(This is a rewrite of the original urban legend, taking the basic ideas and writing it as I felt was interesting and scary)
It was out in the country, when it was first built. The staff were afraid the busy traffic and fumes of London might frighten their patients into doing things they might later regret.
So it was built way out in the country, with no cars, lorries or buses to disturb them. It was peaceful, quiet. The only thing that could be heard at night was the soft hooting of owls and the squeaky cry of foxes.
Perhaps, it was also to stop the public being unnerved. After all, who would really enjoy living next door to an asylum for the mentally impaired?
The official reason it was moved was because the area was getting full. Many had migrated from the city to the fresh air and cool breeze of the country. It made them feel young again, there was room for their children to run around and play. There was no longer any space for the asylum, and the peace had been disturbed. It was only a slight change in noise, but the staff worried it might be too much for some of the more temperamental inmates. Inmates, guests, patients – they never called them prisoners, lunatics, murderers, but the simple fact was that a large amount of them were all three.
That was the official reason, but the real one? Living so close to a mental institution unnerved many new residents. The thought of murderers and crazies locked up so close to them was too much. Maybe it was that they’d seen too many horror movies; who knows? All that is known is that the residents gathered quietly. One by one, they added their name to a petition.
It was shown to the staff, and they accepted. They would relocate shortly, and they did so.
Nobody was prepared for what happened next. Was it fate? Chance? Or just plain bad luck?
Everything had been prepared, the new buildings, the food and water supplies, everything that was needed.
On the day of the move, all the inmates were traveling together in one large bus. In hindsight, it wasn’t such a good idea to have them all in the same vehicle, but the staff of the asylum thought it would work out well. They had restraints on the most violent of people, and hypodermic syringes and straitjackets were nearby in case of problems.
The first problem came before they even set off. The driver had suffered from a cardiac arrest out of nowhere. It was a common thing in his family, but the asylum workers had neglected to check.
A replacement was swiftly found, and the journey was begun.
If the company had forgotten to check the previous driver’s background, they certainly had no time to check the new one.
The long, three hour journey was uneventful more the most part. Slowly evening cast its spell over all the passengers, and, unfortunately the driver as well. He veered off course, drifting from the road. Nobody was in a state to wake him.
They were all awoken by the sickening crunch as the bus smashed into a train. The bus had gone so far off the road it had driven onto train tracks. The train hadn’t spotted them until it was too late.
Many of the patients died that day, unable to protect themselves due to being restrained or asleep. Not all of them succumbed to the eternal embrace of death, though. A few escaped into the area nearby, and managed to stay hidden.
The bodies of all the dead were collected and buried, given a brief funeral. The staff enlisted the help of the local police to search the area, to find the missing inmates. They were a danger to both themselves and the people around them. They had to be recaptured – they would have used the word retrieved – before they could do any harm.
One by one, bodies started turning up. They had died of starvation and dehydration, mostly, but at least two corpses bore faint teeth marks. It was as if they had been chewed. What they found most disturbing was that the teeth marks were, without a doubt, human.
After a while, only one patient was left. All the others had been recovered, some dead, some alive. One remained alive, dead, nobody knew. He was in the nearby area and, if the police hadn’t even glimpsed him by now, was probably still alive and hiding. How could one man, not right in the head or particularly strong at that, hide from them for so long? Morale was not high in the police force.
Then something changed the neighborhood's lives forever.
In trees around the area, the limp bodies of dead rabbits hung from branches, their carcasses cleanly, neatly skinned and half eaten. Hundreds of them turned up, more each day. Nobody was ever seen hanging them, nor carrying rabbits. There was one suspect for the man or woman who had held the knife as they slit the stomach of the rabbit, to hang it by its entrails from the trees.
The escaped prisoner.
The final man who had escaped from the asylum, who had lived so long in the wild – now they knew what his diet consisted of. Hundreds of half eaten wild rabbits.
Many children and adults had nightmares of the grotesque bundles, hanging from the trees, swinging gently in the wind. To this day, some are haunted by the memory.
This was bad enough for the terrified residents who lived nearby. Some children were afraid to go to school, scared the man would attack them. Seeing the freshly killed rabbits each day, blood dripping, the marks of human teeth on the flesh – it is a surprise that more of them did not completely break down. The adults tried to stay strong for their sons and daughters, but inside they were at breaking point. They barely withstood the rabbit incidents, and what came next made them snap.
A man in the local town, who went by the name Marcus Green, had disappeared. He was a painter, a rover, he never stayed in one place for too long. He would be away from the city for months at a time, to return with beautiful, breathtaking paintings and sketches of the far away rocks and mountains and the white foam of the sea as it lashed against the white chalk cliffs.
Nobody had given much thought to his absence. His presence was much more shocking.
It was in the early morning one day, the sky a dull grey and the wind cold but not as bitter as it had been for some time, it was on this winter day that they found him.
He was found under a bridge. He was hanging upside down from a tree that grew outside, and had poked a limb under the bridge. His weight was spread against three branches, to prevent them from snapping. His face was the only part of him that could be identified as human. The rest of his body was mangled – in fact, it was skinned. A heap of rotting flesh at the base of the tree confirmed this.
On Marcus’ face was a look of terror. They had only this to guess what had happened to him, and one other thing.
The human tooth marks on his broken neck.
The press went wild when they discovered it. They interviewed the police and anyone who would give a statement. Fact or lies, it was material for them. The papers ran countless stories on the escaped convict. They named him the Bunny Man, after the vile disposal of his food, rabbits, and they also claimed the bridge had been called the Bunny Man Bridge in ancient times. Who was anyone to question it? People were either too excited with the news, or too terrified, to even think about whether any embroidering of the truth was going on.
Blame was laid on the shoulders of the asylum staff. There were cries of court, but it never came to fruition. They may never have been officially punished for their blunder, but the press openly shamed and mocked them in every single issue they published that included an article on the now-famous Bunny Man.
Time went by and the rabbit corpses showed no sign of disappearing. If they were taken down, removed, new ones would be hung up in their place by the time the week was over. It could mean only one thing. The killer was still alive and still at large.
Eventually, the national panic and publicity ran out. The rabbits did not.
The town lived in terror for another six months, before another fact was revealed that brought newspapers back into business with the Bunny Man convict.
There was a headline that ran “Bunny Man still at large – but is he the Easter Bunny?” This, among others, exploited a small fact that had inadvertently been dropped by one of the asylum’s former staff. Most of them had left to work elsewhere, unnerved by their experiences and ridiculed by the press. One had been tracked down, and gave a short interview.
The simple fact was that the murderer, who was named as Mr. Harvey Douglas, had been placed in the asylum for killing his entire family, wife and three children, on Easter Sunday. He was not mentally stable, so had been spared the normal prison sentence for a life behind bars with padded walls.
The media seized this fact, and ran so many articles of the links between Douglas and the Easter Bunny that many families in the town complained it was scaring their children and themselves.
The stories slowly stopped, as other readers grew bored of reading the same story time and time again.
Suddenly, three weeks later, they ran a dramatic headline – the notorious Bunny Man was dead!
This time, it was for real.
The police had tracked him to a train station. They had been about to catch him as he turned and saw them. He was wearing the skins of countless rabbits, sewn together with their sinews to create a grotesque cloak.
He smiled and waved as the early morning train smashed into him, ending him forever.
It was only later that the police realized something was odd with the train.
It was the same one that had killed his fellow inmates.
