Creepypasta Compilation

Prey

My story takes place in a town you’ve probably never heard of in south-eastern rural Kentucky. It’s a small town with its people sparsely peppering the mountainsides to and fro. It’s the type of town where it isn’t exactly unusual to find neighbors bartering for goods with livestock, living off what the land provides, and making do with what they’ve got. It is here that my father was raised. It is here that my father raised his family.

My father was a proud man; short, barely 5’7”, but stout. He was many things – a mountaineer, carpenter, a survivor, a hunter…but mostly, he was proud. He instilled in me all the virtues that I believe in today. He’s the type of man that would give you the last dollar to his name. The type that would go hungry to make sure his children were fed, and there were times that he did. I suppose I should clarify that I grew up in poverty. No doubt there were those that were worse off than me, but times were hard nonetheless. My father worked intermittently, mostly in construction. There were few homes within the community that my father did not at least help with. He built our house from the ground up, dug out the basement, and leveled the land with little more than a shovel, wheel barrel, and the helping hands of my uncle and two older brothers. Our house sat on a hillside, in a leveled alcove; the yard stretched on for what seemed like forever, ending at a fresh mountain brook where the woodland lied beyond.

He spent a lot of time in those woods – hiking trails, digging ginseng, hunting, and otherwise passing time. The mountains provided our family with many necessities. Our water was pumped from a mine near the mountain’s peak. Our food consisted mainly of game and livestock. My mother is a wonderful cook. She had a fondness for chicken – which we raised. My father, on the other hand, preferred game. No stranger to the culinary arts, my father was adept at preparing a variety of dishes. All of which he tracked and killed himself. Long before the sun would rise, my father would grab his light and head out. He would follow the mountain stream before turning off onto one of the many mine roads that littered the terrain. One such road ran by an old graveyard long since forgotten by the rest of the world. Some headstones there dated back to the onset of the 19th century.

I recall one night my father decided to go spotting. For those of you unfamiliar, spotting is a common practice amongst Appalachian hunters (perhaps amongst hunters in general, but I do not hunt so I am not sure). The hunter will set out before sunrise, taking a light and little else. The hunter will then proceed to shine the light, much like a spotlight, in hopes of catching a glimpse of an animal’s eyes. You see, the eyes of an animal are luminous; and in complete darkness when the light passes over them they will shine. This is a method of establishing good hunting venues. On this particular night, my father broke tradition and decided to take his shotgun with him on his spotting expedition. This decision, I would later learn, saved his life.

It was a warm spring night. I was always a night owl, so when my father stirred, I was still awake and playing my Super Nintendo. It was not a school night, so I was greeted with his ever present smile. “Hey big man,” he chimed. “You’re up late.”

“I want to beat Mario,” I told him, my eyes leaving the screen long enough to see him tying his boots. He didn’t reply, he just smiled and rubbed my head as he passed me on his way to the gun cabinet. From it, he removed his customary 12 gauge shotgun, some rounds, and a miner’s light. The light, I recall, strapped to his forehead and attached to a rather large battery that he hung at his waist. He then made his way to the couch and sat next to me. He casually lifted the TV remote and waited. When I finished the level he smiled.

“Pause it. I need to check the forecast,” he told me. I obliged and he changed the channel. He watched as the forecaster rambled on about the weather and seemed content. “Not giving rain for today. That’s good.” He turned to me and smiled again. “Okay. You can go back to your game. I’m going out. I’ll be back in a while, tell your mother I’ll bring home supper. Tonight, we’re going to have rabbit.” He kissed my forehead and stood. I smiled at him as he rounded the hallway corner to our front door. I listened to the door shut and to the clunk of his boots as he made his way off the porch, down the steps and through the yard. His steps faded in the distance. From this point on, I cannot vouch for the validity of my tale, but I can tale you that the man who returned was not the man that left. Make no mistake, my father did return; but he was a changed man. He never spoke much of that night until after I had started college. This is his story.