14 Jan The Bone Orchard

Posted at 11:00h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on January 14, 2025

“The Bone Orchard”

Written by Micah Edwards
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).

🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 12 minutes

Rating: 10.00/10. From 1 vote.

Please wait...

There weren’t ever any stories about the forest. It wasn’t haunted. It wasn’t sacred ground. It wasn’t anything except a bunch of pine trees, and whatever grows under pine trees. Mostly smaller pine trees, as I recall. Pine trees tend to kill off anything else that grows near them, which might explain why that forest existed at all.

The point is, it was just a big pine forest, covering a couple of hundred acres or so. We all grew up playing, fishing, and hunting in it. There was never anything odd about it. No one ever went missing. No one found strange things in the pinecones. It was just a place like any other.

Sometime last decade, some fellow named Randy Sommel bought the forest. He wasn’t a local. He had been a software developer, I think, or something like that. He’d made his pile of money and decided to retire out to somewhere cheaper, and our slice of the country fit the bill. So he came on out and bought the forest. I imagine he probably paid less for that whole chunk of land than his Silicon Valley house. Certainly, he had money left to throw around afterward.

I don’t mean to make him sound like a jerk. He wasn’t. He didn’t try to stop anyone from using the land like we always had, or put up signs about trespassing or anything. He made a point of coming into town and meeting folks and actually getting to be a part of the community. He didn’t fit in, exactly, but he tried. We all appreciated that.

Anyway, there was not much point in owning a forest without any sort of place to live, so naturally, the first thing he did was to clear out an acre or so and start putting up a house. A real nice place, filled with all sorts of modern conveniences. Huge picture windows with views of the forest, big kitchen and dining rooms for entertaining, the whole deal. He had folks by on the regular to see it, and while I suppose that was kind of showing off how much he had, he really was a good host.

Randy truly thought he was just going to kick back and relax. Come into town to watch the game, have folks over for a dinner party, and enjoy his retirement from age 40 on. But our town isn’t what you’d call fast-paced, and in short order, he found himself going a little bit stir-crazy. So, like anyone would, he took up a hobby to occupy his time.

He still had plenty of that software money left, though, so his hobby was a little bit bigger than what most folks might’ve gotten up to. Randy cut down another big swath of that forest, a dozen acres or so, and started an apple orchard. He started almost from scratch, planting seedlings and bringing them up from tiny little sticks. He was proud of not taking the shortcut and bringing in mature trees. Said that his were going to be made fully from the ground he’d planted them in, and he didn’t mind waiting a few more years for them to grow up the right way.

I think most of us thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Randy took a shortcut or two and cut down the amount of apple talk by a couple of years. On the other hand, he tended to buy rounds of cider when he was talking about his upcoming orchard, so mostly, we didn’t mind listening.

In any case, Andy calmed down after a few months. He was still having the time of his life up in his orchard, and he was happy to show folks around if they wanted to see it, but basically, the next few years were trees getting bigger an inch at a time, and there just wasn’t that much to say about it.

That all changed when the trees started bearing fruit. I’ve seen folks who weren’t as proud of their newborn children as Randy was of those first apples. He came into town with a wooden bushel full of them, just like it was a hundred years ago, handing apples out to anyone who glanced in his direction. As far as I know, no one noticed anything wrong with them that day. Of course, we were all just eating them the way you eat apples, taking bites around the outside and throwing out the core when you’re done. No one was cutting them open then. So, probably, those first ones were the same, and we just never knew.

Despite all the time Randy spent in that orchard, he hadn’t figured out what to do with the apples when the first crop came in. He didn’t have anyone to sell them to. He didn’t have a full-size cider press set up. He just had a dozen acres of trees, all bearing fruit at once. So he kept picking those apples and bringing them into town, telling us to enjoy them now before he started charging, and pretty soon, we were all swimming in apples.

You can only eat so many apples raw, so folks started cooking and baking with them. Within about a week, the whispers were starting. No one wanted to sound ungrateful, rude or—worst of all—strange, so it was all carefully couched in deniable language. People were all asking the same sort of question, though: had anyone else noticed anything…odd about the apples? Specifically, in the cores?

It turned out a lot of us had. It took a lot of hemming and hawing and “well, it looks like”s, but eventually word got around. That white, stick-like thing in the core of the apple wasn’t unique. It was in almost every apple grown in Randy’s orchard. And it didn’t just look like a fragment of a bone. It was one.

We were real unsure about that last bit at first, and no one wanted to be the first person to say that they’d found a bone in their apple. Mostly, they were just slivers, little broken bits that could have been anything. Twigs, some kind of odd growth, something normal like that. But a couple of folks found ones that were pretty clearly knucklebones, and at least one opened up an apple to find a hollow little bone that ended in a knee joint. Looked like it had been snapped off of a bird or something.

None of the apples were damaged in any way. No one was sneaking these bones inside of them or anything weird like that. We started checking carefully before cutting them open, and those apples were pristine and unblemished. They’d grown around the bones.

People were starting to kick around some wild ideas, like ghost trees and carnivorous apples snatching birds out of their nests. The next time Randy came into town with a pile of apples to give away, he noticed that folks were a lot less willing to take them than they had been.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Hope I haven’t appled you folks out already. There’s a lot more coming! We’re gonna be in trouble if you’ve already hit your limit.”

He was all smiles and excitement still. He had no idea what was going on. Telling him was going to be like kicking a puppy, but we knew we had to do it. And besides, maybe he had a normal explanation for the bones in the cores of his apples. I know that sentence sounds insane, but we all hoped it might be true. You can tell yourself some odd things when you’re trying to avoid the truth.

Randy did not have a good explanation for why his apples had bones in the core. He didn’t even believe us at first. We had to cut one open and show him, and then he still thought it was some kind of a trick. He took one himself, picking it from the middle of the basket, as if he suspected us of changing out the ones on the top, and cut it carefully down the middle.

The bone that fell out of that was the clearest one yet. It didn’t look like an animal bone like the others. It was cracked in half, but despite that, it was very obviously the top joint of a human finger.

Everyone was eyeing Randy pretty suspiciously at this point, and he was giving the eye right back. We called in the sheriff by unspoken mutual agreement. This was well beyond what town gossip and whispers could sort out. We needed the law.

Sheriff Morley was pretty unhappy about the entire situation. It was complicated and confusing, and it wasn’t exactly clear what crime had been committed. Obviously, it had to be illegal to give people apples with bones. That sort of thing couldn’t possibly be allowed. It’s just that it was a little hard to find a specific statute to point to forbidding it.

Just like the rest of us, though, Morley had eaten several of those apples. He didn’t appreciate learning that he’d accidentally put something strange in his mouth. So he was motivated to find some reason why whatever was going on with Randy’s apples wasn’t okay. After a little digging around, he told Randy that he was investigating his orchard for violations of the Nutrition Labeling Act, and he was going to need to go look around up there immediately.

It probably wasn’t a reasonable citation. After all, who’s ever seen an apple with a nutrition sticker? But it sounded official, and Randy wasn’t inclined to fight it. He wanted to get to the bottom of this as much as any of us. Moreso, in fact, since it was his orchard that was tainted. We’d all just had a few apples to deal with. This had been Randy’s passion for the last half-decade. For him, this wasn’t just a complaint about some oddities in the fruit. It was a personal attack.

Morley offered to wait until the weekend to come look through the orchard, but Randy insisted he come up right then.

“I’ll be taking one right off of the tree when I get back,” said Randy. “You might as well be there with me to see it. If this is some kind of hoax, I’ll be glad to have a witness that my apples aren’t the problem. And if it isn’t…I guess I’m gonna need all the help I can get figuring out what’s going on. So bring anyone you like. We’re going up now to get to the bottom of this.”

Turned out that most of the town was interested in getting to the bottom of this. We all piled into various cars and followed the sheriff and Randy out to his house. The driveway was never meant to handle that many vehicles at once, but we all angled onto the grass at the edges and made it work. Then we realized it was still a bit of a hike out to the orchard, so while Randy and the sheriff took his golf cart out along the track, the rest of us crammed into the backs of a few pickup trucks and rode out after them.

This is all to show the sort of quiet chaos lurking in the background. It wasn’t a problem yet, but it was the sort of thing that could easily become a problem if anything went wrong. We were all too fixated on the apples to think that far ahead, though.

The whole procession rolled up to the first tree. Randy got out with an apple picker and pulled a fruit down straight off the tree. We all saw the branch bend when he pulled it, and then bob back up as the apple popped free. That fruit had grown there, sure enough.

Sheriff Morley took a knife and cut the apple in half. Nestled in the center, neat as could be, was a human tooth. It was a molar missing one of its roots in a jagged break. It had no business being in an apple.

“I don’t understand,” said Randy. He spoke for all of us, really. Up until that very moment I think we’d all been holding out hope that this was a trick, or a joke, or some sort of insane prank. But we’d all seen the apple come down together. We’d crowded around and watched as the sheriff turned it over and cut it open. It was whole before he took the knife to it. The only way that apple could have had a tooth inside of it was if the tree had put it there itself.

Randy went to another tree, then another, then another. We all trailed along behind, watching as he took an apple from each one and split it open to reveal a new bone. Some were just tiny fragments, looking more like toothpicks than anything structural. Others were almost whole. There were big ones and little ones, fingers and toes and wings and spines. The only thing they had in common was that none of them belonged inside of an apple.

Finally, maybe fifteen trees in, Randy found one that didn’t have anything inside of it except apple seeds. The look of relief on his face was comical.

“They’re not all like that!” he said, pulling down another apple and cutting it open. “Look, this one’s normal too. It’s not the whole orchard! Whatever’s going on here, it’s not all of the trees.”

We all shoved in close to see the apple in Randy’s hand. Sure enough, it was perfectly ordinary inside. We passed it around, examining it carefully, as if maybe the bones were hidden behind the seeds. The sheriff, meanwhile, wandered over to tap on the tree and try to figure out what made this different from the previous ones. Something in the roots caught his eye, and he crouched down to scratch at the soil, pulling away clumps of grass.

“You put this one on rocks?” he asked Randy. “Could be that’s what’s keeping the bones out.”

“I had this entire area tilled to tear up all of the pine stumps and roots,” Randy said. “There shouldn’t be any sizable rocks left.”

“Big milky quartz-looking thing,” said Morley, rapping on a piece he’d exposed. “Huh, sounds hollow. What kind of—”

Everyone went quiet at once. The sheriff knocked on the rock in front of him again. It was definitely hollow. We couldn’t see much of it sticking out of the ground, but the same thought occurred to everyone at the same time. This was a skull.

“Get me a shovel,” he said quietly. “If this is human, this is now a crime scene.”

The sheriff probably should have cleared us all out then, but I suppose he realized he’d have a riot on his hands if he tried that. Randy went tearing off back toward his barn and came back a few minutes later, riding in a big yellow digger that barely fit down the row. It knocked branches aside as it came, sending apples rolling free across the ground. I pictured the bones inside of them bouncing and tumbling, rattling against the core. I wondered if the skull we were about to see was human. I tried to figure out what it all meant.

I came up with nothing. I just stared along with everyone else, waiting to see what would be revealed.

“What’d you bring that huge thing for?” Morley asked as Randy drove up. “You can’t dig this up with that. It’d smash it all to bits.”

Randy tossed a shovel to the sheriff and clambered down from the digger, letting it idle.

“Something’s going on under my trees,” he said. “You can dig that skull up carefully first, but after that, I’m making a big hole to see what’s behind all of this.”

The tree roots were tangled everywhere the sheriff tried to dig, but after a couple of tries and a bit of inventive swearing, he managed to get the blade of the shovel under the skull and lever it out of the ground. It popped free in a shower of earth, but even before the sheriff lifted it up, it was obvious that it was a deer skull.

We all let out a collective breath. From the small bit of the curve we’d seen, I’d been certain it was human. It was a disappointment and a relief. It’s still a bizarre thing to find tangled in the roots of an apple tree, but it’s no longer something that used to be a person.

“It’s just a deer,” said Morley. He sounded as relieved as the rest of us.

“That one is,” said Randy, peering into the small hole. The sheriff’s head snapped around.

“What?”

“There’s another one under it. Look, past that big root.”

The sheriff did his best, jabbing and chopping at the thick roots, but this one was too far under the tree to retrieve with the shovel.

“Step back,” said Randy, who had climbed back into the digger. “I’ll see what’s under the tree.”

We all backed up a step as he dropped the scoop into the ground and started to dig. The teeth bit into the thick tree roots, scarring and mangling them. He pulled the scoop back up, scattering broken roots and dirt everywhere—and along with it, dozens of skulls in all sizes.

Most of them belonged to animals. At least two were those of humans.

“There’s more down there!” called Randy, sending the scoop back into the ground. The next haul seemed to contain more bone than earth. The skulls spilled out everywhere, hundreds of them this time. They were shattered and fragmented from their unceremonious retrieval, but again, several human skulls were obvious in the mass.

“Stop digging!” shouted Morley, but Randy was already going in again.

“There’s more down there!” he cried. “Wait! There’s something moving!”

The digger jerked as if caught on something, and then tilted forward. Randy yanked back on the controls, but it hung in place, straining against an unseen force. It stayed that way for several seconds before suddenly lurching backward, released from whatever titanic grip had held it. It crashed into another tree, ripping its roots from the earth and knocking it askew.

As the roots sprung free from the ground, we had a glimpse of something massive tangled in them. I thought for a moment that it was just more collected bones, but then it moved in one long, snakelike mass. It was as thick around as a man’s waist, and I saw at least twenty or thirty feet of length whip by as it vanished back into the ground. The entire structure was composed of bones, from human femurs and spinal columns to tiny mouse ribs, all deftly arranged into a single, flexible unit.

The bones in it were not broken like the ones we had been finding in the apples. They were strong and whole, worthy of being put to use. Something was not just collecting the bones but selecting them. It was building something new underneath the soil. It was somehow using the trees to remove its discards.

None of this made any sense. It wasn’t even properly something I thought about. It just crashed through my mind like the bone tentacle itself, a small piece of something much larger.

I was already running before the thing under the ground disappeared. So was most of the town. The ones who’d driven their trucks to the orchard didn’t wait for the passengers to climb back aboard, but floored the pedals as soon as the engines started. Dirt fountained from spinning wheels as they stomped on the gas. People screamed as they were knocked aside by fishtailing vehicles, thrown from the beds, and crushed beneath the tires.

No one stopped to help anyone up. Those who didn’t make it into the trucks just kept running. None of us even looked back.

There weren’t any bodies that day, though I can count seven people missing from town. The sheriff was among them. I don’t know why that feels like it matters more than the others. He was supposed to find out the truth, I suppose. He was the one who was meant to be in charge. Taking him—well, I guess that means that whatever is under the orchard is in charge now.

I thought maybe Randy would cut down the orchard, burn it to the ground, or move away. Instead, he’s had delivery trucks coming up to his house recently. I sneaked a peek. It looks like he’s finally getting that full-scale cider press installed, the system for processing all of those thousands of apples at a time. The mashers and the filters on it look pretty solid. I imagine if they can handle the stems and seeds and cores of the apples, they could probably take all sorts of other fragments as well.

Doesn’t matter what goes in. Cider comes out.

The rest of the slurry goes right back into the orchard. Bone meal makes excellent fertilizer.