Easter Bunny Sighting
I have to admit, I also saw the Easter Bunny, along with my little brother. This was probably the formative experience that caused me to become Fortean. I was about 11 or 12 and my younger brother was 8 or 9. We were the youngest two of five so we had lost the belief in Santa Claus pretty early on, and had never really fallen for the Easter Bunny and tooth fairy myths. To us, Easter was totally about one thing--candy.
It was about 10 AM on Easter Sunday--we had cheated and gone to the 6 AM mass with our dad, who liked this mass because it had the fastest priest. We got to skip the high Easter mass and had gotten into our Easter baskets when we got home. You'd think if we were going to see the Easter Bunny, the time would have been when we were looking for our baskets, rather than hours after we had boarded the chocolate train.
To set up the visual, our house had a staircase that folded back on itself, with a landing in between the two flights. When you crossed the landing towards the bottom flight of stairs, you were put directly in line of sight of the main hall that led from the kitchen out towards the front door.
My brother and I were running down the stairs, racing towards some goal that I no longer remember, and as we rounded the corner for the bottom flight of stairs, we saw it--a huge white rabbit--probably 5 feet tall, but otherwise having normal rabbit features--fur, long ears, cotton tail, standing on it's hind feet with an Easter basket hanging from its right front fore-leg like a market basket on a farm-wife's arm.
When we first saw it is was just sort of sauntering through the house--I don't remember it hopping, but it was moving at a casual pace. I have an impression that it seemed sort of self-satisfied, but in a good way, like someone who has just done some secret good deed. I don't know why it seemed like this, because it had rabbit facial features, not human, but this is the impression I got. But then it saw us pounding down the stairs at about the same time as we saw it, and it got a sort of "oh shit" expression on its face and took off down the hall.
Again, I don't remember it hopping, but it was like it was moving so fast the method of locomotion became a blur. At any rate, it ran up the hall and my brother and I ran after it, not even thinking of the situation as bizarre at all, just thinking "catch that rabbit!"
The hall from the stairs to the front door was only about 50 feet, but by the time we got to the bottom of the staircase, the rabbit was gone, and the front door closed and locked. We opened up the door and looked all around the porch and yard, and up and down the street, but never found it, or a guy with a rabbit suit over his arm getting into a car.
That was part of the strangeness of it all--we didn't think the rabbit was strange--somehow that wasn't a shock to any part of our belief systems. But when we got outside, it was so empty--everyone in the neighborhood was at Easter services except for us and the dad (who was upstairs trying to take a nap before he'd sent us downstairs to keep out of his hair).
I remember there being just a really strange quality to the daylight, like when streams of sunlight break out of a cloudbank--the light and the quiet and the emptiness were surreal.
My brother and I went back inside and discussed what we'd seen, and we'd both got the impression that the Easter Bunny had just been cutting through our house? That he'd come in the back door, gone through the kitchen and was headed down the hall when we'd spotted him, which was obviously not part of his plan.
I had actually sort of lost this memory for a while--buried it in my childhood collection, and not labeled it as anything out of the ordinary. I remembered it only because my own children started asking if Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were real.
Over the last five years, I've puzzled over this experience. It didn't seem tulpa-ish--the bunny seemed to have a definite purpose and reactions of his own outside of my and my brother's thought constructs. I have never seen the film Harvey, and had never even heard of it at this age. It's possible that if this was a construct, that it was somehow inspired by the Trix rabbit, but I don't know if that ad campaign had started yet, this being the early 70's.
Also, except for the weird emptiness and quiet outside, the actual sighting of the bunny didn't strike us as odd, eerie, supernatural, scary, or any of the reactions that might identify an encounter with a non-natural being. If a pony had trotted through the house it would have struck us in the same way, even if the pony disappeared at the door.
Since then, I've had only one other questionable sighting--again with my brother and one of our cousins--seeing a brown bear at a place where everyone else we knew said it was impossible for a bear to be. So why was the Easter Bunny my one glimpse into the hidden secrets of our universe? I have to chalk this one up to the Joker.