Murderer, vandal or urban legend? Who was the Bunny Man?

For decades, people around Baltimore used to pass on warnings to each other. The kids whispered about the “Bunny Man.” He was tall, sometimes naked and wearing bunny ears.

Some believed he lived in the woods at Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park. Others thought he might be in the pathway behind the apartments near West Cold Spring Lane, or along the train tracks in Pigtown and Cherry Hill.

He was Baltimore’s boogeyman.

Sightings and lore about the Bunny Man have gripped generations, with various twists on the tale spreading from parts of Northern Virginia and D.C. to Maryland. Some say he was simply folklore, a tall tale to keep children behaving. To others, he was unseen, an ominous man worth fearing.

In Baltimore, stories of the Bunny Man are determined by a person’s age and where they grew up in the city. Today, people can go down more than a dozen TikTok rabbit holes about the Bunny Man. Some commenters rehash how they believe they escaped him at least once.

The way people have shared stories about the Bunny Man is a hallmark of folklore and how society tries to understand scary things, experts said.

“Life is so confusing. You make stories to make sense of it because that seems to give you some control,” said Mike Olmert, who taught in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park for over 30 years.

The origins of the Bunny Man date back to 1970.

A few weeks before Halloween, an Air Force Academy cadet and his fiancee were sitting in his car across from his uncle’s property in Fairfax County, Virginia. They reported to police that a man who appeared to be wearing a white suit and long bunny ears approached their car, told them they were trespassing and threw a wooden-handled hatchet through the windshield.

Two weeks later, he reappeared, this time confronting a night watchman at a housing development, where he threatened to whack him with an axe. Both encounters were detailed in The Washington Post.

The news of these episodes spread widely, especially among children.

There were so many tales that in 1973, Patricia Johnson, a University of Maryland undergraduate, decided to study them for a folklore class. She questioned Prince George’s County high schoolers about their experiences with the Bunny Man. Johnson wanted to understand the power of this tale.

One student insisted that the Bunny Man chased little kids out of the park. Another heard that he mostly targeted people with the middle name Denise.

There were teenagers who assumed that he was in the woods in Palmer Park in Hyattsville cutting off the heads of animals. One student heard that kids ambushed the Bunny Man with chalkboard erasers in Landover after he allegedly entered school grounds.

Maybe a commenter on TikTok summed it up best: “The Bunny Man was everywhere, but nowhere at all.”

Of Johnson’s more than 40 interviews preserved in the Maryland Folklore collection, no two stories are the same. While some wrote him off as “a harmless creature harassed by society for no reason,” others recounted stories of him damaging property, hurting people and, in some instances, killing them, according to her findings.

In some cases, Johnson found that entire families changed habits and personal routines to avoid the Bunny Man.

They stayed in the house. They steered clear of sidewalks with clusters of bushes and trees. And older siblings were recruited to walk the littlest ones to and from church.

One local man, Reggie Graves, and his friends used to cut through the woods in Hanlon Park to get home from the former William H. Lemmel Middle School in the late 1980s. Graves and other middle schoolers in West Baltimore were already warned by older kids not to travel through the woods, especially when alone, because of the Bunny Man. One day, they spotted a man in the woods. Assuming it was him, they threw rocks and sticks at him. When he turned to chase them, they bolted out of the woods.

“We thought we had escaped the Bunny Man,” said Graves, now 52.

In the 1990s, Dominique Bagley and her friends would sometimes inch toward a certain tree line near the Bocek Recreation Center in East Baltimore. They heard from teens that the Bunny Man lurked there. Curiosity tempted them, but the moment anyone heard a rustle or crack among the trees, they scattered and ran.

“That part of the park was just forbidden,” said Bagley, 40.

In the 2000s, Terrod Roberts, 34, remembers running around Pigtown streets when he was as young as 5 years old. But by first grade, kids in the neighborhood started talking about the Bunny Man. It was said that he lived in the woods at Carroll Park. Roberts would only ever travel that way with bigger kids.

Though they came up in different generations, Graves, Bagley and Roberts all heard tales that took the story to a scarier level: that the Bunny Man molested, raped or even killed.

That thread of perversion may have been related to attacks and murders that occurred in West Baltimore in April 1968.

Over the span of about a week, police investigated two disturbing crimes. First, four boys were lured into the woods by a man who beat and molested them. Around the same time, four other boys disappeared entirely.

After a stakeout at Leakin Park, police arrested Reginald Oates, who was wandering there.

That’s when police started to find the bodies.

Several of the murder victims, ranging in age from 5 to 10, were sexually mutilated, according to The Baltimore Sun. Oates was carrying a paper bag containing parts of the victims’ bodies when he was arrested, according to reports.

Oates, who was 18 at the time, was found incompetent to stand trial and sent to Clifton T. Perkins State Hospital. According to the Maryland Department of Health, he is still under the care and custody of the state today.

To some growing up in West Baltimore at that time, the case and the Bunny Man became synonymous. In other parts of Baltimore, people had no clue about Oates or what he did.

In the last few decades, though, the Bunny Man’s sinister image has lost some of its power. People report that they started playing games, pretending random bystanders were the Bunny Man. The “Bunny Man Bridge” in Clifton, Virginia, near where he allegedly first appeared, has become a spot for curiosity seekers.

And when asked about him, the new generation of young people is confused.

They’ve never even heard of the Bunny Man.