Where Do Stories Come From? Urban Legends, the Bunny Man, and Disco Donna

Many thanks to E. B. Davis for inviting me to talk about the genesis of my short story, “Disco Donna,” published this month in the Chesapeake Crimes: Homicidal Holidays anthology.

So, where did Disco Donna come from?

Urban legends fascinate me. Not so much the ones about albino alligators in the sewers of New York City as much as tales of vanishing hitchhikers or haunted Lovers Lanes. These stories often reflect the preoccupations and fears of those living where the events reportedly took place.

One aspect of urban legends that especially intrigues is the associated phenomena of legend tripping. Did your teenage self – on a dare – ever go to a supposedly haunted house or cave where doomed lovers died, or an unholy rite occurred, or a monster lurked? If you did, you, my friend, legend tripped.

Teens in my area go to the Bunny Man Bridge, site of the urban legend of Fairfax County, Virginia, the Bunny Man. Years ago – no one is exactly sure when – an escapee from an asylum (naturally), wearing a bunny suit, menaced parking kids with a machete on the isolated, lonely roads near an abandoned railroad bridge. The usual stew of insanity, fear, death, sex, and a machete for good measure make this an enduring tale, and teens still dare each other to visit the creepy bridge.

At the same time I was mulling over story ideas, some friends and I were talking about reputations. Do teens worry about their reputation anymore? I flashed back to long ago high school days when many girls (sign of the times – it was usually only girls) had a “bad reputation” due to their dating history.

That’s when beautiful, wild Disco Donna Demonte danced—to a Bee Gees tune—onto the page. Fictional Donna is a high school student in the seventies, bad rep, too hot to care, discovered murdered in her bed the morning after Halloween. She had been strangled and is clutching a single, red rose. Rumors swirl about the killer: Could it have been the high school football captain? Devil worshippers? The ever reliable escapee from an insane asylum? As years pass and her murderer is never found, kids from the town dare each other to visit the abandoned house where Disco Donna was murdered.

Flash forward to the present day, to some high school girls in a vintage clothing store trying to decide what to be for Halloween. One girl decides to dress as the town’s most famous citizen—Disco Donna. That innocent decision sets in motion events that finally unmask Disco Donna’s killer.

Hope you enjoy the story. Just remember to put some Donna Summer on the stereo, lock the door, and read with the lights on.

I am grateful to the wonderful editors of the anthology: Barb Goffman, Donna Andrews (not a model for Disco Donna!) and Marcia Talley. These brilliant criminal minds were there when I needed them to fill plot holes, polish prose, and vanquish tense shifts. A million thanks, ladies.

Do you have a favorite urban legend? Did you ever legend trip?

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The Bunny Man: A Suburban Legend

When I was growing up in Connecticut we heard many stories of the Black Dog of the Hanging Hills (a wonderfully gothic name – sounds like something from a Sherlock Holmes tale). The supernatural dog roamed the hills, and woe to the unlucky walker who encountered him. If you saw the red, demonic eyes of the black dog, er, Black Dog, it was said you’d die in three days. This didn’t stop people from walking the beautiful hills, but it did make for good campfire stories.

My new home in Northern Virginia features its own fairly modern urban, or more precisely, suburban legend: The Bunny Man.

Gather round the fire, get your marshmallows ready….

In a rural part of Fairfax County, a country road twists through (Don’t turn to the left! Ignore those McMansions and the shopping center!) Ahem, where was I? Oh yes… the road twists past ramshackle abandoned farms and barren fields, then narrows to a single lane to pass under a decaying railroad bridge. You know the one. The Bunny Man Bridge.

Well, my friend heard from her cousin (the captain of the volleyball team) that there were these kids? And they were parking near the bridge? At midnight? When some crazy guy who escaped from the insane asylum in A WHITE BUNNY SUIT started chopping on their car roof? With AN AXE! He chopped and chopped, screaming about how he was going to kill them just the way he chopped up those other kids and hung them up on the bridge for everyone to see –

Well, you get the picture.

The Bunny Man tale features several favored horror tropes:  teens, a Lovers Lane at midnight, an axe, the insane asylum. Some versions of the story add “accounts” of murdered children and “reports” of skinned animals to the tale.

Is there any factual basis to the Bunny Man legend? I decided I needed facts, so I turned to an expert account: “The Bunnyman Unmasked: Real life origins of an Urban Legend” by Brian A. Conley, Historian-Archivist with Fairfax County Public Libraries. When reading this account of a dogged historian’s search for the truth behind the Bunny Man story, what fascinated me most was the way the story changed and grew more ornate, gory, and supernatural. The story grew from minor but real events to the point that the story was filmed for a ghost-busting television show in the 90s and was made into two indie horror films that were apparently as bad as you think they’d be. The versions of the story multiplied like, well, you know.

What I had been calling an Urban Legend is actually referred to in academic circles as an Urban Belief Tale. Urban Belief Tales like The Bunny Man take place in an urban setting and have elements that have appeared in print as truth. Some scholars add that these tales reflect community morals and concerns, thus acting as cautionary tales for teens who would frequent Lovers Lanes. We all know how well they work.

So, was there ever really a Bunny Man?

Conley found police reports in the Washington Post of a man with an axe threatening developers who were building the huge tract neighborhoods that sprang up around Washington, DC in the 1970s. Someone calling himself The Axe Man called a builder to complain about construction debris, and a few days later a man in a bunny suit was seen chopping at the columns on a newly built house.

At about the same time, a young Navy cadet was parked with his date on a secluded Lovers Lane near the bridge when they were accosted by a man who told them they were trespassing. As they drove away, the man threw an axe through the car window. The axe element, plus the young woman’s description of the man’s white headgear – she thought it looked like bunny ears - were the link in the two tales. Thus were planted the seeds of the Bunny Man Legend, which today is a gothic horror tale complete with children and/or teen sweethearts strung up from the railroad bridge by an axe murdering bunny-suited man/extraterrestrial/psychopath/cannibal/zombie (take your pick) with supernatural powers.

In my short story, “Disco Donna,” I invented my own urban legend, the story of Disco Donna, a wild high school girl too hot to care about her bad reputation. The story goes that Donna was strangled in her bed on Halloween night, her body found the next morning clutching a single red rose. The details – some say the murderer was the high school football captain, some say it was an escapee from a psychiatric hospital one town over – change depending on who tells the story. The elements of a sexually active teen, roses, and Halloween night are typical embroideries to these campfire stories.

What’s your favorite urban – or suburban - legend?

PS Readers of fellow blogger Gloria Alden’s Bigfoot post will be relieved to hear that the Urban Legend of the Capture of Bigfoot by a man claiming he lured the creature with $200 worth of ribs has been debunked by Snopes. No surprise for those of us at WWK. We all know from Gloria’s blog that the real Bigfoot can only be lured with pizza.