Original Creepypasta: Rabbits in the creek

I'm writing this because my family won't talk about it anymore. I'm the only one who can't seem to forget.

I was raised on the outskirts of Preston, a small town in southern Idaho with a small population. My more immediate community was an isolated, dead-end dirt road called Bear Creek. Less than twenty families lived there. I lived with my Ma and my 8 older brothers but since we were so isolated, she didn't mind me running off into the woods as long as I came home before nightfall.

We were a very small community. We all knew each other; everyone watched over everyone's kids; we all trusted each other... Really, we were all very close. We had 4th of July parties at the local ballpark and swam in the nearby reservoir. It was a good, quiet community.

My house was an old farmhouse apparently built by my great-great-grandfather and was situated on a small hill surrounded by a wide grass field on one side, and a snaking dirt road on the other. Across the road was the creek bottom. Southern Idaho being categorized in a desert climate, it's not surprising to see that not much grows outside of the irrigated fields besides sage brush and burrs. The creek bottoms were the only exception. The creek fed the growth of a thick tangle of pussy-willow bushes. In the late fall my brothers and I used to go down into the bottoms and pick the white, cottony pussy-willow seeds to decorate the fences of our driveway.

Being so isolated, it wasn't uncommon for animals to come down from the mountains. We had a female moose who brought her calf down and lived in our orchard every winter. And the occasional mountain lion wasn't unheard of either.

The summer when I turned eight, a smaller mountain lion was spotted several times in our area. But we weren't worried. The big cats usually stayed away from the farms and would just move to another area if they couldn't find enough food.

The same summer my neighbor and best friend, Jane Doe, was working on one of his newest project. He was about four or five years older than me and absolutely loved animals and the surrounding wildlife in the creek. The poor guy… He used to live in the big city, you know, before both of his parents were killed in a really bad car crash when he was six. Having no family in the city, he was taken in by the only relative he still had and who turned out to live here. I couldn't really tell if it was his uncle or his grandfather or… Whoever. But 'Merasmus' (as everyone referred to him) took great care of Jane, so it didn't really matter.

As I said earlier, he really loved animals and the young lion that happened to be in our area at the same time hadn't failed to capture all of his attention. He had decided he wanted to try and get pictures of it for a photo album he was making about the wildlife of Bear Creek. He knew how to do this and had bought all of the equipment he needed off of internet.

He later explained his plan to me: he was going to set up an automatic camera that would take shots every couple of seconds in an area the lion was known to visit. He said he would also have to set some kind of bait to make sure the lion would come by. No one in the creek liked the idea of live bait or carrion, so he came up with a different kind of bait.

He decided to set up an audio recording of a dying rabbit and play it on a loop through a set of speakers hidden in the willows. I remember when we were down in the bottom testing the equipment, and I heard the noise for the first time. It was horrible. I could only describe it as identical to the sound of a screaming child. It made me feel sick in the stomach.

The camera was set up. The speakers were set up. Everything was perfect. Jane explained that he would allow the camera and recording to play uninterrupted for a week, and then he would go check on it. This would give time for our scent to fade from the bottoms and encourage the lion to come closer.

At first I was worried about the noise. It was a truly horrible noise, and our house was the closest to the set-up point in the bottoms. My oldest brother Michael assured me that the noise wouldn't reach as far as our house, and I was relieved when we arrived home that night and he was correct. The bottoms were far enough away that I couldn't hear anything.

I remember Jane the next day when I came to play with him in the woods behind his house. He was jumpy and impatient to check on the equipment. But he had to wait a week, which Merasmus kept reminding him of. He couldn't risk going down too early and scaring the lion away for good.

That night, I woke up to an awful noise. I sat straight up in my bed with my eyes wide in the dark, hands clutched so tight my knuckles went white. I knew that noise. I knew it. It was the recording of the rabbit. It sounded faint, and far off, as if it really was coming from the bottoms. But that was impossible. Because the recording had been going all night the previous day and I hadn't heard a thing.

I didn't sleep at all that night. I was too scared to get out of bed and wake up Ma. The recording played over and over again. Even when I tried to cover my ears, I still heard the loop in my head. In the morning I stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast. My Ma and my brothers Thomas, Alex and Steven were sitting at the kitchen table. They too had dark rings under their eyes. I hadn't been the only one hearing it.

Ma was convinced that the equipment must have been broken, or had malfunctioned. She wanted to go down into the bottoms to check it out but Michael told her it was a bad idea. He said it might mess up the setting and cause some unnecessary drama, and Ma ended up agreeing with him. He was sure there had been a strong wind last night, and the wind was carrying the noise farther than its natural reach. He told us to listen. We did. He was right, we couldn't hear it now.

We forgot about it and went on about the day.

But the next night, it happened again. I stayed up in bed with my back to the wall. The screaming was even louder than before. But this time something was different. It was lower pitched than I remember. And parts of the loop were slowed down, as if the recording was warped in places. At times the loop did not loop normally and instead picked up at a random place in the middle.

My mom didn't mention anything at the breakfast table. But her and my brothers seemed tense…

The third night I somehow found the courage to stand beside my bedroom window and look out into the yard. For a moment I stood, motionless with my hands shaking no matter how hard I clenched them. The noise seemed to pour in through the cracks in the window. I watched the outline of the trees in the yard. They were perfectly still, and not even the slightest breeze stirred their branches…

My mom announced that she would be going to visit my aunts in town the next day, and would probably spend a few nights there. She told me I could either come along with her, or that I could stay with my brothers. I chose to stay at home in the end so I could be there when Jane retrieved the camera and the pictures. That night, as I expected, I heard the screams again.

And as expected, I didn't sleep at all.

We began to hear the noise during the day too. I was drawing with chalk on the sidewalk with Jane and a few other friends when it happened. My shoulders tensed and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. There was only one scream. A short, high pitched one. And then the recording fell silent. It happened again several times throughout the day, but it was never the whole loop; just bits from it.

Later that evening Merasmus walked up our driveway knocked on our door. He said he was looking for 'Lieutenant Bites', Jane's pet raccoon who had been missing since that morning. Michael said he was sorry, and that we hadn't seen him. I stared at him, silently begging him to mention the recording. But he didn't. He was a quiet old man after all. He didn't want to bring up any unnecessary drama.

Mom stayed away the whole week, in the end. I hardly slept at all and neither did my brothers. By Saturday the screaming could be heard constantly, though now it sounded completely different from the original loop. I didn't recognize any of it. Sometimes the screams were thin and long, other times they were hardly more than growls. Once, while Michael had been heating up a meat loaf for lunch, the noise rose into such a terrifying howl that he dropped the plate and it shattered. I pressed my hands over my ears where I sat at the table and squeezed my eyes shut, but it didn't help. The noise forced its way in through between my fingers and pinched my throat and rattled in my ribcage. It lasted for a whole minute, and then fell silent.

Michael was shaking and I think Alex and I were on the brink of crying. That was the last we heard of the noise that day.

Jane came by Saturday evening to ask permission to cross our road to collect the equipment. I asked if he wanted me to go with him but declined my offer. He was so excited. I watched him disappear into the creek bottoms with a sense of tired relief. After the equipment was gone, it would all stop. I couldn't wait to get a full night's sleep.

Not a minute later I spotted Jane coming back up from the creek. I was confused. It had taken us much longer to set up the camera and speakers, so I had assumed it would take just as long to collect them. My breath stilled when Jane came closer. He didn't look right. His eyes were wide and his face as white as a sheet. Something wet was dribbling from his chin and onto his shirt and I quickly realized he has puked himself. And he was crying, too. He walked up to me on shaky legs before collapsing right in front of me into a sobbing mess. I called my brothers over and we tried asking Jane what had happened but it was no use.

Jane couldn't speak. He just cried.

My brother immediately called Merasmus and I looked after Jane as Michael and Steven went into the bottoms with his legal guardian. They were gone for a really long time. When they returned, their faces were grim. And they smelled funny. I noticed red on Steven's hands. I asked what was wrong but they walked right passed me and immediately called the police.

Merasmus had taken Jane away and nobody would tell me what had happened. I sat on the couch as all our neighbors and groups of police officers swirled around me. At one point an officer placed something on the kitchen table and left. I looked into the kitchen curiously. It was Jane's camera.

I wish I hadn't looked.

It was a little bit damaged. Tiny scratches and dents covered the plastic casing. When I lifted it my hands stuck to it a little. Something sticky and smelly covered the screen, but it turned on fine.

The first set of photos was normal. Just the dense bushes and the moonlit sky in the background. However as I continued to click through them they quickly became strange. At one point the camera angle changed, as if it had been knocked from its post. Grass now obscured most of the frame. Flecks of red appeared on the lens and remained for the rest of the sets. One photo made me pause.

There was a figure in this one. Or half of a figure as most of the upper torso hadn't made it into the frame. It looked human; it was human I knew it because it wore thick leather boots and black clothes but it looked… Odd. Its legs were extremely thin and white, like bones, and it seemed to be having difficulty supporting itself. Beside the legs a long, thin arm hung with a thick leather globe covering the hand. Whatever it was must have been stooped over, for its fingers hung below its crooked knees.

The next set was different. It was as if the camera had been picked up, and was now being held. The first photo was of the creek bottoms at night. The next startled me. I had to look closely before understanding what it was. A rabbit had been laid in the bushes, but it was headless with bits of flesh and nerves hanging from the severed neck. The next was of the same rabbit, but a gloved hand was holding it up against the sky. Its limp body hung like something from a nightmare.

In the following photos more rabbits joined the one, all missing they're heads. Then a cat. Then more cats. Then a raccoon with a small, cut up leather collar next to it. Lieutenant Bites. Then the lion. The following photo was of seven rabbits, three cats, the raccoon, and the lion all laid out in a row facing the same way. Their arms and legs had been arranged as if they were marching. Like some… Nightmarish parade. All of their heads had been removes and bits of their spines could be seen between the blood and rotting flesh.

The last photo was overly bright, like the photo had been taken too close with the flash on. An eye dominated the frame, but it was yellow and full of fire on an odd orange face. In the bottom corner the edge of a mouth could be seen. No lips; it looked like it had been literally carved into the face; not unlike how one would carve a pumpkin for Halloween.

I wish I hadn't looked.

I heard Michael talking to the police outside. They said the speakers had malfunctioned. The recording had only played the first night.