The following account is reposted with permission from The Singular Fortean Society. Tobias & Emily Wayland are also members of the Phantoms & Monsters Fortean Research team:
The Singular Fortean Society was contacted earlier this year by a Canadian man (name withheld by request) who wished to report his encounter with a "six-foot-tall white rabbit with a dark vest" that he had seen the Easter morning of 1988 in Crofton, British Columbia when he was 11 years old.
According to the man, his sighting took place just before 7 a.m.
I was looking out my bedroom window across my backyard with a backdrop of a forest. I had a rabbit cage at the border of the forest adjacent to our work shed, roughly 40 feet away. I witnessed a six-foot-tall white rabbit with a dark vest facing the door to my pet rabbit's cage.
I went into shock, as I was beginning to be skeptical of such things as the Easter Bunny as I was aging out of the concept. I couldn't believe my eyes. I maintained a visual of the rabbit and pinched and slapped myself so hard to try and wake myself up. The pain confirmed I was not dreaming.
I rubbed my eyes; the giant rabbit was still there.
I threw open the single-pane window which led to the backyard facing the rabbit cage. I yelled at the rabbit, "Hey, I see you". I tried to volley up into the window to leap out and run to the rabbit, (in my tighty whitey kids' underwear) but couldn't make it up out the window.
It turned, looked at me, and took a series of bounds at high speed into the forest. I called my little brother, and he arrived at the window as the giant rabbit disappeared into the Douglas firs.
I woke my parents and even a neighbor. I quizzed them as to a possible Easter costume, but I knew no one could make leaps at that speed nor have such a detailed costume, and why run for that matter. They all had a good laugh at my expense.
I explored my pet rabbits' cage and surroundings as well as the forest soon after trying to get a sense of what occurred. No tracks and no trace evidence were left behind.
The memory haunts me to this day because of the absurdity of the situation.
For some reason, I thought I would google this strange experience, such as the one I had observed in my youth as it stands out in my mind to this day. Your witness's story came up in my feed and I have goosebumps as I write this. I am in disbelief and a little embarrassed but feel compelled to tell you my story because this is beyond coincidence and indicates something bigger is going on.
Currently, I am a retired police officer and forensic artist residing in Central B.C. I have witnessed strange things in my life and career, but this childhood memory was so strange, and not a hallucination. It feels like a relief to recount it, embarrassing or not. Thanks for your time.
"After the six-foot rabbit incident, I had a bizarre Mary Poppins song stuck in my head on repeat and I could not shake it. It really made no sense as I was not a fan and it was before my time. It was odd and ill-fitting for the occurrence," he added.
The report referenced in the man’s testimony came from Sharon, an Illinois woman who said that when she was eight or nine years old, she awoke early one Easter morning in 1961 or 1962 to see a six-foot-tall, white, bipedal rabbit wearing a black vest embroidered with multicolored glass beads hopping through her backyard.
In further correspondence with investigator Tobias Wayland, the man noted some synchronicities between his and Sharon’s experiences.
"What's very strange is the woman from her 1962 encounter had the same dog as me [an Airedale Terrier] and lived in a similar type of suburb and was close to the same age and circumstance," he said.
Also, like the man, Sharon only submitted her report after seeing another article published by The Singular Fortean Society on a childhood sighting of the Easter Bunny.
While rare, reported encounters with mythological beings associated with major holidays are not unheard of.
In addition to the Easter Bunny sightings mentioned above, The Singular Fortean Society received a report in 2021 from witness Haley Pearce, who said that when she was eight years old, she had stepped outside of the Christmas Eve service at her local church in Lancaster, Ohio, only to see what appeared to be a sleigh pulled by reindeer flying overhead.
Researcher Stephen Wagner posted a list of over a dozen such sightings of Santa Claus that he has compiled to the website LiveAbout, updated most recently in 2019.
The witnesses in the encounters recorded by Wagner are almost exclusively children, with the lone outlier being a sighting of what was, in all likelihood, a perfectly normal human being.
The sighting reports are either partially or entirely anonymous and generally describe up-close encounters with Santa Claus inside of the witness’s home.
So far as the Singular Fortean Society is aware, the report submitted by Pearce very well could be the first such sighting to be given completely on the record.
Multiple competing hypotheses exist to explain these holiday-themed encounters, with the most skeptical including dreams, hallucinations, misidentifications, and outright hoaxes, while more paranormal explanations include Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and other such entities existing as living thoughtforms, along with the possibility that these images are being used as a disguise or otherwise projected by another, unrelated paranormal entity or phenomenon.
This most recent Easter Bunny encounter might favor the latter paranormal hypothesis, considering how the witness has experienced other unusual events that hint at a hidden reality surrounding us.
"Around the same time and years after [my sighting of the Easter bunny], there were instances of sleep paralysis and dreams that could be interpreted as premonitions such as family deaths and nightmares of environmental disasters," he said. "Strange occurrences...for example, the family dog would sleep at the foot of my bed, and I would find her locked outside of our house and she would be looking in my bedroom window growling at 1 a.m., or the living room couch cushions spread on the living room floor in a pattern. I would be accused of pranking by my mother in the morning. Strange noises of babies crying from the woods at night. My father would say it was cougars trying to lure prey."
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Have you had a sighting of a winged humanoid or huge bat-like creature in the Chicago, Illinois metro area / Lake Michigan region? The entity has also been referred to as the 'Chicago Mothman', 'Chicago Owlman' & 'O'Hare Mothman' or 'O'Hare Batman.' - Chicago / Lake Michigan Winged Humanoid Regional Interactive Map - Please feel free to contact me at lonstrickler@phantomsandmonsters.com - your anonymity is guaranteed. Our investigative group is conducting a serious examination of his phenomenon. We are merely seeking the truth and wish to determine what eyewitnesses have been encountering. Your cooperation is truly appreciated.
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