One woman suffered a heart attack after just 90 seconds inside the Box. A 17-year-old boy had to be dragged out, kicking and screaming. The boy was from one town over and Erin hadn’t known him, though her friend Celeste claimed her parents were friends with the boy’s mom. They went to his funeral when he killed himself two weeks later. Whatever the truth of the matter, town officials were quick to act in getting Farmer Grave’s shut down and they even somehow managed to keep the incident out of the local paper.
Of course, no one could stop people in the town from spreading their own rumors about the now infamous attraction, which they began to do almost immediately. For the next month or so, it seemed like the Toy Box was the only thing anyone could talk about. It had become the stuff of legend and of course, it didn’t take long for the local kids to start venturing out to the Orchard at night to see the Box for themselves.
Farmer Grave’s Haunted Orchard was owned by a middle-aged couple named Will and Darlene Sawyer. When the town council ordered the Sawyers to shut down, they were so pissed about the ruling, they left most of the attraction still standing, including the Devil’s Toy Box. The actual orchard was on a plot of land located at the rear of the Sawyer’s property and was only accessible by a narrow two-lane dirt road.
One night, several seniors at Erin’s school snuck out to the Sawyer’s property on a dare and claimed they found the Toy Box’s entrance padlocked, but a certain Will Sawyer showed up out of nowhere and asked them if they wanted to go inside. Will’s sudden arrival had startled the young men, but once they realized that he wasn’t mad at them for trespassing and in fact seemed genuinely happy to see them, the guys decided to take him up on his offer to have a go inside the box. Of course, they chickened out as soon as Will unlocked the door and it seemed to swing open on its own, like a hungry mouth at the sight of food.
That’s how the rumors about midnight screenings of the Devil’s Toy Box began to circulate. Most of the people who ventured out there afterwards claimed they encountered Will Sawyer after waiting beside the Toy Box for an unspecified length of time. A few even said that they went inside the box but these claims were always dismissed as bullshit. No one came out of that box that was coherent enough to talk about it.
Last week, Erin’s boyfriend Troy went out there with some of his idiot friends and Erin hadn’t seen him since. His parents reported him as missing and Erin even tried to tell the cops about the Orchard, but they didn’t seem to take her seriously. Now, Erin was going crazy worrying about Troy and of course, she was hoping I would be intrigued enough by her story to come with her to investigate Farmer Grave’s because she was too scared to do so by herself.