Scare Tactics

I live in an older farm house, which means I deal with creaky floors, paper thin walls, and cracks in the walls where cold air from outside can come in. Unfortunately, the wind isn't the only thing that comes in; mice do to.
I'm used to them by now. Hearing them in the walls or waking up to the sound of scampering across my floors at night. As long as they stay away from me, I don't mind them. Sure it's annoying to find mouse poop or sunflower seeds in various places, but otherwise we don't usually have a problem with them.
It's when they do torment you when you least expect it-like when you're sleeping. I used to have problems with that all the time until I switched rooms with my parents. Now they don't ever bother me in my sleep.
Now that I've said all that, it's time to get to what happened today....
So recently we've had a large amount of mice in our house, probably because of the recent snow storm we had. So we've been catching one or two a day. Yesterday was no different-we had caught one in the basement and one in my closet (that's where we catch them most). But as I was getting ready for bed last night all of a sudden I heard a distressing squeak from the cupboard. Not thinking much of it (and knowing what to expect) I opened the cupboard and stuck my head inside. Nothing. I could still hear the sqeaking, but there was nothing there to make it. I yelled down to my mom and she told me it was probably in the wall somewhere and not to worry about it.
I still did of course. The poor thing sounded miserable. But I continued with my nightly routine and went to bed.
I have a horrible memory-especially short-term- so by the time I woke up this morning I had forgotten about the whole ordeal. I got up, showered, and went to school. I did my thing at school and came home. Still didn't think about it. Of course being the day before thanksgiving, I went and tidied up my room and bathroom. Wash the mirror, clean the toilet, put away my stuff. Everything was going well. I took the headbands and shoved them into the container I store them in, which is in the cupboard. A moment later, my heart leapt out of my chest.
Half-way into the container (which is clear on one side) I saw it. It wasn't much, but it was enough to give me the heebie-geebies; the end of a mouse tail.
All I could think was that first, gross. I had been wearing a headband that was touching a dead mouse (i had tapped the container then shook it to make sure). Second, that the squeaking noise probably was from the mouse in the container. Third, I had just squished a dead mouse even further into my headbands-uber disgusting.
I got squeemish. I'll admit it. In fact, so squeemish that I slammed the container shut and held it out at arms length walking down the stairs yelling "mom, Mom, MOm, MOM, MOOOOOOOM!" She was confused. I handed her the box, pointed at the tail and whined "please tell me that's not what I think it is..."
She laughed. "It probably is." She opened the box and peeked around. She shook the box, then proceeded to take the headbands out one at a time. I stepped back, worrying still about my headbands being all nasty. Finally, she got down into where the suspicious tail was.
She began laughing hysterically. I didn't know what was going on. Was it really that funny? I didn't think so. She pulls out a brown headband, walks over to the drawer with scissors in it and returns to me. Taking the scissors she cuts of a loose string on the headband and hands it to me.
"There's your dead mouse."