Rabbit Monster

[Leaferne]

Surely that thing is going to look pretty tatty in a couple of months? Or are they planning to send some kind of giant cleaning lady up the mountain every week to give it a polish?

That's what I was thinking; if it's made of wool, it's going to get filthy and be ravaged by animals--or, heaven forbid, set alight.

 

[krobone]

Re: Easter bunny and Christ

Yes, you are quite correct in that for a time Christianity and the Old Faith existed in harmony for many years in Britain, I did not mean to imply any cultural or religious tyrrany across the board, merely stating in a simplistic way what happened with the Easter Bunny.

Certainly the Culdee Church flourished in the Western Isles and Scotland where the Old Faith and Christianity were practised together and it all worked really well.

However, this joyous union was edged out to the fringes by the established church. The problem is not with Christianity or Christians but with people in authority who mistake their own narrowness for Christ's.

After all, St Columba once said: 'Christ is my Druid'. Hardly the thing to say if he thought either deserved censure.

You are also correct in saying that religions throughout history amalgamate and evolve (the Egyptians did it all the time, as did the Romans) - it's one way in which cultures learn to understand each other.

[/quote]

Ditto.

Back to the rabbits - anyone ever see 'Alice' by Jan Svankmajer? The White Rabbit in that will give you the willies. Brrr... :shock:

 

[Anonymous]

Pink bunnies

Oh yes, that would disturb me if I saw it in poor light - especially if I had been sampling the local chianti.

Is it true that the ears follow you, no matter where you stand to look at it?

 

[Anonymous]

Alice and Rabbits

Yes I've seen a clip of that particular version of 'Alice'. Seriously freaky - scared the willies out of me!

 

[tattooted]

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.

 

[PeniG]

The Trix rabbit dates back at least to my childhood, and I was born in 1961.

I have no suggestions to offer. This is my favorite kind of Fortean story - purposeless, bizarre, inexplicable, and not, to the experiencers, remotely eerie. Any suggestions anyone can make will be in the nature of an explanatory fable, related more to the teller's ability to construct sense out of a nonsensical world than to what really happened.

Cool.

 

[andy_just_andy]

Silly rabbit. Trix are for kids.

 

[Graylien]

Well, as we predicted, that big pink rabbit is now looking decidedly peaky...

"It's rotting away and the intestines are running out of its side, but it's really sweet," Mr. Janka said. "It has a warmth and a gravity. It's nice to lie on it." It's especially nice if you're interested in the way things rot: grass has sprouted through the rabbit's knitted skin, it's beginning to ooze a brown liquid, and animals have foraged inside.

source

More giant-rabbit-as-art shenanigans here: Inside the Purple Rabbit

 

[theredmeanie]

I've just stumbled (hopped?) over this thread, and it reminded me of an odd sighting my ex and me had on the way back from our local one night about 3 years ago. It happened while we were driving down Steeple Road, between Mayland and Latchingdon in Essex, on the Dengie Peninsular...it's quite a rural area and the road bissects lots of farmland and fields, with grass verges, hawthorn bushes and ditches on either side of the road. We were driving back, and suddenly an animal jumped out of the bushes and hopped along the verge, keeping pace with our car, which was going about 40mph, for about 100m before jumping back into cover. It was dark, there being no streetlights along that part of the road, but the animal was about 1m high, and I remember thinking it hopped like kangaroos I'd seen on TV..it was no more than a silhouette, so I couldn't identify it positively. Just jogged my memory...

 

[Anonymous]

Hopped like a kangaroo...

Could well have been a wallaby - you would be surprised how many are actually loose in the countryside

 

[zardozzz]

Well, as we predicted, that big pink rabbit is now looking decidedly peaky...

"It's rotting away and the intestines are running out of its side, but it's really sweet," Mr. Janka said. "It has a warmth and a gravity. It's nice to lie on it." It's especially nice if you're interested in the way things rot: grass has sprouted through the rabbit's knitted skin, it's beginning to ooze a brown liquid, and animals have foraged inside.

source

Im afraid this above link does not work. You need to subscribe to the NY times to be able to see it.

 

[theredmeanie]

Re: Hopped like a kangaroo...

Could well have been a wallaby - you would be surprised how many are actually loose in the countryside

A few weeks later the local newspaper reported a dead kangaroo on the M25

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Re: Easter Bunny

"Easter, or Ostara was the feast of the Saxon Goddess Eastre, goddess of fertility, new life etc."

I hope this doesn't come as too great a shock to you but I learned this in some detail years ago in Christian (Southern Baptist) Bible class.

We were taught about Eostre and Ishtar too and "Ishtar-Eggs."

But I question whether early Christians "stomped" on other religious and folk beliefs, which strikes me as a fairly prejudicial choice of words. All those early Christians had to do was to make egg-dying a death penanly offense. Instead, they ENCOURAGED the practice!

What SEEMS to have happened is that newly converted peoples brought their own religious accoutrements and traditions into Christianity as gifts for their new Savior.

This can be seen to this day in any German-American Catholic or Lutheran church, where the old pagon pine boughs surround and "protect" the creche scene. That sight warmed my childhood.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Re: Easter bunny and Christ

"The problem is not with Christianity or Christians but with people in authority who mistake their own narrowness for Christ's."

We have no argument there.

The problem is that the Established Churches are all overseen by Giant Rabbits. (See, now we're back on topic.)

 

[dreeness]

More rabbit-related mayhem:

http://hamersly.org/bunnyman.htm

(to be taken with a grain of salt, of course...)

 

[OldTimeRadio]

"(to be taken with a grain of salt, of course...)"

Half the Atlantic Ocean is more like it.

The first time I ran across this story, in a much longer text, with the full names and dates of each (supposedly) mutilated victim given in mind-numbing detail, I thought I'd found a genuine "white crow" case.

That was until I ran every name, date and other checkable detail through Google, Yahoo and Copernic.Com.

Those details were all there, right enough, but the only links led directly back to the Internet story I was attempting to verify!

So this entire "legend" seems to be a piece of fiction made up for the Internet.

 

[Graylien]

I'm sure someone's already linked to this essay researching the origins of the Fairfax Bunnyman legend, but I can't find the thread. Anyway, it appears that there's a tiny grain of truth at the heart of the myth:

The Bunny Man Unmasked

 

[Spookdaddy]

I just came across this thread and was reminded that around 15 years ago there were stories of a giant rabbit in Kielder Forest (in rural Northumberland).

It's such an odd story for anyone to make up that even at the time I thought there must be something in it. And now I see a whole thread about monster bunnies!

Has anyone else seen anything like this?

I posted the following experience on the WEIRD ANIMAL SIGHTINGS thread some time ago.

Right, promise not to laugh - I know the following isn’t on a par with werewolves and their ilk but it gave me pause for thought. Around ten years ago I was walking through Monsal Dale towards Monsal Head in the Derbyshire Peak District when I saw on the hillside to the west of the valley what I can only describe as the granddaddy of all rabbits. It sat in a group of seven or eight other rabbits and was I would estimate about five to six times their bodyweight. It was a lot darker in colour than the animals around it. I know there is a size and weight difference between bucks and does but this bugger was huge. And before anyone thinks the obvious I’m a country boy and know the difference between fully grown rabbits and their kittens - all the animals in the group were mature. The only thing I can think is that it was a domestic escapee of some large breed gone feral. Unless of course it was, ulp...a were-rabbit.

Stop sniggering you bastards - I was not pissed, stoned or otherwise incapacitated!

I note I pre-empted Nick Park by three years - should I sue?

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Bunnyman Vs. Bunny Man

There needs to be a clear distinction made between the "Clifton Bridge Bunny Man" legends and the "Bunny Man" SIGHTINGS of the 1970s, although both took place in the same Virginia county.

Clifton Bridge Bunny Man is not supposed to have LOOKED like a rabbit. According to the legend, he was an escaped lunatic who survived in the countryside (for fully 60 or 70 years) by killing and eating wild rabbits. (And thus the "Bunny Man" label.) Again, this entire "legend" seems to have been made up for the Internet

But the OTHER Bunny Man seems to have been one or more human beings attired in bunny suits! There were a rash of Bunny Man sightings reported a decade (or a little less) before the "Phantom Clown" scares of the early 1980s, which in some ways they very closely resembled. [Enough so that I keep "Phantom Clown" and "Bunny Man" accounts together in the same file]. These reports (unlike Clifton Bridge) made mainstream newspapers across the country.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Just Remembered

I just remembered that back in the 1970s, when those Bunny Man sightings were fresh and newsworthy a newspaper reporter entered several Washington, D. C-area costume shops and inquired as to whether he could rent or buy a bunny suit.

"No," he heard at every stop. "We have nary a one in stock. We've had a real run on bunny suits recently and we're not certain why. As soon as one comes back in it goes right out again."

I wonder what the market for clown suits was during the Phantom Clown panics.

 

[RedQueenWildBoy]

Concious dreams and the associated paralysis/breathing problems are terrifying. I had one once involving a very large fly with no eyes and a knobbly black body. ...

I had the fly as well! It was only a one-off, but as a three-year-old child, I clearly saw a giant 2ft tall house fly (otherwise completely normal, to scale, and anatomically accurate) walk across my bedroom floor very soon after my mother had turned the lights off. I had never seen any imaginary creatures with that kind of clarity before (or since), and I remember it made me scream like the Dickens.

 

[Bannik]

I came across this recently:
source

More recently from the same site:

Easter Bunny Sighting
BY MIKE B.
When I was about seven I used to be curious about the Easter Bunny. So one night I pulled an all-nighter while I was sleeping at my grandma's place with my older sister, who was nine. So we were all in bed; my grandma, sister and I were still wide awake. My sister would always hog the blankets and I would be cold.

So I was trying to fight with my sleeping sister, and all of a sudden I heard hopping downstairs. I was confused; I didn't hear the door open. Then I heard something hop up the stairs. I started to pinch myself: yes, I was awake and cold and I started to sweat, a bit overwhelmed. The hopping noise was coming up the stairs. I started to slightly close my eyes so the rabbit won't know I'm awake.

He entered the room we were in. I had my eyes closed. The creature grabbed the blanket and pulled it over me. I couldn't believe it! He hopped to the other side of the bed toward the window and just stood there. I got a quick peak: a huge rabbit, human-sized with big ears pointed up. I was shocked. It couldn't be real! He was just standing there looking at my grandma and he just stood there.

The sun came up and he vanished, almost like he faded into the light. I was speechless and got up looked around. Nothing was there. You could ask me to this very day. I do believe in the Easter Bunny. I just don't believe he gives out chocolate (obviously).

http://paranormal.about.com/od/othercre ... 05_03t.htm

 

[guestus]

I personally confused dreams with reality in the my childhood, and I know this can happen if you have anxiety problems and stuff.

 

[havohej]

Interesting how often a giant rabbit type of thing crops up...
When i was about 5-7yrs old I was staying over at family friends... I'd had a bad dream and was walking to my friends parent bedroom across the landing upstairs from one bedroom to another... They had large windows across from the landing over looking the garden, and I remember seeing the silhouette of rabbits ears (a pair at a time) jumping up at the window... my only thought (that I remember) was how strange that the rabbits were jumping so high...

Side note is that I had awoken because of a bad dream... I'd been told by my friend that her sister always had a bad dream when sleeping in the bed I was staying in... and I did..

 

[EnolaGaia]

... BUT... there was one comment on the capybara article I had to copy for you...regarding catching and eating capybara before Lent....

This popular custom is attributed to a curious theological decision by the Catholic Church. When European missionaries first met capybaras in South America during the 16th century, they wrote to Rome for guidance, saying "there is an animal here that is scaly but also hairy, and spends time in the water but occasionally comes on land; can we classify it as a fish?" The question was significant, as the Catholic faith then forbade eating meat (other than fish) during Lent, the period of abstinence lasting 40 days before Easter. Having a second-hand description of the animal, and not wanting the petitioners to turn away from Catholicism, the Church agreed and declared the capybara a fish — a decision that was never reversed.

In a related story, which specifically involves rabbits ...

Debunked: The Strange Tale of Pope Gregory and the Rabbits
The details of how most animals became domesticated lie deep in the murky past, much debated and glimpsed only in tantalizing hints from fossils and DNA.

Except for rabbits.

Their story was clear, and it was a strange and compelling tale. Around 600 A.D., Pope Gregory the Great decreed that fetal rabbits, or laurices, were not meat, and could be eaten during Lent, when meat was not allowed. Monks in France — where else? — quickly saw an opportunity and began to keep and breed rabbits as a meaty non-meat to nourish them through a cold and fishy Lent.

Lent, a period of penance and self-denial for many Christians, begins Wednesday, but anyone to whom this story suggests a new menu should stop right there. Apart from the scarcity of laurices at the supermarket these days, the whole story is wrong according to a new scientific report.“None of it is even close to being true,” said Greger Larson, one of the main authors of the report debunking the myth. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/science/rabbits-pope-domestication.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

THE CITED SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE:

Rabbits and the Specious Origins of Domestication
http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(18)30001-6

 

[IbisNibs]

Just came across this thread.

In one of his books Heuvelmans mentions Australian prospectors who staggered out of the desert claiming to have seen 10 ft. rabbits. He suggests that they may have seen a living example of an animal called a Diprodoton which is supposed to have died out 10,000 years ago.

Hallucinations due to extreme dehydration? Twisted humor of isolated, unbathed prospectors? DTs?
Not that any of those hypotheses would explain the weird things one sees at night in a forest.