Wazzup Pilipinas!?
The Horned Horror of Fort Collins: When Folklore Comes Alive
It starts with a whisper.
A neighbor swears they saw a rabbit with horns in their headlights. Another insists something with antlers scurried across their yard at midnight. By the third sighting, no one’s laughing. In Fort Collins, Colorado, a legend has clawed its way out of the dusty pages of folklore and into the real world.
The locals call them jackalopes. But these creatures are no taxidermist’s joke or roadside myth. They are real rabbits, twisted by an ancient virus into shapes that feel more nightmare than nature.
The Virus That Wears a Mask of Myth
Behind the terror lies Shope papilloma virus (SPV), a relative of human papillomavirus. Spread by mosquitoes and ticks, it doesn’t make rabbits sick in the way most viruses do—it rewrites their flesh.
The result? Wart-like tumors that sprout on their heads, ears, and eyelids, ballooning into grotesque antlers, black spikes, and curling tentacles of flesh. Some rabbits stumble blind, unable to eat. Others carry their deformities like a crown of thorns until the tumors turn cancerous and end them.
It is cruel. It is incurable. And in Fort Collins, it is spreading.
A Town Haunted by Its Own Rabbits
Imagine walking home at dusk, the Colorado sun bleeding into the horizon, when you spot movement in the brush. A rabbit hops into view. But instead of twitching ears, you see jagged horns jutting upward, tumor-cloaked eyes staring blindly back at you.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s daily life for residents of northern Colorado. Trail cameras catch their misshapen forms. Backyards echo with whispers of “zombie rabbits.” Parents warn children not to touch them.
The unsettling truth is that these rabbits aren’t dangerous to people. Wildlife officials stress it: humans cannot catch SPV. Pets are safe, too. The real carriers are the insects, tiny winged ferrymen ensuring the virus passes from one rabbit to the next.
But that knowledge doesn’t erase the horror of seeing one up close. “They look like something out of The Last of Us,” said one resident, shaking their head. “Except it’s not a TV show. It’s right here.”
Folklore Made Flesh
The myth of the jackalope has long haunted the American West—a rabbit with antlers, part trickster, part symbol of wilderness magic. For decades, it was a campfire joke, a postcard oddity, a creature of taxidermy hoaxes and tavern tall tales.
Now, with rabbits in Fort Collins growing horn-like tumors, the joke feels different. Less whimsical. More prophetic. The line between legend and biology has blurred. The jackalope has stepped out of myth, carried on the back of a virus older than memory.
Nature’s Dark Imagination
Scientists explain it calmly: outbreaks spike in summer, when mosquito numbers rise. Warmer, wetter conditions make it worse. Domestic rabbits can be treated, but the wild have no such luxury. There is no cure, no salvation, no intervention.
But stripped of clinical language, what’s left is chilling: an entire town living alongside horned, disfigured rabbits, animals twisted by forces unseen, wandering suburban streets like omens.
The Lasting Image
Somewhere tonight in Fort Collins, a child will press their face to a window and see it—a rabbit, stumbling under the weight of its tumors, its head crowned with grotesque horns. They’ll pull the curtain closed, unable to forget.
Because sometimes, horror doesn’t need to be written. It grows in the grass, hops across your lawn, and waits in the dark.
Fort Collins has its jackalopes now. Not whimsical, not mythical, but real—and more terrifying than legend ever promised.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
.jpg)
Post a Comment