Free Story Friday: The Letiche
A new original tale every week—twisted, terrifying, and inspired by the darkest legends you thought you knew.
I grew up in Louisiana, but you’d never have known it to watch me pack for that trip. I was a city girl through and through, born in Baton Rouge, raised on sidewalks and window units, the kind of person who thought “camping” meant a hotel without room service. Levi was the opposite. He’d only moved down from Ohio the year before, and somehow in twelve months he’d fallen harder for the bayou than I ever had in twenty-six years of living beside it. He kept a folder of photos on his phone: cypress knees rising out of black water, moss hanging so thick it looked like the trees were grieving something. When he found a guide willing to take a small group out camping, I told myself I could survive three days of mosquitoes for him. It felt a little absurd, letting a man who’d lived here a year teach me about the place I was from. But that was Levi. He’d taken to the water and the woods the way some people take to a new religion, and I loved him too much to tell him no.
I didn’t expect to survive anything else.
There were six of us in the end. Me and Levi. Brooke, who brought a camera with a lens the size of a coffee can and photographed everything from dragonflies to the guide’s weathered hands. Dylan, who made jokes the whole first hour on the water. And Ryan, who I’d only met twice before the trip, loud and restless in the way of someone who needed to be the center of every room he walked into.
Our guide was a man named Marcel. Sixtyish, quiet, forearms like braided rope from decades of poling flat-bottomed boats through water that didn’t want to be poled through. He didn’t talk much, and when he did, he didn’t waste the words.
The boat ride in was so beautiful it was easy to forget to be afraid of anything. Egrets lifted off the water in slow white arcs. The cypress trees stood in long rows, trunks swollen at the base, roots gone knobby and strange beneath the surface. Spanish moss draped from every branch, grey-green and constantly moving even with no wind to move it. The air smelled like mud and rot, and somewhere under it, something sweeter I couldn’t place.
“Beautiful, right?” Dylan said, and even Ryan agreed for once.
Marcel didn’t answer. He was watching the water.
We set up camp on a small island, hardly more than a hump of solid ground ringed by black water and cypress. Marcel built the fire himself, methodically, before he’d even let us unpack the tents. When it was going, he stood and looked at all of us in that unhurried way of his.
“Stay close to camp after dark,” he said. Then, almost as an afterthought, “Keep your food packed up after supper, too.”
Dylan grinned and said something about raccoons raiding the cooler, and Marcel let him think that. Nobody pushed for more of an explanation. It sounded like standard tourist advice: don’t feed the alligators, watch for snakes, nothing worth worrying over. Ryan laughed and asked if there was WiFi. Marcel didn’t laugh back.
“If something happens out here after dark,” he said, “we handle it ourselves.”
“What if somebody gets hurt?” Brooke asked, not really worried, just curious.
“Nobody’s coming till morning.”
I remember thinking Marcel had mentioned the dangers of the night more than once, but the sun was still up, the frogs had started their evening chorus, and it was easy to let the words slide past me like water.
That first night, we sat around the fire eating the fish Marcel had caught and cleaned that afternoon, and the bayou closed in around us the way it does, not threatening, just total. No light anywhere except our fire and the stars, more numerous than I’d ever seen them. Cicadas droned in waves. Somewhere out in the water, something surfaced and submerged again with a soft, heavy splash, and none of us thought anything of it.
Then I heard the crying.
It was faint at first, coming from somewhere beyond the reeds on the far side of the island, thin and hitching, unmistakably a child. I sat up straight.
“Did you hear that?” I said. “That’s a child.”
Levi frowned and listened. The others quieted too. The crying rose and fell, a small broken sound that pulled at me before I could think better of it.
“She sounds scared,” I said. “She’s probably lost.”
I was already halfway to my feet when Marcel said, without raising his voice at all, “Sit.”
I looked at him. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the dark tree line, his jaw tight.
“There’s a kid out there,” I said. “We can’t just—”
“What would a child be doing way out here after dark?” Marcel asked. It wasn’t really a question. Then, after a moment, almost too casually: “Probably a panther.”
I must have looked as skeptical as I felt, because Levi put a hand on my arm and drew me back down beside him. “He’s probably right,” he said. “Panthers scream, Mia. It’s not a myth. I’ve heard recordings. It sounds exactly like a woman, or a kid crying. People call it in all the time thinking somebody’s being murdered out there.” He said it so evenly that some of the tightness in my chest eased. He’d spent a year chasing down every strange fact about this place, and I wanted to believe him more than I wanted to trust my own instincts. “Out here, with no other people for miles? It can’t be a kid,” he said.
I let myself be convinced, or at least I let myself stop arguing. Marcel’s stillness carried more weight than either of our words, and eventually the crying trailed off into nothing, swallowed by the frogs and the cicadas, and we let the fire and Dylan’s bad jokes pull us back into something like comfort.
I didn’t sleep well. The crying stayed with me long after it had faded into the night. I kept telling myself Marcel was right, that it had been a panther, but the certainty in his voice bothered me almost as much as the sound itself.
Day two was easier. We fished. Brooke photographed a heron standing so still in the shallows it looked carved. Levi caught a catfish nearly as long as his arm and wouldn’t stop talking about it. I noticed, in the unhurried way you notice things when you’re not looking for them, that Marcel never went far from camp. Even wading out to check the lines, his eyes kept cutting back toward the tree line, like he was keeping a running count of the shadows.
By evening the good mood had mostly returned. We ate, we laughed, Dylan told a story about a fishing trip gone wrong that had nothing to do with strange cries in the night, and for a while I let myself believe the crying the night before really had been some animal, some trick of sound the swamp was famous for.
Then it came back. Closer this time.
It curled through the dark in that same thin, hitching rhythm, and this time I could almost make out words underneath it: broken, pleading things. I don’t remember deciding to do it. I just found myself scraping the leftover rice and fish onto one of the tin camping plates, some old instinct insisting that a hungry, frightened child needed to be fed before anything else.
I was three steps from the firelight when Marcel stepped out of the dark in front of me. I hadn’t heard him move at all.
He didn’t say anything right away. He just took the plate gently out of my hands, walked to the fire, and tipped the food straight into the flames. It hissed and smoked.
“Don’t feed things in this swamp,” he said.
“I was just—there’s a kid out there, Marcel, I can’t just sit here and—”
“Raccoons’ll come right up and eat out of your hand if you let ’em,” Levi said, trying to smooth things over, assuming that was what Marcel meant.
Marcel looked at him for a long moment. “Raccoons ain’t what worries me.”
He wouldn’t say anything else. He went back to checking the boats, and I stood there by the fire with my hands empty and my stomach in a knot I couldn’t explain.
By the third day, nobody was quite as talkative. The bayou looked the same as ever, but something in all of us had gone quiet and watchful, mirroring Marcel without meaning to.
Brooke found the footprints in the mud near the edge of camp, small and bare, five little toes pressed clear into the soft ground, leading up from the water and stopping a few feet from where we’d slept. She called us over, more curious than afraid.
“Kids don’t come out here,” she said. “Whose are these?”
Marcel came and looked. The color drained from his face. Without saying a word, he dragged his boot through them until they were gone.
“Marcel,” Brooke said.
He didn’t answer her either. He just went back to the fire pit and started stacking wood for that night, higher than he had the two nights before.
That third night, Marcel had only walked down to the boats to check the ropes one last time. He’d been gone less than a minute. The rest of us sat around the fire in a quiet that had teeth in it. I don’t know what came over me. I told myself I was only going to look, that I wasn’t really going to feed her, that I just wanted to see if she was real, if she was hurt, if she needed help that none of the rest of them seemed willing to give her.
I made up another plate. Nobody noticed me slip away. They were all half-watching the dark, half-watching each other, and I only went a few yards past the ring of firelight, to an old flat stump at the edge of the reeds. I set the plate down.
For a moment nothing happened. Then she came out of the dark, low and slow, the way a shy animal approaches a hand.
She was small, maybe seven or eight, filthy from head to foot, her hair a black tangled mat plastered to her skull, her feet bare and caked in mud. She didn’t look up at me right away. She knelt by the stump and ate with quick, wet, animal bites, and the sound of it raised the hair on my arms before she even lifted her head.
When she finally looked at me, she smiled.
Her mouth opened too wide, and behind her lips were rows of teeth, small and impossibly sharp, packed too close together for any child’s mouth to hold.
I don’t remember screaming. Levi told me afterward that I did. What I remember is his hands closing hard around my arms and yanking me backward, and Marcel already moving, already at the fire, snatching a burning branch up in one hand like he’d done it a hundred times before. He drove it toward the girl in a wide arc of sparks, and she hissed, a sound with nothing human left in it, high and wet and furious, before she folded back into the reeds and was gone.
For one long breath, I thought that was the end of it.
Then Brooke’s voice, very small: “…Marcel?”
We all turned. Standing just beyond the reach of the firelight, perfectly still, were three more children. They didn’t move. They didn’t blink, as far as I could tell. Only one of them smiled, the same smile, the same teeth. The other two simply watched us, patient as the moss on the trees.
Marcel told us then. Only then.
“That wasn’t a child,” he said.
He said old folks around here had a name for them: Letiche. His granddaddy used to tell stories about them when Marcel was a boy. Some folks said the stories kept children away from the water after dark. Others believed they were warnings, because the Letiche were real. They cry. They laugh. They call for help in whatever voice will pull you closest. They know exactly what a person can’t stand to walk away from.
“They just know how to look helpless,” he said.
I remembered the little tin plate in my hands, and the way I’d worried she was hungry.
My stomach turned.
I’d done exactly what it wanted.
“What are they?” Levi asked. “Actually.”
Marcel was quiet a moment. “Depends on who you ask. Some say they’re cursed children, drowned and changed into something else. Some say they were never human at all, just something that learned the shape because it works. I’ve heard a dozen stories.” He looked out at the dark water. “Only thing everybody agrees on is they’re dangerous.”
“Dangerous how?” Dylan asked.
Marcel hesitated, and the silence said more than any answer could have.
“People who follow ’em into the swamp,” he said, “don’t always come back.”
Ryan’s voice, when he spoke, had lost all its usual bravado. “You mean they kill people?”
Marcel didn’t answer right away. When he did, it wasn’t really an answer at all. “I’ve never met anybody who came back to tell me different.”
Then he said the only thing that mattered. “Stay by this fire.” He nodded toward the black tree line without looking at it directly, like even looking too long was a kind of invitation. “Out there, I can’t protect you.”
I saw him then, quick and quiet, make the sign of the cross over his chest, the way you do a thing so old it’s stopped being a decision and just happens on its own. He didn’t say anything about it. Beside me, Brooke’s hand had gone to the small silver cross she always wore, and her fingers closed around it, but she didn’t say anything either. I think we all understood, in that moment, that Marcel, who had spent a whole lifetime on this water, who had never once acted rattled by anything we’d seen, was afraid. Not startled. Not cautious. Afraid, in a way that unsettled me worse than the teeth had.
I looked toward the empty stump where I’d left the plate.
“Marcel…”
My voice barely sounded like my own.
“Is this my fault?”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“No.”
The answer should have made me feel better.
It didn’t.
He glanced toward the darkness beyond the firelight.
“But feeding one never helps.”
I looked down at my hands, remembering the little girl crouched over the plate, the way she’d smiled at me before showing those impossible teeth.
My stomach turned.
Levi slipped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me a little closer.
“You were trying to help,” he said quietly.
I nodded, but I couldn’t stop wondering if kindness had been exactly what that thing was counting on.
Ryan didn’t handle it well. He was on his feet, pacing, glancing at the dark like it was closing in from every direction at once, and in a way I suppose it was.
“They’re surrounding us,” he said.
“That’s exactly why you stay,” Marcel told him, calm as ever.
But Ryan had already grabbed his flashlight. “I’m not staying here to die.”
Marcel stepped in front of him. “If you leave this fire, I can’t promise you’ll come back.”
Ryan pushed past him anyway. We watched the beam of his flashlight bounce and jerk between the trunks, growing smaller, and then there was nothing: no light at all, just the dark closing back over the place where it had been. Silence. A splash, somewhere out past the reeds.
Then laughter. A little girl’s laughter, bright and delighted, and then another voice joined it, and another, until the whole swamp seemed to be full of children laughing at something wonderful, echoing off the water from every direction so that none of us could say where it was actually coming from.
Ryan never came back.
At first light, we searched. We found his flashlight half-buried in the mud, the lens cracked, the batteries dead. We found one boot, upright, laces still tied, as if he’d simply stepped out of it. There were long drag marks through the mud near the water’s edge, and no blood, and nothing else at all.
Marcel stood over the boot for a long moment. “Let’s go,” he said.
Nobody argued.
I couldn’t stop wondering if it had started with me.
If I’d never carried that plate into the darkness…
would Ryan still be alive?
The official search went on for the better part of a week: wildlife officers in flat boats, a helicopter passing low over the water. They never found anything more than what we already had. The sheriff’s department ruled it an alligator attack, which everyone in town seemed content to accept. People go missing in the bayou every year, they told us, gently. The water takes what it takes.
Marcel never argued with the ruling. He just nodded along, and something in his face told me he’d heard that same tidy explanation before.
I’ve been home for a few weeks now. Levi and I don’t talk about that trip much, not because we’ve decided not to, but because there’s nothing either of us can say about it that sounds like anything but a story too strange to be believed.
Yesterday evening I was watering the flowers on my back patio when I went inside to refill the watering can. A loud crash made me jump. I hurried back outside.
One of my ceramic flowerpots lay shattered across the concrete. Potting soil was scattered everywhere.
Through the spilled dirt, small, muddy footprints led straight to the sliding glass door.
They stopped there.
No footprints led away.
I stood very still for a long time, listening to nothing, remembering the way Marcel had looked at that little girl by the firelight, the plate of food already gone, her small filthy face turning up toward mine.
They just know how to look helpless.
Author’s Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by the Louisiana legend of the Letiche. While the characters and events are fictional, the legend itself has been passed down through generations of Cajun folklore.
If you’d like to learn more about the legend that inspired this story, read The Letiche: The Terrifying Alligator Child of the Louisiana Bayou.
© 2026 Karen Cody. All rights reserved. This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog. Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission. This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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