Bunny Horror: Ghostly Rabbits and Witchy Hares

Ghostly rabbits, witchy hares... Welcome to one of the strangest corners of the supernatural warren. Chris and Simon talk sheep-killing, human attacking, Roman-hating, bad luck bringing bunnies and speculate about why rabbits and hares so terrified our ancestors. In this episode you will learn: what a graveyard bunny is; tricks for getting off a poaching charge; and how to sabotage a witch trial with a hare in a sack. Other highlights include: Donnie Darko, the axe-wielding Bunny Man, Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit, Stonehenge encounters, and Chris's ickie rabbit foot embargo. Will the two get hopping mad with each other or will they share a carrot and be friends? Find out on Boggart and Banshee's Night of the Lepus.

Transcript

[Simon] Well, Chris, we're here today to talk about a very sombre theme, supernatural rabbits and hares. And I thought I would start by asking you whether you have had prolonged encounters with these creatures?

[Chris] Well, I know of some people who had pet rabbits. One had a big white rabbit called Bonnie, Bonnie the Bunny, and they would keep it under a cage in the yard so it could browse on the clover and things and not be attacked by local animals. And then the same people had, when they lived in New York in an apartment, a rabbit named Mr. McGregor. Oh my god. And Mr. McGregor was a lovely rabbit. He was, I think, paper or litter trained, and he had the run of the apartment. He just hopped around. But they had to send him to a home in the country because he started gnawing the insulation off the wires.

[Simon] He didn't take after his namesake?

[Chris] No, no, he was not put into a pie. How about you? Have you had any pet rabbits?

[Simon So, my daughters did have a pet rabbit for several months. I'm afraid our pets don't survive long. And the rabbit was called Diego. And it, too, had a penchant for insulation wires. And I one day discovered that my computer adapter had been chewed through, and I was very irritated. And this brought me to the most intense experience I had with Diego. I ran after him around the house. He, too, was, let's say, more or less house trained. And I captured him. I got him into the corner of a room and very foolishly rushed him. And I got the nastiest bite I have ever had from an animal. I still, I'm looking at my thumb at the moment, and I can still see the scar where Diego took his revenge. And after that, Mr. McGregor went to the country. Diego mysteriously disappeared. And unless there's a sinister reading there, I really don't know what happened to him. It's a great mystery. One day he was there, and the next day he just wasn't in our garden.

[Chris] Oh, that's your story, and you're sticking to it. That's right, that's right. And there was a really nice casserole the next day. So, why are we talking about rabbits? What is it about rabbits?

[Simon] If you'd asked me to do a podcast on rabbits or hares, even, say, six months ago, I would have just laughed. I would have thought it was ridiculous. But over the spring, I began to keep a file on haunted rabbits and hares. This is rabbit and hare ghosts and shape changes in English mythology, in English folklore. And I was really quite struck by the number of references I got. I think you two will attest to this, Chris. We put up a suggestion for an episode on ghostly rabbits on our Facebook page, and there was quite a lot of enthusiasm, I felt. I also wrote a column on this in Fortean Times. And I think I've been writing for Fortean Times for seven or eight years. I have never had such a big response to a column. So, I feel that the hour of the lepus, the hour of the rabbit, the hour of the rabbit is upon us. And I think we should gently give some space to the rabbit and hare and see if there is something to it. Now, on a previous podcast, I said to you that it would be a simple matter to publish a short booklet on haunted chairs. And I can tell you it would be a simple matter to publish quite a long book on haunted rabbits and hares. There are loads and loads. So, let's get to it. Have you a reading to kick us off?

[Chris] I do, I do. This is from Cornwall, a very famous copper and tin mine called Wealvore. A fatal accident was always presaged by the appearance of a white hare or rabbit in one of the engine houses. This mysterious animal has often been chased in the enclosed space by the men. No dog dare join the hunt, but it always escapes. On one occasion, it dodged into an unused pipe lying on the ground and stopped at the farther end, exactly as a living rabbit might have done. Secure of their prey, the pursuers rushed to the spot, only to find the pipe empty and all trace of their quarry vanished.

[Simon] There's a lot of these accounts of rabbits presaging death, rabbits actually giving a sense to those around that someone is about to die. And this seems to be the main role with these haunting rabbits and to some extent hares. And I'll just briefly say at the beginning that I found references to these cursed hares or cursed rabbits all across Britain, apart from Highlands of Scotland. It's something that you find right through England, right through Wales, that you found from Cornwall. What about the US? Are we finding similar beings there?

[Chris] We find similar ghostly hares or rabbits. Rabbits are more common in the US than hares are. But when I see the stories, they seem to always involve a murder victim. For example, on a farm near Springfield, Missouri, a spectral rabbit lingers about an old well into which the dead body of a murdered peddler was thrown many years ago. The animal is bulletproof. No matter how many shots are aimed at it, it maintains its position day after day. You could put that verbatim in a lot of the stories of ghost rabbits. They always feature a dead person who's come back as a rabbit. Also the theme of the hunters out and they're hunting rabbits. These fellows, let's see where this was. This was Michigan, Houghton, Michigan. They came home with a bag of 17 rabbits, but they said there was one gigantic rabbit, which they couldn't find its carcass. They described it as being as big as a dog. They're all positive. They hit it and it fled into the bushes, a small clump of bushes, and they searched, couldn't find it. They think it was a rabbit's ghost.

[Simon] There's so many things to pick up on there, but let's start with size. The biggest rabbit ghost I've come across is from Glamorgan, Central Wales. I think it's the year 1900, and there's a reference to a shape-changing female ghost there that frequently, but she frequently becomes a rabbit. However, she is described as being a rabbit, the size of a sheep. And whenever I think of this, I just can't help myself. For some reason, I focus in my mind's eyes on the ears, and I imagine these gigantic ears in a field in Wales. I think I may have beaten you, Yanks, for once. Have you got any rabbits that can rival a sheep?

[Chris] No, nothing. This one was just as big as a dog, and the article said a somewhat indefinite bigness. So we don't really know, but that's the biggest one I've found.

[Simon] Problem with a lot of these rabbit ghosts is the obvious explanation is, well, they were rabbits. And I sometimes worry about this a little bit, but usually the way people in Britain get around this is they say, ah, but it was a white rabbit. So the colour white is usually very important. And I imagine, of course, there are albino rabbits that occur naturally, but it's fairly rare. I've certainly never, of the couple of hundred rabbits I've seen in the countryside in Britain, seen a white rabbit. And there is one account from Westmoreland, this tiny county in the north of England, where there is a versicoloured rabbit. I'm guessing that means black and white, but I always like to think of it as being rainbow coloured, just to make life a little bit more interesting.

[Chris] That's a really good point. I mean, Bonnie the Bunny was an albino, but you're right. They don't occur normally in nature, so they must be spooky because they're white. The other thing I've noticed from British ghost rabbits or scary rabbits, almost like boggart rabbits, is they're in graveyards a lot. And I was trying to figure out what the association of graveyards and rabbits could be, because you've got a lot of loose soil in which you can burrow, or the relative peace and quiet of a churchyard. Or are we talking church grims?

[Simon] First of all, I want to say you're absolutely right. In Britain, at least, they're frequently associated with graveyards. Our best-attested haunted rabbit is the famous, I should say infamous, Borm rabbit, which is the rabbit at a little graveyard just on the edges of Rochdale. And right up until the Second World War, locals talked about this rabbit that appeared in the graveyard chewing sedately on grass. And I suppose my reaction would be, well, maybe it's just a local rabbit chewing grass. But in many of the accounts, the rabbit is sometimes said to jump into a grave when approached. In other words, it's a spirit of one of the beings in the graveyard. And there is one graveyard in York that is supposed to have Dick Turpin's body, the famous highwayman. And he appears as a white rabbit.

[Chris] So again, we have the spirit of a dead person, maybe a murdered person, but not necessarily as a rabbit or a hare.

[Simon] Wow. Now, another thing I wanted to say, really because I'm just worried that people are going to laugh at us about this, that when I began to look at rabbits, I just couldn't take them very seriously as a haunted object. And I was surprised sometimes at the sheer terror that came through certain accounts. And I think that for us today, this is really difficult to process. Whereas a black dog, a horse that runs you into the sea or into a lake, these things can still give you a little bit of terror. And so I thought, Chris, I'd share with you a reading here, and this reading relates to Surrey. Now, Surrey is one of the greenest and most boring, forgive me, counties in Britain. And this is a lovely description that I think gets across some of the fear that you sometimes have associated with these rabbits. In a letter to the papers, Mr. Hume, the Kew naturalist, alludes to the rustic tradition that on a holy stone at the three crossways between Pearford and Woking, there sits at midnight an unholy white rabbit with fiery eyes. The rabbit, Mr. Hume told an evening news representative, is supposed to be the devil in visible shape. I think here you start to get this sense that you imagine a rustic going by on his cart and horse, and he gets to the holy stone at the three crossways, and he sees this terrifying looking white rabbit with fiery eyes. 

[Chris]And big pointy teeth.

[Simon] Oh yes. Well, Diego can tell you about pointy teeth. Remember that scar on my finger.

[Chris] Well, my favourite ghostly rabbits are ones that are death omens. And as we've said, they're frequently found in mines as a sign of a bad accident about to happen. But then there was a story from New Albany, New York, and it was told naturally by a gentleman whose veracity is beyond question. This mechanic was going to work about four in the morning, and he saw a white rabbit in the street in front of his house, and he thought, I'll get that. And he tried to grab it, but it kept jumping across the street and away from him. Every time he reached it, it got away. So it ended up on the doorstep of the house of one of his neighbours. He got close enough to pick it up. He had it cornered, bent over, only to have it vanish into thin air. And a few days after this, the little child of the man whose doorstep the rabbit was on, the child died. Now, the article goes into sort of rhapsodies about the man who witnessed the strange scene thinks that it was an angel strayed away from the upper and beautiful world and came in the form of a little white rabbit to seek out some pure little soul that it might be transplanted up above into the beautiful garden of heaven. Now, as somebody who studies the history of death tokens, this seems a little less probable than it just being a straight up omen of death.

[Simon] Yeah, here, here. And again, so many British cases follow this idea that the rabbit is an omen of death. There's one that I particularly treasure from Devon, which is the county that, to the best of my knowledge, has the most of these rabbits. And there, there is a vicar, a church of England vicar, and a parishioner comes to talk to him. And he says, you know, I was walking home last night and I saw this white rabbit. And I know that it's a sign that my son has died. And my son is on a British vessel. These were the glory days, of course, of the Royal Navy. And the vicar is very gentle. It's the vicar who writes this account and tries to disabuse the parishioner of this superstition. But in the end, the parishioner thanks him and walks away, shaking his head. And a week later, the news arrives in Devon that the son had indeed died on that day. And I'm usually so sceptical that I almost feel contempt for some of these stories. I'm ashamed to admit, forgive me, Chris, but this one really impressed me because it was the Church of England vicar who was writing, who clearly didn't want to believe, but was really impressed by this extraordinary coincidence.

[Chris] And speaking of vicars, we have to mention the rabbit seen at Epworth rectory. There was a headless badger and the manservant saw something like a small rabbit coming out of the copper hole, its ears flat upon its neck and its little scut straight up. And he tried to run after it with the tongs, but it of course vanished.

[Simon] I think it's also worth adding a little level of complication here that there are some very unusual hauntings where the rabbit actually appears with a human being. And I think I have three of these from the UK. I don't know if this would ring any American bells, but there's one case from Berkshire where there is a lady ghost that shuffles along and she has a couple of ghosts that shuffle beside her pattering along. And I think in the same way that a horse ghost is different from a knight on a horse. For me, this is a different category because I see them as an ensemble. But listen to this one. This is a really strange one in Westmoreland or what is today's Southern Cumbria. It's in this area in the fells. There is a Dobie, which is the local word for a haunting, a little bit like a boggart or a bogie. And there's a very unusual Dobie that is this man that walks along the road, but he has a rabbit in his pocket. And every so often he lets the rabbit out and this rabbit will chase after people. And if you are chased or seen by this rabbit, it is a sure omen of death. And that one is so unusual. And it's only attested in one place that I wonder if perhaps someone was perhaps making things up.

[Chris] I would think it was maybe the ghost of a poacher and he's got his rabbit in the pocket. That'd be my impression.

[Simon] Chris, that's brilliant. That this is why you're so good at this. It's such an obvious interpretation never occurred to me. Can I just share with you my favourite rabbit poaching story? Oh, sure. It's this great story about a poacher out one night. Well, we shouldn't call him a poacher. It's a great story about a gentleman out one night and he's taken by the gamekeeper with 12 rabbits on the floor in front of him. And the gamekeeper heard a lot of shooting. And so the gamekeeper gets the policeman along. He's brought up for trial. This is the 1920s. It's, you know, it's not going to be transported or executed, but it's still a serious charge. And he plays this extraordinary argument where he claims that the rabbits attacked him and it was an act of self-defence. And I suppose, unfortunately, this will be an urban legend, but the story says how in the end, the judge couldn't see a way this could be contradicted as the man had been on his own. And therefore, he didn't get to keep the rabbits, but he also didn't spend a day in the local prison.

[Chris] Oh, that was ingenious. But you can attest to the fact that rabbits can be deadly.

[Simon] Right. Well, there were several accounts over the years of rabbits actually ending people's lives, everything from people choking on rabbit bones, but particularly to rabbits causing accidents on the road, you know, motorcycle veers and goes off the road or a horse is scared by a rabbit running or a hare crossing the road. So maybe that's also part of the mystery of rabbits, rabbit ghosts.

[Chris] There's a story in one of the U.S. papers I noticed of a rabbit that was seen supposedly killing a sheep. I'm like, how? How? But that, of course, might be a misapprehension.

[Simon] Why don't you kick us off with what is the other aspect of rabbit, but particularly hare lore? And that is the idea that witches, when they want to go around the countryside, sometimes become a cat, but usually become a hare, a tradition that you find everywhere in Britain, including the Highlands of Scotland.

[Chris] Gives me a great segue to Isabel Gowdie. And she was a very famous witch. And on a trial, they described how to turn into a hare. She would chant and I'm not going to do the dialect. I shall go into a hare with sorrow and such care, and I shall go in the devil's name. And when I come home again, to change back, she would say, hare, hare, God send thee care. I am in a hare's likeness now, but I shall be in a woman's likeness even now. So that's, if you want to try this at home, I suppose.

[Simon] But you've got to have a good Scottish lowland accent.

[Chris] Yes, you do. And I can't, I simply can't do that.

[Simon] We'll put up the spell on our Facebook page, but we are not responsible for the consequences.

[Chris] Yes, exactly. So this is a very common trope is that the witch would turn herself into a hare and run around and do mischief. And if you shot the witch, you know, of course, you'd go home and you'd find the witch dead in bed or damaged in some way from the shot.

[Simon] And usually it was connected. So for example, someone would take a shot at the hare, hit it in the left ear, and then they would find that Mrs. Mopsey, the village witch, had taken to the bed with a bandage over her left ear. So it was usually quite precise.

[Chris] Exactly. And supposedly, sometimes the witches would take hare hunters on sort of a wild goose chase or a wild hare chase, as it was. There was a fellow named Bobby Dawson. He survived really long. He was the oldest whipper-in of the oldest hunting club in the world. And he said that the Billsdale witch used to turn herself into a hare and led the dogs a bootless run. So they just, for mischief, lead everybody astray.

[Simon] Well, my absolute favourite witch and hare story comes from that wonderful island, the Isle of Man, between Britain and Ireland. And there is a fabulous and very well-documented story that in the 1840s, a village had decided that one of their members was a witch and that she regularly turned into a hare. And it so happened that this came in front of the judge. It's one of these very uncomfortable 19th century moments where clearly most of the people on the jury and everyone in the public galleries really did think she was a witch. And the judge was trying to keep some kind of order. And at the height of this legal judicial persecution, a jester in the court came up with this astoundingly funny trick. And he had actually brought a live hare into court and he opened the sack. And you can imagine this terrified hare, suddenly it could see freedom. And in the way that hares do, it jumped six feet and landed in the middle of the court and started to hop around as it desperately tried to escape. And there was absolute bedlam in the courtroom. Everyone was utterly, utterly terrified. People began to scream, the witch, the witch. And you can imagine the court was cleared very quickly. I think of all our 19th century witch stories, that is my absolute favourite.

[Chris] Oh, that's a brilliant one. Kudos to whoever thought of bringing the poor hare into the courtroom. This one, I don't know whether to class it as a witch rabbit or a ghost rabbit. It was a bewitched farmhouse in Binbrook. And the foreman and his wife, according to the newspaper story, said, they tell weird tales of a dead rabbit, which detached itself from a hook outside the house, ran about and went back to the hook again. Oh, I mean, I assume it was being hung before it was skinned and eaten. But so I'm not sure if that was a ghost or if it was being bewitched by the local witch just to run around. And then you've got this from Sussex, 1868. John Byrd claimed that he was always being kept awake by a witch in the shape of a large hare who sat at the foot of his bed every night. So he arranged a scythe across his open window, so the hare would cut itself while climbing into the room. And the next morning, he found a trail of blood leading to the witch's cottage and he wasn't troubled again.

[Simon] That's a nice variant on that version we were saying before. There's very little writing on rabbits and hares, but I just want to throw in here a suggestion that I found in a couple of older books, which is interesting. Lots of these witch hare stories involve, as Chris rightly points out, hunts. Is it possible that this is something to do with the so-called wild hunt? The idea that at a certain time of the night and of the year, the devil or some diabolical figure will lead horses and black dogs in pursuit of sinners. And there were a couple of legends in Britain, and I'm sorry to drag us back to ghosts here, but particularly in the Southwest where we this podcast, where there's talk of a spirit being transmuted, transformed into a hare, and then being chased by ghostly hunters. So there may be some kind of connection there in the background. I'm sceptical, but I mentioned it just in case that appeals to you or to anyone.

[Chris] Yeah, I hadn't thought about that in connection with the wild hunt since I think of them as being primarily up in the sky.

[Simon] One of the things I love about the witch's hare story is just how many there are and how late they go. They really do last as belief legends after the Great War, which is rather unusual in Britain. However, there is another legend that I privately suspect might be a descendant of the witch's hare legend. And I have a couple of examples of this from Southern England, and Chris, it will be very familiar to you. Hunters go out and they're trying to kill rabbits, they get a couple of hares, and at one point they see a usually a quite big hare and they take a shot at it and they visibly hit it and they go over to get it and it's not there. And you, of course, have given us a US version. I was very excited to hear it. And I wonder if maybe as belief in witchcraft broke down in the way that legends work, this was just too good a legend to give up. And this is the last little heartbeat of this legend as it is ground down into mythological hummus.

[Chris] But yeah, that may be right, because normally you'd have the hare disappear and then the witch would be found back in her cottage. So yeah, that makes perfect sense.

[Simon] Chris, it's so rare for you to say that. I can't tell you how happy I am at the moment. This is a very rare occurrence. What else? We also wrote emails to each other about this beforehand, and you talked about several superstitions concerning hares and rabbits. Now, I have only one. It involves hares and fire. So I'm going to hold back, but I'm very curious what you've come up with there.

[Chris] Well, of course, there's the rabbit's foot. Now, do you have these in England? Is this a lucky charm in England, the rabbit's foot?

[Simon] I think it's there in the culture. I don't know if it's British or whether we've just borrowed it through American sitcoms and films and the like. I'm not sure.

[Chris] I would say you probably had, because whenever I read about it, it's presented as a rural superstition or even a superstition of Black communities. And there's very, very specific requirements. It has to be the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit killed in the dark of the moon. So very, very, very, very specific. And you can't use it yourself. You have to give it away to somebody else, and then it will give them the luck. And you have to rub it to activate the luck. They were popular as love or luck charms or for gamblers. And I always kind of laughed because there was a gambling charm that was the forefinger of a dead woman. So maybe these guys were squeamish about digging up a grave, but they didn't mind going to a graveyard in the dark of the moon at midnight to kill a rabbit.

[Simon] But I wanted to ask you about graveyard rabbit. What does that even mean? Just a rabbit that happened to be killed in a graveyard? Yes.

[Chris] And they always refer to it as a graveyard rabbit. And what's interesting is there is the association of graveyard rabbits, and they are actually people who study cemetery monuments. Because when I first saw that, I'm like, what? Why are they called that? But yeah, they always refer to these as graveyard rabbits. And we had these in high school. There was a fad for rabbit's feet, and they were dyed in various colours and used as keychains. I have to ask, Chris, what colour was yours? I actually didn't have one, but I saw people with them. I thought they were a little icky. A bit garish. Yeah. So we have rabbit feet.

[Simon] Any other superstitions?

[Chris] Well, in the Silver Bullet and other American witch stories, there's a story about a young woman who had headaches. And her wise woman told her that her headaches were probably caused by birds carrying off her hair, using it to make nests. And she suggested that a witch had put some of their hair under the skin of a wild rabbit, like inserted it under a live rabbit's belt to cast a spell onto her, and it wouldn't be broken until the rabbit was killed. So when a local man shot the rabbit, her headaches immediately ceased. So yeah, that's another one. Elliot O'Donnell, who we can't really trust that well, but said, hares and rabbits are very susceptible to the super physical, the presence of which they scent in the same manner as do horses and dogs. And he says that he's known rabbits to be absolutely terrified when brought into a, quote, haunted house.

[Simon] So you have rabbits almost like canaries in the coal mine.

[Chris] Yeah, canaries in the coal mine Yeah.

[Simon] The ghost hunter brings along this cage and poor Diego or whoever, Mr. McGregor in his retirement.

[Chris] And they scream. Rabbits do scream.

[Simon] They do.

[Chris] It's really terrifying. Let's see. Also, if you meet a rabbit going from home, look for trouble before you return. And if you come back, you're coming back home and you see a rabbit, there'll be trouble in your family. So they've got good luck, bad luck, alternating. It's kind of hard to say, you know, which is which.

[Simon] The last one, Chris, is very common in British folklore. The others for me are rather exotic. Ah. So what about hairs and fire? Do you know about this? 

[Chris] I don't. Tell me. 

[Simon] This is a really interesting superstition, and it's particularly interesting because it's very well attested over centuries. We have a mediaeval reference to the idea that if a hair appears in a settlement, so a little village, a hamlet, this is the sign that there would soon be a fire. Oh, right. In said settlement. Now, this is also then it resurfaces in our records in the 19th century when people are collecting folklore. And I actually have descriptions from newspapers from the early 20th century, just before the Great War, from Bedfordshire, where people clearly believe this and that a hair had been seen in the street of Village X and the week after there was a fire and no one was surprised. And for me, it's a peculiar idea, because why would you connect hairs and fire?

[Chris] Yeah, that's that's a mystery to me. Of course, I have a forensic idea that you've got a bonfire that you set and there was a rabbit underneath it and it runs out and it's on fire and it catches everything in the vicinity on fire. But that's extreme projection, I guess. That's always ingenious, though. In the book, Magical House Protection, I was reading that sometimes rabbits were walled up, either as, quote, foundation sacrifices, whether that was a real thing or not, like cats were, and maybe that was an anti-fire protection. There was one where the rabbit was discovered buried in a coffin at the top of the wall of a house. There was no date given on this, and all I can think of is the hair in Rowan's coffin in The Wicker Man.

[Simon] Wow. Well, I wasn't expecting that. This is Brian Hoggard's book, is it?

[Chris] Yes. Yes. It's a wonderful book.

[Simon] Chris, you gave me this book as a present, and you've given me several presents over the years, but maybe this has been the single most useful one. It's a wonderful, wonderful book, and it's now in paperback, so you can get it at a reasonably cheap price for what is a fabulous volume. You've given us as well The Wicker Man. I thought it might be interesting just to talk about rabbits and hares in general culture, and I wanted to start, actually, with a hare from a couple of thousand years ago, one of our earliest reliable references to Britain. When Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni, was thinking about revolting against the Romans, she actually had a ritual where she took a live hare and she released it from the folds of her dress, and the elders of the Iceni tribe decided whether or not to go to war on the basis of this augury, and the hare ran, depending on your point of view, in the right or the wrong direction, and a couple of weeks later, London was on fire and many Romans were in the mortuary. And any other rabbits or hares from our more general, perhaps more modern culture, Chris?

[Chris] I'm only thinking of films and urban legends like Harvey, the movie Harvey, where he's a puka. That was the first time I ever heard the word puka. And then there's Donnie Darko, which the rabbit in the publicity posters is just terrifying. They really did a good job making a horrifying rabbit.

[Simon] I think another important moment with public consciousness and rabbits came with Watership Down. Oh, yes. So, Richard Adams wrote this novel, I think, in the mid-late 70s, and then the film was made, I think, perhaps late 70s, very early 80s. This is an animated film, and both the book and the film are very powerful. And then on the back of the success of the film, an animated series with three or four seasons was made. I watched the series with my kids and greatly enjoyed it. And there were several very, let's say, dark rabbit characters in the novel and the adaptations. So, I think that's a little bit of a useful corrective to this idea of rabbits being these rather useless lumps of fur, not really capable of producing fear.

[Chris] Well, then you have The Bunny Man, urban legend, where people do their legend tripping, searching for this thing. About 1970, I think, there was supposedly a man wearing a rabbit costume who attacked people with an axe or a hatchet. This was in Virginia, near a railway overpass, sometimes referred to as Bunny Man Bridge, which intrigues me because these creatures often appear near bridges, like the Popelik Goat Man Bridge, that sort of thing. So, these urban legend monsters almost always have a bridge connection. But it was based completely on, I think, it was pretty much based on fiction. There may have been somebody running around pretending in a rabbit suit. There's a whole legend of how all these people were murdered. And supposedly, there's a variant of it in England, Wembley Police Station. Some of the detainees were supposedly beaten up by somebody in a bunny mascot costume. Again, urban legend stuff.

[Simon] No, I'm just trying to process this. And I was thinking again of the, you're right, very frightening rabbits in Donnie Darko. And I just wonder if there's something about the harmlessness of the bunny rabbit that just makes the creature so much more frightening when it becomes violent in that way or potentially violent. It reminds me a little bit about the fear people have of clowns. I mean, in a certain sense, the clown is the most harmless, joyful thing you can imagine. 

[Chris] Oh, no, it's not. 

[Simon] Well, I don't want to contradict you, but I guess what I want to say is that it should be. And so, when it becomes sinister, it's absolutely ghastly. Maybe there's something similar going on with bunnies. I'm not sure.

[Chris] They're also in magic. You always pull a rabbit out of a hat. So, they've got sort of a magic association. I think they drew the chariot of goddess Diana. I've often wondered why a rabbit, why not a cat or a rat or a bird out of a hat?

[Simon] Now, you've got me curious. Another, just an image that flashed into my head. Have you ever seen those illuminated manuscripts where rabbits are anthropomorphised, so they start killing people or fighting each other? And I wonder if that, too, is this idea that rabbits, of all creatures, they're... They're such cute little bunny. Yeah, yeah.

[Chris] Very possible. Yeah, those are great. Well, look... I've seen series of those.

[Simon] One thing that I've been quite excited about as I've been looking at these rabbits is to think back to Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll's book, and the white rabbit there. And I'm starting to think of that book in a slightly different light now, because if you really have these English lowland traditions about white rabbits being portents of death, of the supernatural generally, I wonder if that figure doesn't make a lot more sense. And if there's someone out there who's 20 and wants to write an incredibly pretentious article for Victorian studies, and knows their Foucault and Derrida, and I'm sure that this tiny idea could be easily spun out over 20 pages. But I think there might be something there that we've missed in terms of Lewis Carroll, but I'm guessing you're not a fan anyway.

[Chris] I'm not. I'm not. The whole thing is just too psychedelic for my taste.

[Simon] Yeah, the good, prim, proper Swiss lady. That's how I think of you.

[Chris] I was the librarian for the revolution.

[Simon] Oh dear. Well, Chris, look, I was told off last time for trying to jump over further reading, but surely there is no further reading for ghost rabbits or hares.

[Chris] There is, and it came from you, from the Fairy Census. Oh. So this was in the 2020s.

There were two people witnessing this. It said the witness was tired, hadn't slept for a long time. The sun was setting and my friend and her mom were sitting outside their car on a country road beside Stonehenge. It was the summer solstice and the sun was just setting. Looking up the hill to the stones, she and her mom saw a giant hare as tall as the stones. Scared, she scrambled into the car, but when she looked back, it was gone.