Reports from the Void: 'Strange Encounter on Easter'

The Singular Fortean Society received the following email with “Strange encounter on Easter” in the subject line on January 10th, 2022.

Hello! I saw your posting looking for strange holiday encounters and stories. I’ve never gone on record with this story but I can still picture it in my head as clear as the day it happened. I don’t tell many people this story as it’s often met with ridicule or disbelief but I can swear on a stack of bibles that I remember it happening.
It happened when I was a child. I’m 28 now so I must have maybe been seven years old or younger at the time. I was very young. I would say maybe 1999 or 2000 but I’m not fully sure. I remember it was Easter morning. I was on the floor of my parents living room watching some Easter special, playing with whatever new toy I got in my Easter basket, and feasting upon chocolate goodies.
I can clearly remember not hearing any sort of sound or something that would draw my attention, yet I looked out the sliding glass door of the living room that went to the fenced in backyard. We lived in a residential neighborhood on a busy street with numerous neighbors around. So we weren’t out in the sticks by any means.
As I looked out the sliding glass door, I saw a flash of color. I distinctly remember white and blue and purple. I got up and looked out the window and saw something I’ll never forget. Jumping over the fence into our backyard was a six-to-seven-foot-tall rabbit-man. It had the face of a rabbit with those cold darting eyes and twitching nose. Ears up and tall. White to cool blue/purple coloring in the fur. It didn’t have an Easter basket or anything funny like that. It stood on two legs which were flat like a rabbits hind legs with large powerful haunches. I don’t remember what exactly the arms looked like but I remember it held them close to its body. It jumped over the fence from the neighbor’s house and landed in our yard. I stood there in awe as this thing hopped across the backyard. It stood for a second and looked at me and proceeded to jump over the adjacent fence into the next neighbors yard. That was the last I saw of it.
I immediately told my parents of what I saw and they laughed and said I’ve watched too many Easter specials. They confirmed with me there was nobody running around the neighborhood in a Easter bunny costume. This was broad daylight so it was odd that nobody else took notice of this thing. Maybe I was the only one who could see it?
I’m an avid cryptozoological investigator and have gone on numerous Sasquatch expeditions and have had what I believe to be a few encounters through the years. I've spent numerous field hours looking for UFOs and going on ghost hunts and things like that. Yet this always stuck in the back of my mind the most out of anything.
Thank you for reading this! Let me know if you have any questions or feedback! Like I said I am 100% honest and sincere in writing this.

Investigator Tobias Wayland scheduled a phone interview with the witness to discuss the experience, but the witness later said they needed to cancel the interview and any subsequent attempts to reschedule were met with no response.

While rare, reported sightings of encounters with mythological beings associated with major holidays are not unheard of.

The Singular Fortean Society received just such a report late last year 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, updated most recently in 2019, to the website LiveAbout.

The witnesses in these encounters are, unsurprisingly, 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 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.

Reports from the Void is a repository to share those stories for which we do not have enough information to make a full report. This is usually because of little or no communication from the witness following their initial submission. The Singular Fortean Society will always provide as much information as possible regarding any correspondence during our attempts to speak with those involved.

This series is meant only to present you with the full breadth of the information sent to us, and makes no judgments towards the veracity of any stories shared within it.

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

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