Internet Horror: The Orange Story

Note: Blog content will be sparse for a while, as the summer heat is cooking my already-fragile brain

Last time on the extremely popular and long-running series where I review internet spooky stories, we looked at a beloved nosleep yarn that actually holds up, mostly. Today let’s talk about one that doesn’t.

I am a grown, logical man, crying tears of horror right now. Or the story of her holding an orange, often abbreviated to The Story Of Her Holding An Orange or just “the Orange Story” is a multi-part tale that originally debuted on nosleep in 2012. Our narrator starts the story off during his childhood, recounting an unsettling event wherein one of his mother’s friends began speaking in a creepy, high-pitched voice and tried to get him to take an orange from her. He refused and put the episode behind him, only to have the woman continually re-appear over a span of years, getting more and more insistent that he needs to take the damn orange. Realizing that he’s being stalked by something supernatural, he tells his wife about the experience…but it turns out that she’s also had run-ins with the same person or entity. What does it all mean???

So there are two ways to approach writing for nosleep. The first is to sit down and put in lots of hard work, treating the subject like any other serious writing project that you intend to be read by the wider public. The other approach is to stay up too late eating bad take-away food and sugar, blithely hammer out whatever nonsensical idea your internet-addled brain conjures up, then slam the post button before your sense of shame can catch up to what you’re doing. Having taken both approaches in my time as a nosleep writer, I can say that the latter approach yields results of variable quality.

Now, I’m not saying that u/inaaace didn’t put a lot of work into The Orange Story. I’m just saying that it reads like something that was made up on the spot with very little planning or forethought, following a thought process that would have gone something like: “What if the main character was in a room alone with his Mom’s friend, and she, like, started talking in this really creepy voice? And then she tried to give him an orange, I guess? Or something?”

Given that, it’s actually remarkable that the story isn’t far worse.

As you may have gathered from the plot description, the whole “cursed fruit” idea eventually gets extremely silly, but it doesn’t start out that way. In fact, the narrator’s first two run-ins with Rose, the titular her who’s holding the orange, are actually pretty creepy. I’m a big sucker for David Lynch-esque horror that’s based largely on normal people suddenly acting in unsettling ways, and the initial encounters with her really nail that sense of unease. Given how over the top nosleep stories were getting at the time, I like that the author keeps the appearances relatively subtle.

Also, going back to what I said in my last nosleep review, the story is firmly in the old-school nosleep style in that it’s very much presented as a Reddit post, not a fictional narrative. This has the added bonus of making the relatively frequent typos and poor grammar a lot more forgivable.

All that said, the initial premise did have some issues as well. Engaging in the timeworn horror tradition of Going Too Far, the story has Rose doing a bunch of goofy stuff like talking in the voice of a child, talking without opening her teeth (?), grinning, and tilting her head to the side. Those last two are for some baffling reason a creepypasta staple; I’ve lost count of the number of promising stories that have derailed instantly with “and then the ghost grinned super bigly and tilted its head to the side wooOOOooo!”

If you don’t have a giant horror brain like me, then you might not understand what’s so bad about this. Allow me to illustrate with an example.

I compared the encounters with Rose to something from a David Lynch movie earlier. There’s a scene early on in Inland Empire, Lynch’s Lynchiest movie, where the protagonist is visited by a creepy woman who says a bunch of weird bullshit while acting vaguely sinister and unsettling. It’s one of those bits like the Winkie’s scene or the Mystery Man in Lost Highway where Lynch makes a scene intensely creepy despite it taking place in a thoroughly non-creepy setting.

Now picture that scene again, except this time the old woman is grinning like the Joker and tilting her head ninety degrees. The scariness comes from the fact that the old woman is acting kind of weird and off, but not to such an extent that something obviously threatening or supernatural is happening. The situation takes a long time where the protagonist feels that she can justifiably tell the woman to leave, so she has to just sit there getting more and more unnerved.

If the old woman had been acting in a more overtly horror movie-ish manner, that factor wouldn’t be in play. The protagonist would have been free to think “this person is either deliberately trying to scare me or isn’t in their right mind, I should get out of here.” This is the line that the Orange Story crosses early on, and once it does, there’s no going back. I think the whole concept would have worked better with a lighter touch.

But even with these criticisms in mind, we’ve still got the ingredients for a short, creepy one-off: “My mom’s friend acted really weird and scary and kept showing up with an orange, 2 spooky 4 me pls help!”

But then it keeps going.

This isn’t like Search And Rescue where the story was propelled by reader enthusiasm; the first chapter ends with an Exciting Cliffhanger, so it was clearly planned as a multi-part narrative from the beginning. But maybe it shouldn’t have been, because it gets very silly, very quickly.

I’ll say this before laying into the criticisms: the basic premise of the following chapters--a husband and wife discovering that they’ve both been haunted by the same entity since childhood--is a dynamite idea. Some of the individual scares still retain their potency, stripped out of context. And I like that the story uses fake photos to keep up the “this is a real reddit post about real things that are really happening” conceit, which is something that older nosleep stories tended to go in for a lot more often.

But Rose’s manifestations are inherently prone to diminishing returns--it starts to get a bit stale even by the end of the first chapter--and the author’s attempts to spice things up are...well, here’s an example from the second chapter:

“I have something for you.” She said in a voice that definitely wasn't natural for a woman her age. Her voice belonged more to a teenager than an adult. There was something playful but terrifying in it.

Now, Lila has seen some shit while flying, so she wasn't taken back by this interaction.

“Yea? What would that be, ma’am?”

“Don’t patronize me, you bitch.” She said that fast. Like really fast. Her jaw was closed while saying that. Then she started grinding her teeth, never letting go of that fucking smile.

We all know that horror villains who talk are the absolute worst, but horror villains who swear are even worse. As soon as I read this section, all of the spookiness went out of the story, and it didn’t come back.

The Orange Story was tidied up and compiled into a self-published book, like many a successful nosleep story (the most famous is probably Dathan Aurbach’s Penpal) and judging by the Goodreads reviews it doesn’t seem to have been received very well by the general reading audience. 

I’m not surprised; nosleep stories rarely work outside of their original context (for an example see the aforementioned Penpal), and The Story of Her Holding An Orange didn’t work too well within its original context.