THE DEVIL WITHIN

THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN

Episode Two: The Bridge

There is a railroad bridge outside Clifton, Virginia, where Colchester Road narrows into a single lane and disappears beneath the tracks. For generations of Northern Virginia teenagers, it has been known by another name: Bunny Man Bridge.

According to the legend, this is where the Bunny Man lived, killed and perhaps died. Some versions claim he was an escaped asylum patient who vanished into the surrounding woods after a transport bus crashed. Others add mutilated rabbits hanging from trees, murdered children, bodies suspended from the railroad tracks and a killer who eventually returned from the dead.

It's a spectacular horror story.

There's just one problem: almost none of it appears to have happened.

In Episode Two of our three-part investigation, we follow the Bunny Man away from the documented encounters on Guinea Road and into the place that transformed him from a bizarre local mystery into a full-fledged American monster. Research by Fairfax County historian and archivist Brian Conley found no evidence of the asylum, the escaped inmates or the Bunny Man massacre supposedly connected to the bridge. The two documented incidents from October 1970 happened miles away.

So how did the Bunny Man get to Clifton?

We travel back through the history of the village itself, from the arrival of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad in 1858 to its importance during the Civil War, when the tracks became part of the military infrastructure connecting a country tearing itself apart. After the war, a railroad village grew here, preserving a pocket of older Northern Virginia even as suburban Washington expanded around it.

That landscape gave the legend something Guinea Road eventually couldn't: permanence. Construction sites become houses. Woods are cleared. Empty lots acquire addresses. But a secluded railroad overpass surrounded by trees can remain unsettling for generations. Better still, it gave teenagers somewhere they could actually visit. The Bunny Man stopped being merely something people heard about and became something they could go looking for.

From there, the mythology began building backward. An asylum appeared where historical research has found none. A bus crashed. Patients escaped. Rabbits were slaughtered. One fugitive supposedly died while another became the Bunny Man. Eventually murders, Halloween rituals and supernatural encounters were attached to the bridge, creating an elaborate origin story for a monster whose real identity had never been established.

We'll explore why those additions were so effective, how the abandoned asylum became one of American horror's favorite shortcuts for hidden evil, and why the Bunny Man's axe survived the transformation from reported weapon to unmistakable horror icon.

Most importantly, we'll see the moment when folklore becomes interactive. Teenagers began driving beneath the bridge after dark, turning off their engines and waiting for something to happen. Every movement in the woods, unexpected car or freight train thundering overhead offered another opportunity for the story to reproduce itself.

Because the Bunny Man didn't become immortal when somebody died beneath those railroad tracks.

He became immortal when people started going there to find him.

NEXT TIME

In the final chapter of our Bunny Man story, Midnight at the Overpass, we follow the legend through the 1980s and 1990s and into the early internet, when a regional Virginia ghost story suddenly gained access to a global audience. We'll explore Halloween pilgrimages, stranger danger, Satanic Panic and the peculiar rituals that taught generations of teenagers how to summon a monster.

Then we'll return to October 1970 and the question that none of the mythology has ever answered:

Who was actually inside the rabbit suit?

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THE DEVIL WITHIN

THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN

Episode One: The Man on Guinea Road

In October 1970, along a dark stretch of Guinea Road in Fairfax County, Virginia, a young couple sitting inside their car saw someone emerge from the woods. The stranger appeared to be wearing a white suit with long rabbit ears. He began shouting about private property, claimed to have their license plate number—and then hurled a hatchet through the passenger window. The couple escaped. Police recovered the weapon. The man in the rabbit costume vanished.

If that were the end of the story, the Bunny Man might have survived as little more than a spectacularly bizarre newspaper clipping. But ten days later, another encounter was reported nearby. This time, security guard Paul Phillips discovered a rabbit-costumed figure at an unfinished house, carrying a long-handled axe and reportedly chopping at the structure while complaining about trespassers. Two incidents had given Northern Virginia something much harder to dismiss: a pattern.

In Episode One of our three-part journey into The Bunny Man, we go beneath the legend to the landscape that created it. Long before suburban Washington pushed into Fairfax County, this was a place shaped by Indigenous history, colonial Virginia, George Washington and George Mason, the American Revolution and the Civil War. By 1970, another invasion was underway as farms and forests disappeared beneath subdivisions, highways and construction sites.

That transformation provides an irresistible backdrop for what happened on Guinea Road. The original Bunny Man emerged from woods being consumed by development, repeatedly complained about trespassing and carried the very tools traditionally used to clear the landscape around him. Whether any of that symbolism was intentional is impossible to know, but the timing helped create an almost perfect American monster: something lurking along the uneasy boundary where countryside was becoming suburbia.

We'll also trace how two documented encounters began mutating almost immediately through newspapers, telephones, school buses and playgrounds. Before the internet could make legends viral, children and teenagers were already remarkably efficient distribution networks, repeating stories, changing details and filling unanswered questions with increasingly elaborate explanations.

And somewhere along the way, the Bunny Man moved.

The famous Bunny Man Bridge near Clifton was not the location of either documented 1970 encounter. Yet as the original construction sites disappeared and unfinished houses became ordinary homes, the secluded railroad overpass remained beneath the trees. Eventually the legend acquired the bridge, an asylum, escaped killers, mutilated rabbits and murder—transforming an unidentified man in a bizarre costume into something supernatural.

But before we get to the ghost stories, we begin with the part that remains considerably stranger because it appears to have actually happened.

Someone wore the rabbit costume. Someone carried the weapons. And more than half a century later, nobody has conclusively established who was inside it.

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THE DEVIL’S LEDGER

Week of September 14, 2026 — Twenty-Five Years Later

This week on The Devil’s Ledger, we mark the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001 and remember the 2,977 people whose lives were taken that day, along with the first responders and rescue workers who ran toward unimaginable danger while thousands were desperately trying to escape. We also honor those who have died in the years since from illnesses connected to their work at Ground Zero. Twenty-five years later, “Never Forget” remains more than a phrase; it is an obligation to remember the victims, teach the history and honor the extraordinary courage witnessed that morning.

THE CREEPIEST THING I HEARD THIS WEEK: THE CURSE OF DUDLEYTOWN

Deep in the forests of northwestern Connecticut lie the remains of Dudleytown, an eighteenth-century settlement that eventually became one of New England’s most enduring haunted legends. Stories of a centuries-old family curse, insanity, mysterious deaths and strange creatures transformed an abandoned settlement into the so-called “Village of the Damned.” Historians have challenged much of the mythology, offering far more ordinary explanations for Dudleytown’s disappearance, but the legend proved harder to kill. Ghost hunters still seek it out despite the former settlement being privately owned and closed to the public.

THIS WEEK ON THE DEVIL WITHIN: THE BUNNY MAN

The New Monsters heads to Northern Virginia for the story of The Bunny Man, a legend that began with genuine 1970 reports involving a mysterious man in a rabbit costume carrying a hatchet or axe. From those strange encounters grew Bunny Man Bridge, tales of escaped lunatics and an abandoned asylum, alleged murders and a midnight summoning ritual. Across three episodes, we separate the documented incidents from the mythology and follow the Bunny Man from newspaper reports and playground whispers into teenage legend-tripping and eventually the internet.

THIS WEEK ON CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: JAYCEE DUGARD

Carolyn Ossorio examines the devastating 1991 kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard, who was just eleven years old when she was abducted near her South Lake Tahoe home and held captive for more than eighteen years. Joining Carolyn is legendary investigator Paul Holes for a conversation about the investigation, the evidence, the opportunities authorities missed and, most importantly, Jaycee’s extraordinary survival and reclamation of the life that was stolen from her.

THIS WEEK ON THE SLIPPERY: THE DEADLY SECRET BEHIND WELCOME TO SWEETIE PIE’S

Behind the family drama of the hit OWN reality series Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s was a crime more shocking than anything television producers could have manufactured. The Slippery examines how Tim Norman became the architect of a murder-for-hire plot targeting his own 21-year-old nephew, Andre Montgomery. Investigators from the FBI, ATF and local law enforcement eventually unraveled a trail of life-insurance policies, burner phones, cell-tower records, financial transactions and accomplices that exposed the machinery behind Andre’s murder.

THIS WEEK IN HORROR: BLACK ZOMBIE

Director Maya Annik Bedward’s documentary BLACK ZOMBIE travels beyond Hollywood’s flesh-eating undead to explore the zombie’s origins in Haitian history and spiritual tradition. Moving through films including White Zombie, Night of the Living Dead and The Serpent and the Rainbow, the documentary examines how a figure rooted in enslavement, stolen agency, resistance and survival was transformed into one of modern horror’s most recognizable monsters. Featuring historians, artists and horror figures including Tananarive Due and Tom Savini, BLACK ZOMBIE asks what was lost when Hollywood took the zombie out of Haiti—and what can be reclaimed by putting that history back.

We close this week where we began: September 11, 2001. Remember the people who went to work and never came home, the passengers and flight crews, the firefighters climbing the stairs, the police officers and paramedics running toward danger, the passengers who fought back aboard Flight 93, and the families whose lives were forever divided into before and after. Life is short. Call somebody you love, take the trip, have the dinner, laugh too loudly, make something, and tell people what they mean to you while they are still here to hear it.

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Never forget.

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THE DEVIL WITHIN

The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode Three: The Monster Under Manhattan

By 1980, the alligator had escaped.

The legend that began with misplaced reptiles, a very real 1935 newspaper story and Teddy May’s extraordinary tales of an underground colony had finally crawled out of the sewers and into American popular culture.

Hollywood was waiting.

In the wonderfully excessive 1980 creature feature Alligator, a little girl brings home a baby alligator named Ramon. Her father eventually decides reptile ownership has run its course and flushes the animal down the toilet. Twelve years later, Ramon has survived beneath the city by eating discarded laboratory animals pumped full of experimental growth hormones.

The adorable souvenir has become an enormous, man-eating monster.

And the remarkable thing is that audiences barely needed the premise explained. By then, everybody knew the story.

Baby alligator. Toilet. Sewer. Darkness. Monster.

In the final episode of Alligators in the Sewers, we explore how one of America’s greatest urban legends escaped New York and became part of our shared cultural imagination.

Robert Daley’s 1959 book The World Beneath the City gave Teddy May’s stories a permanent home. Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V. populated Manhattan’s sewers with albino alligators. Books, newspapers and word of mouth continued adding details until ordinary abandoned pets had evolved into enormous, pale, blind creatures supposedly feeding on New York’s endless population of rats.

By the 1970s, the city itself had become the perfect setting. Aging infrastructure, graffiti-covered subway cars, crime, disinvestment and the fiscal crisis transformed New York’s underground from a symbol of nineteenth-century engineering triumph into something darker. The tunnels beneath Manhattan became a place where anything might be hiding.

Then Alligator gave the legend its monster movie.

But reality has an irritating habit of occasionally helping folklore along.

In 2001, a caiman appeared in Central Park’s Harlem Meer. In 2010, police found a young alligator beneath a parked car near a storm drain in Queens. And in 2023, workers discovered an emaciated four-foot alligator in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. None were evidence of some secret breeding colony beneath New York. They were almost certainly abandoned or escaped exotic pets.

Which, of course, was exactly how the legend supposedly began.

Nearly ninety years after East 123rd Street, New Yorkers were still finding alligators where alligators had absolutely no business being.

And perhaps that is why this particular monster refuses to die.

The sewer alligator was assembled from pieces of reality. Americans really did buy baby alligators. People really did abandon exotic pets. Crocodilians really have appeared in New York. Beneath the streets really does exist an enormous hidden geography of sewers, subway tunnels, utility corridors, buried waterways and infrastructure most of us will never see.

Folklore simply connected those facts and populated the darkness between them.

Today, New York has gone one step further and embraced the creature. In 2023, artist Alexander Klingspor’s NYC Legend placed an enormous bronze alligator atop a manhole cover in Union Square. The monster supposedly hunted beneath the city had finally returned to the surface as public art.

First New York feared the alligator.

Then it laughed at it.

Eventually, it made the thing a mascot.

And that may make the sewer alligator one of the prototypes for everything we’ve been exploring in The New Monsters. Long before Slender Man spread through internet forums, before the Backrooms became a collaboratively constructed online universe, and before millions of people analyzed pixels searching for the Fresno Nightcrawler, New Yorkers were already creating folklore in real time.

They simply did it with newspapers, books, schoolyards and stories passed from one person to another.

New York built an extraordinary artificial wilderness beneath itself.

And every wilderness eventually gets a monster.

NEXT TIME ON THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN

Next time, we leave Manhattan behind and head for the rapidly expanding suburbs of Northern Virginia, where another distinctly American monster emerged from an entirely different landscape.

Our backdrop this time isn't the sewer.

It's the suburb.

In October 1970, police began receiving reports of a strange man wearing a rabbit costume who allegedly threatened people with an axe. Newspapers picked up the story. Then came another encounter.

Over the decades, those incidents accumulated escaped mental patients, mutilated animals, murdered children and a lonely railroad overpass that generations of teenagers would eventually visit after dark.

The strangest part of the Bunny Man legend isn't that much of what people believe about him never happened.

It's that something really did happen first.

Next time on The New Monsters: The Bunny Man.

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THE DEVIL WITHIN

The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode Two: The Man Who Saw Them

They kept seeing alligators.

Sometime in the 1930s, New York sewer inspectors began returning from beneath the city with an increasingly ridiculous claim: there were alligators living beneath Manhattan. Their boss, Theodore “Teddy” May, had a more reasonable explanation.

Whiskey.

According to Robert Daley's 1959 book The World Beneath the City, May became convinced his workers had discovered somewhere underground to hide booze. He sent men to investigate. Nobody found the whiskey.

But the alligator sightings continued.

Eventually, Teddy May decided to descend into the sewers himself—and according to the story he later told, his flashlight swept across the water and revealed something he hadn't expected to see.

Several alligators.

In Episode Two of Alligators in the Sewers, The Devil Within heads back beneath 1930s New York to meet the men whose jobs took them into a hidden world most New Yorkers would never see.

We explore what it was actually like to work inside Manhattan's enormous underground infrastructure, where sewer inspectors navigated brick tunnels by flashlight during the lowest-flow hours of the night. The dangers were very real: rapidly rising wastewater, powerful currents, blockages and deadly gases. And the things moving through those tunnels could be bizarre—barrels, Christmas trees, jewelry, false teeth, weapons and practically anything else New York managed to lose down a drain.

Then we meet Teddy May.

Part sewer worker, part foreman and apparently one hell of a storyteller, May would become the central figure in the sewer-alligator legend. His claims transformed the documented discovery of a single reptile beneath East Harlem into something much larger: an entire population living beneath Manhattan.

And then, according to the legend, New York fought back.

Daley's account describes an extraordinary extermination campaign in which sewer crews supposedly used poisoned food, powerful trunk-sewer currents and, in some versions, .22-caliber rifles to eliminate the animals. It's an irresistible image: Depression-era municipal workers disappearing through Manhattan manholes carrying flashlights and guns to hunt alligators beneath New York City.

There's just one problem.

The evidence for a citywide infestation—and the war supposedly waged against it—is considerably thinner than the story. No substantial contemporary municipal paper trail has emerged documenting an organized extermination campaign. What survives largely depends upon testimony recorded more than twenty years later.

But folklore was already taking over.

The ordinary reptiles of the earliest stories became pale, blind subterranean monsters, supposedly transformed by generations without sunlight and sustained by Manhattan's endless supply of rats. The biology doesn't work, but the mythology is perfect. An ordinary alligator beneath New York could simply be lost. A pale, blind alligator belonged there.

This is the story of the men beneath the manholes, the raconteur who gave their stories life, and the moment an escaped exotic pet became something uniquely New York.

This is The Man Who Saw Them.

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THE DEVIL’S LEDGER

Week of September 8, 2026

MISTRIAL.

After seven weeks of testimony and roughly 36 hours of deliberations, the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has ended with a hung jury in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Eleven jurors reportedly favored finding Clancy not criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children. One juror disagreed, and Judge William Sullivan ultimately declared a mistrial.

So what happens now? Potentially, we do the whole thing again. A deadlocked jury generally does not trigger the double-jeopardy protection that would prevent prosecutors from retrying the case, leaving open the possibility of another trial, a negotiated resolution, or whatever comes next in a case that has already generated an extraordinary amount of public attention.

We'll keep following it. In the meantime, I suppose we'll have to wait for whichever juror signs the first book deal.

THE CREEPIEST THING I HEARD THIS WEEK

THE MASKED MENACE — CAUGHT

Remember our masked friend from Philadelphia?

A few weeks ago, we told you about a man roaming Center City Philadelphia in a disturbing white doll mask, approaching and chasing strangers and generally turning the morning commute into the opening ten minutes of a slasher movie.

Now we have an ending.

Authorities identified the suspect as 22-year-old Zymire Hughes, who police say harassed or terrorized more than fifteen people on August 12. In one particularly disturbing encounter, he allegedly approached a woman near JFK Boulevard and repeatedly asked her, “Are you ready to die?”

Hughes subsequently traveled from the Philadelphia area to Orlando and then Las Vegas. Newly released body-camera footage shows Las Vegas police and U.S. Marshals closing in on an apartment where authorities believed he was hiding. On August 25, the Nevada Violent Offender Task Force surrounded the complex.

Hughes came out.

The mask did not.

And perhaps the strangest detail of all is that investigators have suggested at least some of this behavior may have been intended for social-media content. Which raises the possibility that the mask wasn't worn because someone didn't want to be recognized.

Maybe it was worn because he wanted to be watched.

A generation ago, if somebody put on a horrifying mask and started chasing strangers through downtown Philadelphia, we'd ask: What the hell is wrong with this guy?

In 2026, apparently we have to ask another question:

Was he doing it for the algorithm?

That's the Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week.

THIS WEEK ON THE DEVIL WITHIN

THE NEW MONSTERS: ALLIGATORS IN THE SEWERS

This week's installment of The New Monsters deals with one of my favorite urban myths of all time.

Growing up in Northern New Jersey, Manhattan was right across the river, and for a kid in the 1980s it represented both sides of the cultural coin. It was the stuff of dreams—hip-hop, graffiti, Basquiat, clubs and the feeling that practically everything interesting in America was happening over there.

It was also the stuff of nightmares.

This was the New York of Son of Sam, abandoned buildings, graffiti-covered subway cars and an underground world that seemed to begin at the bottom of every subway staircase and continue forever beneath Manhattan.

And somewhere down there were the alligators.

At least where I grew up, nobody presented this as folklore. Somebody bought a baby alligator in Florida, brought it back to New York, discovered that baby alligators have the annoying habit of becoming adult alligators, and flushed it down the toilet.

Then it grew to twelve feet long beneath Manhattan and lived on rats.

Obviously.

The adults told us this stuff. We didn't invent it.

This week on The New Monsters, we're breaking down where the legend came from, the real alligators discovered in New York, the bizarre trade in baby alligators as Florida souvenirs and the stories of legendary sewer superintendent Teddy May that helped turn an isolated reptile into an entire subterranean population.

And here's the surprising part:

It's not as crazy as you might think.

The giant albino colonies are another matter.

THIS WEEK ON CRIMINAL MISCHIEF

BAD BLOOD: THE HATFIELDS AND THE McCOYS

Over on Criminal Mischief, Carolyn Ossorio rolls up her sleeves and heads into one of the most famous family feuds in American history: the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Long before reality television discovered that Americans would happily spend an hour watching two families scream at one another, the Hatfields and McCoys were doing it with considerably higher stakes.

The feud unfolded along the Kentucky–West Virginia border in the decades following the Civil War and became so deeply embedded in American folklore that the family names themselves became shorthand for any argument that has gone on so long nobody can quite remember why everyone is still angry.

But beneath the mythology were real people, real politics, property disputes, murder and revenge. Carolyn separates the history from the caricature this week in Bad Blood, on Criminal Mischief.

THIS WEEK ON THE SLIPPERY

Scott and Nancy are taking the Labor Day holiday off this week, no doubt researching another scammer, fraudster or human-shaped warning label whose story will eventually have you stopping halfway through the episode to Google:

“Wait... is this actually real?”

They'll be back next week.

Hang in there.

THIS WEEK IN HORROR

ONSLAUGHT

This week in horror, ONSLAUGHT, the new R-rated action-horror movie from director Adam Wingard, gives us an Army sniper veteran forced to unleash everything she knows when a rogue squad of genetically engineered super-soldiers threatens her young daughter.

And if that sounds gloriously like somebody discovered an unproduced screenplay behind a Blockbuster Video in 1989 and decided to spend actual money making it nearly four decades later, you understand why it made this week's Ledger.

Genetically engineered super-soldiers. Army sniper mom. Dan Stevens. Michael freaking Biehn.

I'm not sure what else you people want from me.

Onslaught is in theaters now.

ACROSS THE EVIO UNIVERSE

That's it for this week's Devil's Ledger.

Happy September, everybody. We survived August, Labor Day is behind us, football is back, playoff baseball is approaching, and somewhere out there somebody has already ordered a pumpkin-spice latte while it's still ninety-four degrees outside.

Hang in there. Fall is coming.

Follow your favorite Evio shows wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a 5-star rating and review, and subscribe to the Evio Creative YouTube channel and turn on notifications so you don't miss what's coming next.

We'll see you on The Devil Within, Criminal Mischief, The Slippery and everywhere else we're telling stories this week.

We'll see you across the Evio Universe.

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THE DEVIL WITHIN

The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode One: Beneath the City

On February 9, 1935, three teenagers shoveling snow into an open manhole on East 123rd Street reportedly discovered something moving beneath the ice.

An alligator.

The following morning, The New York Times carried the headline “ALLIGATOR FOUND IN UPTOWN SEWER.” The animal was reportedly seven to eight feet long, weighed roughly 125 pounds and had been dragged from beneath East Harlem using a makeshift noose fashioned from clothesline. Whatever happened on that winter afternoon, the story gave one of America's greatest urban legends something most legends can only dream of: a date, an address and witnesses.

But before we can hunt alligators beneath Manhattan, we have to understand how an entire hidden world came to exist beneath New York in the first place.

In Episode One of our latest New Monsters investigation, we descend into the history of the city beneath the city—from Manhattan's vanished streams and polluted Collect Pond to overflowing cesspools, cholera epidemics and the massive nineteenth-century engineering projects that transformed New York. The arrival of Croton water in 1842 helped create a new problem on an enormous scale: all that water eventually had to go somewhere. The solution was a vast network of brick-lined sewers constructed beneath a rapidly expanding metropolis.

Then we head south to the Sunshine State, where Florida's booming tourist industry once offered visitors a souvenir that would be almost unimaginable today: living baby alligators. They were cute, exotic and small enough to bring home. Unfortunately, alligators possess the irritating habit of becoming considerably larger alligators.

And that's where the legend gives us the image that has survived for generations: the unwanted pet disappearing down the toilet and into the sewers below.

The plumbing makes that particular scenario considerably more complicated than folklore suggests. The biology is even less cooperative; New York's cold underground environment is a miserable place for an alligator to establish a permanent home. Yet the reptile reportedly discovered in 1935 was real enough to make headlines—and that was all the story needed.

Finally, we meet Teddy May, the New York sewer worker whose stories would transform one misplaced reptile into something much larger. More than twenty years later, writer Robert Daley recorded May's extraordinary claims in The World Beneath the City: according to May, there hadn't been just one alligator beneath Manhattan.

There were dozens.

Was there really a colony living beneath New York? Were unwanted Florida souvenirs somehow surviving underground? And how did ordinary reptiles eventually become the enormous, pale, blind sewer monsters generations of Americans grew up hearing about?

Welcome to Alligators in the Sewers.

Welcome back to The New Monsters.

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The Fresno Nightcrawler: Proof of Something

There was a brief period when we thought cameras were going to solve everything.

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The Fresno Nightcrawler: The Internet Gives It Legs

One unexplained video can be dismissed as an anomaly. A second changes the equation.

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The Fresno Nightcrawler: Something Walked Across the Lawn

Something strange crossed a Fresno lawn after dark, and a security camera was there to see it.

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