Illinois Woman Reports Childhood Sighting of Six-Foot-Tall, Bipedal Rabbit on Easter

An image provided by the witness to illustrate her experience. See below for details.

The Singular Fortean Society was contacted recently by Sharon, an Illinois woman who said that when she was eight or nine years old she awoke early on Easter morning to see a six-foot-tall, white, bipedal rabbit wearing a black vest embroidered with multicolored glass beads hopping through her backyard.

Sharon told investigator Tobias Wayland that she was inspired to share her story after reading a Reports from the Void entry entitled Strange Encounter on Easter, which dealt with a similar sighting.

[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 in correspondence to the investigator, "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 the Singular Fortean Society 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 has 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.

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

In addition to the Reports from the Void mentioned by Sharon, the Singular Fortean Society received 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 that he has compiled to the website LiveAbout, updated most recently in 2019.

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.

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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