Easter Bunny Sightings Could Represent Continuing Trend of Holiday High Strangeness

An image provided by Easter Bunny witness Sharon to illustrate her experience.

Since 2022, I have received three reports from witnesses who claimed to have encountered a large, anthropomorphic bunny on Easter. In honor of the holiday, I thought I’d republish them here.

The most recent report came from a Canadian man (name withheld by request) in 2023 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 to 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 back yard 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 white 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 had 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, no trace evidence was 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 goose bumps 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.

[I was] inspired [to contact you] by [an] email you received [on January 10th, 2022], because it was very similar to my experience," she wrote, "here's what happened."

It was just after sun up Easter morning 1961 or 1962, a little north of Northwestern University in Illinois. I was eight or nine years old and knew there were two Easter bunnies called Mom and Dad. I have never liked mornings, but I woke up that morning just as it started to get light, and decided to check out the Easter baskets for my little sister and me.
They were on the coffee table in the den, I sat on the couch and began inspecting the baskets, when I saw something unusual in our back yard. I could hardly miss it because it was in direct line of sight with the baskets and it was big. It was a six-foot-tall, white, bipedal rabbit wearing a black vest embroidered with little glass beads of all colors (or so it seemed).
It was about 15 feet from the house, facing away from it, so I saw it in profile. It was standing still next to our seven-foot-tall blue spruce tree, about 25 to 30 feet away from me, for maybe half a minute, long enough for me to get a good look at it. It never looked in my direction; it took a short step before it hopped like a kangaroo but with shorter hops, and each hop was double the speed of the last, and the rabbit quickly became a white and black (the vest) blur and vanished before it would have hit the back fence.
After that, I poked my head into Mom and Dad's bedroom, not to see if one of them had put on the show, because I already knew that it was not a person in a rabbit costume; but if they were awake, I wanted to tell them what I saw. They were sound asleep and so was my sister, so I went back to bed and woke up at a normal time. I never uttered a sound from the time I first woke up, until the second time. Even our Airedale Terrier slept through it.
Everyone's first priority was the Easter basket opening ceremony and that's when I told my whole family what I saw, who loved it, especially my sister who was three or four years old. I have never been shy about telling folks what I saw that Easter morning from the start until this day. I'm not the Lone Ranger; I've heard other encounters with giant bunnies, be it Easter or not. It is my only anomalous experience (other than an NDE around age five) until decades later.

Although Sharon hasn't seen any giant animals, rabbits or otherwise, since that morning, she was reminded of the experience while watching television many years later.

"I have not seen a real giant rabbit or any other giant animal before or since, but half a century later, a related incident chilled me to the bone," she said. "It was an early scene in Steven Spielberg's miniseries Taken. When I saw the boy opening his shuttered bedroom window in the middle of the night to see a giant squirrel (?) beckoning him, my heart jumped into my throat, my knees nearly buckled, and I had shivers from head to toe. I grew up watching Svengoolie and never had that sort of reaction."

The incident caused her to question the nature of her own experience.

"Since then I have asked myself, did I see the Easter Bunny or an ET posing as the Easter bunny? I'm going with the real Easter bunny, because it was and still is fun, and I have never had any recollection of abduction or missing time," she said.

Sharon also provided me with an illustration of the experience that she created in Photoshop (pictured above).

"It isn’t photo realism, so here’s an explanation of what is pictured: bottom right is the Easter basket, then our large sliding glass door to the back patio with drapes pulled back on the left and right sides, then the bunny and tree, and last is the wood fence along the side of our yard," she explained.

The experience left an indelible mark on Sharon’s memory, one that remains as crisp and clear today as it did that spring morning decades ago.

"Even after 60 years, the picture in my brain is 3D real—the grass, the needles on the blue spruce, and the snow-white fur and big, shiny, black eyes of the bunny,” she said.

The memory is so powerful, in fact, that even today the idiosyncrasies of its source stick out to her.

"Note that solid white rabbits I’ve seen in pet stores and county fairs have pink eyes," she added.

In further correspondence, the Canadian 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 I had published on a childhood sighting of the Easter Bunny.

That article appeared in ‘Reports from the Void.’

I received an 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.

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

While rare, reported encounters with mythological holiday figures are not unheard of.

In addition to the Easter Bunny sightings mentioned above, I 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. That report was included with another firsthand report of a “Santa Claus” encounter in my book, The Singular Fortean Society’s Yuletide Guide to High Strangeness.

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 I am 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.

The 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."

The phenomena described by the man are common to many paranormal experiences, from alien abductions to ghosts and hauntings to winged humanoid and other monster sightings. While no definitive explanation yet exists for why, it is theorized by many researchers that these commonalities could represent a singular source—or at least a common background or origin—responsible for the majority of reported paranormal phenomena.