The Top 5 Scariest Halloween Urban Legends In U.S. States

Halloween has been tied to the supernatural since the Celtic people observed the festival of Samhain 2,000 years ago. They believed that on October 31, the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest. With this in mind, they wore costumes and lit bonfires to prevent spirits from wreaking havoc on the living. Add to that the many, many creepy urban legends that have cropped up and lingered on across the United States, and you have the makings of some very scary stories that happen to coincide with Halloween.

Among the scariest of these hails from Virginia and is known as the Bunny Man, a killer (or ghost) dressed in a rabbit costume who began killing on Halloween. This legend has been around since at least the 1970s. A newer urban legend in Louisiana is about the Devil's Toy Box, a mirror-lined shack that began as a Halloween attraction but was forced to close after visitors became so traumatized they were never able to speak again — or worse. Then there was Idaho's alleged Halloween Massacre in 1962, when one masked partygoer murdered seven other guests. 

One of the spookiest urban legends is also one of the oldest: the Bell Witch of Tennessee, a story that dates back to the 19th century, when the Bell family was terrorized by a poltergeist. Finally, there's Nebraska's Hatchet House, a legend about a teacher in the early 1900s who murdered all her students and dumped their hearts into a nearby creek. Today, the story goes, you can still hear them beating.

The Bunny Man of Fairfax County, Virginia, is an urban legend dating back at least 50 years. In some versions, he'd escaped from a mental institution and left skinned rabbits hanging from the Fairfax Station Bridge, perhaps as a warning to stay away. One Halloween night, some local teens were hanging out under the bridge when the Bunny Man attacked and killed them, leaving them in the same condition as the rabbits. In other tellings of the tale, the killer was an escaped prisoner who wore a bunny suit while searching for his victims, usually young people, and in still other versions, he was a killer ghost.

Some urban legends turn out to be true, and the Bunny Man is at least partially based on true events, including an unsolved murder from 1918. That August, 14-year-old Eva Roy was found tied to a tree near Burke, Virginia. She'd been strangled to death. Her killer was never found, although an escaped convict falsely confessed to the crime. Even stranger, in 1970, there was a man dressed in a bunny suit who terrorized the town of Burke. In the first incident, just after midnight on October 18, he threw a hatchet through the window of a parked car in which a couple was sitting. Neither victim was hurt in the incident. A few weeks later, the Bunny Man vandalized an unoccupied house with an ax and threatened a security guard. The police recovered a hatchet but were never able to identify the Bunny Man.

Louisiana is a state rife with scary urban legends. There's the Rougarou, a werewolf-like creature said to roam the bayous of Southwest Louisiana. Then there are the numerous legends of New Orleans, including the Voodoo queen Marie Laveau, who was supposedly gifted with supernatural powers. But there are also newer urban legends that have spread via the internet, and one is the story of the Devil's Toy Box. According to the tale, there is a now-closed Halloween attraction in an unnamed place in North Louisiana that will drive anyone who enters insane. It's a shack lined with mirrors where Satan appears, steals your soul, and may even flay you alive.

There is something actually called a Devil's Toy Box — a six-sided mirrored box that some paranormal researchers use to try and record or capture supernatural entities. But in the case of this particular urban legend, there is a solid source for its origin. It likely started with a 2015 horror story by writer Joel Farrelly that appeared on the website Thought Catalog. Even so, thanks to the internet, this is one urban legend that just won't die.

Another more recent urban legend relates to what's been dubbed the "Halloween Massacre," which supposedly took place in a small Idaho town in 1962. That night, a group of masked teenagers got together at a girl's house while her father was out of town. Unbeknownst to them, one of the guests, wearing a homemade, creepy grinning black hooded mask, was a bloodthirsty killer. He locked everyone inside the house before murdering seven of them and making his escape. While the FBI later found his mask, they never caught him.

This is another urban legend disseminated through the internet and apparently began with an old photograph that was turned into a meme. The meme found its way onto social media sites like Facebook, where the tale exploded. In the photo, a group of costumed people pose for the picture and all have strange, mostly homemade masks. In the center, one partygoer stares at the camera wearing the evil grinning hood, and the meme identifies this man as the killer. But according to Snopes, there was no murder fitting this description that took place on Halloween in Idaho or anywhere else in 1962. Still, the legend lives on.

The Halloween Massacre and the Devil's Toy Box may be newer urban legends, but the Bell Witch is one of the earliest in America, dating back more than 200 years. In 1817, farmer John Bell Sr. and his family lived in Red River, near present-day Adams, Tennessee. At some point, they began seeing strange animals — a dog with the head of a rabbit and a giant bird — around the farm. Soon afterward, the hauntings began. The Bell family experienced strange noises, voices, and even physical attacks. The entity eventually began speaking to the family, often cursing John and his child Betsy, whom the spirit hated. In December 1820, John Bell Sr. died under mysterious circumstances attributed to the entity. Even General Andrew Jackson, who later became U.S. president, investigated the haunting and left the farm deeply shaken by the experience. From there, the legend only grew.

As far back as the 1970s, the Halloween ritual of "Bloody Mary" became entwined with the legend of the Bell Witch. The traditional method of playing this spooky game is to stare into a mirror in a darkened room while holding a lit candle and reciting the words "Bloody Mary" three times, which supposedly summons a spirit. The Southern variation of the game involved trying to summon the Bell Witch by repeating the words "I don't believe in the Bell Witch" three times. Today, you can visit the Bell Witch Cave located on the old Bell family farm and experience this urban legend for yourself. 

In Papillion, Nebraska, there's a one-room schoolhouse tied to a macabre urban legend that dates back at least to the 1970s. As the story goes, in the early 1900s, a schoolteacher named Holly Hatchet snapped and murdered all her students with an ax and removed their hearts. In some versions, she also lopped off their heads and set them on top of each of their respective desks. She then walked to a bridge and dumped the organs in the South Papillion Creek. In some tellings, she then buried the children's bodies in the school's basement.

There doesn't seem to be any truth to the story, and how the urban legend came to be remains unknown. As the tale spread, the schoolhouse became known as the "Hatchet House," and the bridge gained the name "Heartbeat Bridge." Before the schoolhouse was moved in the 1990s and became a museum, local kids would try to sneak into the property on Halloween to look for the ghost of Holly Hatchet. The bridge remains, and people claim to have heard the beating of the dead children's hearts or seen the ghostly apparition of Holly Hatchet wandering near the scene of her ghastly crimes.

We scoured various sources to come up with this list of the top five scariest Halloween urban legends in U.S. states, looking at several criteria for inclusion. They had to be Halloween related, either allegedly happening on the holiday (as is the case with Virginia's Bunny Man legend and Idaho's Halloween Massacre) or adjacent to the holiday. Those that didn't supposedly occur on Halloween are still directly related to the spooky holiday. 

Louisiana's Devil's Toy Box was a supposed Halloween attraction, and the legend of Tennessee's Bell Witch inspired Southern children to try and summon the spirit on October 31. Similarly, local kids would make a pilgrimage to the Hatchet House on Halloween, and, in one memorable case in 1983, they were ticketed by the police for trespassing when they failed to realize there was a school board meeting in session that particular Halloween night. Other criteria included the stipulation that each urban legend had to be directly tied to a particular state and, of course, had to be scary.