The Bunny Man

There once was a man with ears, you see

In the dead of night, He'll come for thee

He'll drag you into the woods to scream

And there your bones he'll gnaw

Soon shall The Bunny Man come

To take you away from your dad and mum

Soon shall The Bunny Man come

And your soul shall belong to him

"Catherine, Stop!" I'd scream when she'd sing it, and she'd just cackle and sing it louder.

I can only still remember my sister's face because of that ghoulish smile she wore while she tormented me.

We grew up in New Zealand, so the shanty was something we sort of came up with. Many of the kids sang it, but my sister was the first to adopt it into something different from the original. A few kids had added some creative lyrics to the original, usually something about "fartymen" or something, but Catherine had turned it into a song about the Bunny Man. She was forbidden from singing it at school by our parents and the teachers at the middle school we attended. She took it as an excuse to sing it for me at every opportunity. It was usually sung low, or under her breath, so my parents couldn't hear it, so she could deny it when I went to them crying about it.

It was in poor taste anyway.

The Bunny Man may have been an urban legend, but the man going kidnapping children was very real.

That summer, thirteen children had gone missing in the city we lived in. All of them were from poor families, like ours, who lived in tenement buildings, like ours. They always disappeared in the middle of the night after being lured out of their home, and there was always some sign left behind that tied them together. Whether it was spray-painted on their door, the fence behind their house, or the side of the building they lived in, the calling card was always left in plain white spray paint for the police to find. A white rabbit head in a white circle.

The sign of the Bunny Man.

My sister had started humming the little shanty after the seventh kid had gone missing. I had heard her in her room, working through the lyrics as we did homework. She would hum them to herself in that distracted way people do when trying to figure something out. As she scratched away at moth problems, she would argue with herself and make corrections to the grizzly shanty she was constructing. I would shudder to myself as I heard what she was writing, and I think I became her horrified little barometer.

The more I shuddered, the more lyrics I heard that stayed in place.

By the time school started in august, her shanty had taken form, and she began her reign of terror.

Catherine and I were two years apart. I had started sixth grade as she started eighth, and she seemed to delight in terrorizing the other girls in my class with her Bunny Man song. She would walk behind groups of students, humming the tune at first as they walked to class or lunch. Then she would begin to sing the words to herself, low at first, building volume, until a few of them started to hear what she was singing and become noticeably upset. Then she would run up behind the group, caterwauling the last verse as she sent them screaming and running in all directions.

That how she had earned herself a suspension from school and a grounding by our parents.

That what she was home that night, the night of December fifteenth.

The night The Bunny Man did indeed come.

We were both grounded that night, actually. My sister was grounded after being suspended from school for her Bunny man shenanigans. She didn't much care. She was happy to put off her school work and watch tv all day and suffer the wrath of our parents.

I, however, was grounded for encouraging these antics by saying I had seen the Bunny Man.

It wasn't a joke, though. I wasn't trying to encourage Catherine in her bad behavior. I had woken up for six nights in a row, hearing someone humming that shanty and going to the window to see who it was. I couldn't actually be hearing anyone, I realize now. Our loft was on the fifth floor, looking out on the vacant lot and road behind the building. There was no way I should have been able to hear anything. I could though, I can clearly remember hearing the shanty hummed in a gravelly baritone that sounded as though it were right outside my window. The first few times I heard it, I went to the window and looked out on the lot.

In the moonlight there he would stand, in the road.

A man in a dingy gray rabbit costume, his eyes glowing yellow and ears cocked almost jauntily.

My parents would hear me screaming and come running into my room to see what was going on. They would find me on my floor, screaming and pointing out the window, always jibbering about the Bunny Man. After the third night, I didn't even go to the window. I would lay in bed and sob as the shanty bore into my brain. I would sob and call for them, screaming about the damned Bunny Man, until finally, my father couldn't take it anymore.

That's why both of us were grounded on the night in question, and our parents were out.

It was supposed to be family night. We were supposed to go out and have a meal as a family, see a movie, maybe get some ice cream. Instead, my father had been using it as a punishment for my sister after she'd gotten in trouble. We three would go out and have fun while she stayed home and did not. My mother, however, thought this was a little harsh, and she had been pleading with him to reconsider all week. This had made him a little short, and after being woken up by my screaming all week, he had reached his limit. He grounded me as well, thinking I was trying to egg my sister on with all this Bunny Man nonsense and announced that he and my mother were going on a date instead.

"We will be back at ten. You two are to be in bed by eight-thirty. If I come in and you are still awake, you will be severely punished."

Then they had left, and for a few hours, we'd gotten along pretty well.

Catherine made dinner, heating up some canned pasta in the microwave, and then we'd watched some TV as the sunset and the evening wore on. It wasn't until eight, when I got off the couch and started for bed, that she started in her old ways. She asked what I was doing, and when I told her I was going to get ready for bed, she asked why.

"You heard Dad. If we're still up he gets here, then we'll get in trouble."

"Pfff, probably just scared that the Bunny Man will hear you're awake and come get you."

"Am not," I lied.

"Are too. You're in such a hurry to go to sleep, so The Bunny Man will come and peak at you while you're asleep."

"Cut it out, Catherine!"

She leaned towards me, grinning that awful grin, "Oh, there once was a man with ears, you see..."

I put my hands over my ears and started running away as she sang all the louder and chased me.

"In the dead of the night, he'll come for thee!"

"Stop it, Catherine!" I sobbed

We were running up the hall, and as I wheeled into my room, I tried to slam the door and lock her out. She battered the door aside and bore down on me, grinning and singing as I cowered beneath the window. I was covering my head with my arms, sobbing uncontrollably as I tried to block her out. She stalked towards me, bellowing the song now and scinching her hands like claws as she walked towards me.

"Soon shall the Bunnyman Come, to..." but she stopped suddenly, and as the silence stretched on, I opened my eyes and looked up to find her looking out the window as she loomed over me. She was staring out the window, transfixed by whatever she saw there, and this new game was almost scarier than the shanty. Her face held a look I was unused to seeing. She was startled, unsure of what she was seeing, but it also appeared that there was terror there. Something outside the window had really spooked her, and I scrambled up to peek under her arm so I could see too.

It seemed I was peeking into one of my nightmares.

Standing in the road, right under a street light, was a man in a tattered gray bunny costume. It wasn't like a Halloween costume, some of which looked more like pajamas than a costume, but it was a full suit of course-looking gray fur. The fir was matted and dark in places, the fur kinky and tangled like a stuffed animal that needs to be brushed. The head was obscured by a black hood, some kind of costume hood that just slid over the head, and the face was a flat black nothing as it stared at our building.

No, not our building, as it stared at us!

On top of the hood, someone had stapled a pair of thin, emaciated gray rabbit ears, one of which bent at an almost jaunty angel.

He stood on the street and stared up at us, my sister and I frozen in terror at the sight of the legendary Bunny Man.

All at once, I heard a gruff, tuneless humming from the street that sounded startlingly like Catherine's shanty. He had no words to go along with it. He only hummed and stared, and I think we both felt an almost magnetic desire to stare back at him. It was like the scene in a scary movie where the monster is out in the open, and you pray that none of the characters are stupid enough to go confront him.

In your heart, though, you know one of them is.

Catherine, it appeared, was that one.

I caught her by the arm as she turned from the window. She looked back at me, her face full of confused anger and unsure deliberation. She was clearly at odds with herself, and my sister was not someone who was used to being unsure of her actions. She was a brat, and she was a terror, but I had always kind of believed that everything she did was a calculated course of risks and rewards. This was something else, though. This was her acting against her will.

After all she had sung about The Bunny Man coming for others, it appeared to be her he had come for.

She jerked her hand away and left my room. When I heard the front door open and close, I moved back to the window, waiting for her to appear. The Bunny Man went right on humming, right on watching, as though he were trying to call me as well. I felt the pull, really I did, but my fear kept me rooted to the spot. I clutched the window sill tightly, the paint chipping a little as my fingers gripped it, and I would find splinters under my nails the next day, though I didn't notice the rest of that night.

Then she appeared in the backyard, walking like a sleepwalker and going to him as she vaulted the chainlink fence between the yard and roar.

He reached for her hand, and now I could hear both of them humming that hateful song and staring up at me. It filled my head like a hive of bees, and I knelt my head against the glass as I prayed that it would stop. There would be no way I could resist if they both sang, and I could feel the pull as they tried to drag me out the door as well.

After about sixty seconds of them humming and starring, she took his hand, and the two of them disappeared up the road.

My parents came home three hours later to find me curled up on the floor of my bedroom, sobbing and gibbering, as I rocked and mumbled about The Bunny Man.

They searched the house immediately, thinking that my sister had gone too far now. She had finally scared me too much, and now she was going to have to answer for it. As my mother sat with me, trying to console me, my father tore up the house looking for her. He clearly expected her to be hiding somewhere inside, probably running when she heard the front door open. When he couldn't find her inside, he went looking for her at her friend's houses. Their parents told him, often grumpily, that they hadn't seen Catherine, but they would call him if they did. He got worried then, going to look up and down the street for her, expecting her to have hidden somewhere in fear of retribution.

All the while, mom tried to calm me down and get a straight answer out of me. After about an hour, I started talking about The Bunny Man and how he had come to get us and how Catherine had left with him. She started to get angry, telling me that she was tired of hearing about the damn Bunny Man. However, when I refused to deviate from my story, she started to take me a little more seriously.

The police were called, the neighborhood was searched, people were questioned, and the woods were combed for the next week and a half.

No sign was ever found of my sister or The Bunny Man.

No sign was ever found of any of the children abducted by The Bunny Man that year.

That was fifteen years ago. The Bunny Man took only one more child that year, a seven-year-old girl, on Christmas Eve, and then was never seen again. They never found the remains of any of the children he kidnapped, and no one was ever arrested in connection with the kidnappings. There was never any bunny suit found or a murder weapon discovered in the woods.

Whoever was doing these things just stopped.

I'm twenty-seven now, and my own daughter is eight. Her dad's not really in the picture, which leaves a lot of time for just us. I was getting ready for bed one night, Emilly playing in her room before bedtime, when I heard something that made me stop dead in my tracks. The tune, a familiar tune that everyone in my town knew, crept up the hallway. The tune wasn't what stopped me. It was the lyrics that made me shiver. The words she sang transported me back in time, and suddenly I was twelve years old and watching my older sister creep towards me as she sang those same hateful words.

However, the voice that sang them was childish, lilting the words with no more care than she would have had for any nursery rhyme.

There once was a man with ears, you see

In the dead of night, He'll come for thee

He'll drag you into the woods so green

And there your bones he'll gnaw

Soon shall The Bunny Man come

To take you away from your dad and mum

Soon shall The Bunny Man come

And your soul shall belong to him

I peeked around the corner of the door frame and saw her on the floor playing with blocks, oblivious to what she was singing.

"Emilly," I asked, trying not to let her know she had spooked me, "where did you hear that song?"

She got up and walked to her bed, giggling as she crawled under the covers, "From the funny lady."

"What funny lady?" I asked, bending to tuck her in but finding my hands incapable.

"She comes and sings it at night. Sometimes, after you go to sleep, I'll wake up and hear her singing it. When I go to the window, she's standing out on the street. She has ears on top of her hoody, mommy. Isn't that silly?"

I told her it was, but I didn't feel like laughing in the least bit.

Emily is in my bed now, sleeping soundly as I pin this warning to anyone whose children have heard this song too. I'm afraid it's not an urban legend. It's not a hoax. The Bunny Man is real, and it seems that he's not alone anymore. He's coming for our children again, and I, for one, don't mean to lose my daughter this creep or his children.

As I lay here writing, I can almost hear it on the breeze.

Soon shall The Bunny Man come

As if someone is singing it outside my window

To take you away from your dad and mum

Emilly is stirring in her sleep.

Soon shall The Bunny Man come

It appears it may not just be in my head.

And your soul shall belong to him

I fear it may already be too late.