It screamed again in Mount Vernon early yesterday morning. Ralph Stickman, the Fairfax County game warden who had been waiting for it in the woods, had just given up and started for his car when he heard that eerie, muted wail-like someone being strangled in the shower.

For the last nine months, nocturnal screaming has come from a patch of woods about one mile from the historic home of George Washington. In freezing rain, driving snow and on hazy summer nights, it has echoed through a neighborhood of $150,000 houses. Children have been frightened. Dogs have barked.

This week the Fairfax County police had had enough. They brought out a Park Police helicopter with searchlights to hover above 100 acres of woods. Six policemen equipped with portable radios were told to stand in the woods and signal to the chopper if they found the screamer. They found nothing.

"I suspect it frustrates the police because they have not been able to catch it," said Dr. William Hark, a physician who specializes in aerospace medicine and lives near the howling in the woods.

Often with urban legends, there’s the story and there’s the truth. That’s what makes the tale of Fairfax County’s Bunny Man so eerie, so bizarre and so downright creepy. While there are several variations of the urban legend splashed across the furthest reaches of the Internet, the true story of the Bunny Man may actually be even weirder. “A creepy guy, on Halloween, dressed oddly, throwing hatchets at people…it’s just too bizarre to possibly be true,” says Fairfax County Archivist Brian Conley, “But it is.”

For four decades, the legend of the Bunny Man has captivated Northern Virginia fear-seekers. Conley first heard the tale when he was an area youngster in the 1970s. It showed up in a 1973 University of Maryland undergrad’s class paper. It has been told and retold by local teens for years. While the legend has evolved and changed through the years, it follows these lines: In the early 20th century, deep in the woods that divided the town of Clifton from Fairfax Station, there was an asylum for the insane. At some point, the asylum closed and the residents were piled into a bus bound for Lorton Prison. On the way there, the bus swerved and crashed. Many of the convicts escaped, but were caught–save one, Douglas Grifon. While searching for him, authorities found a trail of half-eaten, gutted bunnies with many hanging from what was then-called Fairfax Station Bridge. For months, the police searched for Grifon, but he was never found. Then, on Halloween night, several teens were hanging out under the bridge. At the stroke of midnight, they were attacked. The next morning, they were found hanging from the bridge, gutted like bunnies. To this day, it’s said that if you are at Bunny Man Bridge at midnight on Halloween night, you too will meet the fate of those teens and rabbits.

“It is a helluva good piece of creative writing,” Conley says about what he thinks is the most widely known version of the story—an account that follows this narrative from “Timothy Forbes” on castleofspirits.com. He specifically cites historical inaccuracies for why the account is false–like that Lorton Prison wasn’t open until 1916, there’s no Fairfax court record of Douglas Grifon and the “old Clifton Library” (where the article’s author tells skeptics evidence exists) never even existed.

A constant trickle of Bunny Man questions re-engaged Conley’s interest in the story. “I got tired of saying I don’t know,” he explains. It took nearly a decade of research, but in 2002, he published what has to be considered the foremost paper on the subject. What he discovered is that the real story is even more bizarre than the legend.