with an axe.

Langham Creek Civil War Ghosts

In Houston, Texas you can park your car on the Langham Creek Bridge at Patterson road at night, with the lights off you’ll heard tapping or even see figures of a pair of ghosts.

Cropsey

In New York, there’s always been lore surround a figure named “Cropsey.” The person can be different depending on where you are and who is telling the story, but it’s general some insane dude that kidnaps/murders children. This documentary is sweet/streaming free on Netflix/scary AF:

The Mothman

In Point Pleasant, West Virginia beginning in 1960 people began to report seeing a moth-like man:

On November 12, 1966, five men who were digging a grave at a cemetery near Clendenin, WV claimed to see a man-like figure fly low from the trees over their heads.[5] This is often identified as the first known sighting of what became known as the Mothman.

Shortly thereafter, on November 15, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant, Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallette told police they saw a large white creature whose eyes “glowed red” when the car headlights picked it up. They described it as a ” large flying man with ten-foot wings following their car while they were driving in an area outside of town known as ‘the TNT area’, the site of a former World War II munitions plant.[6][7]

During the next few days, other people reported similar sightings. Two volunteer firemen who sighted it said it was a “large bird with red eyes”. Mason County Sheriff George Johnson commented that he believed the sightings were due to an unusually large heron he termed a “shitepoke”. Contractor Newell Partridge told Johnson that when he aimed a flashlight at a creature in a nearby field its eyes glowed “like bicycle reflectors”, and blamed buzzing noises from his television set and the disappearance of his German Shepherd dog on the creature. Wildlife biologist Dr. Robert L. Smith at West Virginia University told reporters that descriptions and sightings all fit the sandhill crane, a large American crane almost as high as a man with a seven foot wingspan featuring circles of reddish coloring around the eyes, and that the bird may have wandered out of its migration route.

The sightings culminated in 46 people dying when the Silver Bridge collapsed during rush hour traffic in 1946. Author John Keel wrote that the Mothman sightings were part of a larger phenomena of people having premonitions of this tragedy. This was made famous by the movie, The Mothman Prophecies.

The Bell Witch

The Bell Witch was the inspiration for The Blair Witch Project. She comes from a 19th century Southern legend about a man who was haunted by the poltergeist of “Kate Bell” who would make noises in his home and pinch and slap its residents.

Ghost of Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park

Everyone thinks Golden Gate Park is creepy, but that’s just because people seem to emerge from every shadow and crevice in order to offer you shrooms and then if you decline they do this:

However, if you go to the Stow Lake area, you may see the “Lady of Stow Lake.” People have seen her, “morph into a human shape, an orange light, and a palm tree-like shape.”

The Char-Man

A gruesome burnt corpse of a ghost named Char-Man haunts Camp Comfort County Park near Ojai in California, especially the area known as Char-Man bridge. The legend is that he burned to death and will run out to scare motorists and campers, or to yell, “Help me! Help me!” Apparently, when he appears you can even sense a burnt smell lingering in the air.