Day 2,098

When we cut the tree down we found that it was stuffed full of corpses. Old ones at that. Judging by their clothing people had been peeling the bark back and placing their dead inside for the last five hundred years and the most recent one's obituary was in the papers only last year.

We knew it was one of the oldest trees in the country, possibly the oldest, but there'd never been any record of this tradition in the whole damned world. At least it explained why the tree was dying - its core was literally rotting away and all the corpses were so tightly packed in that we couldn't even separate the oldest ones.

So we left them encased in that dense, red amber and buried them in their cluster. Funniest thing was that the newer bodies all had graves and there were bones in their graves. Not their bones of course but human bones dressed in their clothes nonetheless.

Since our unpleasant discovery all the other "oldest trees" have been placed under careful investigation and 24 hour watches. Ours never showed any signs of the bark being peeled away, there was never any smell and yet it was full to the brim with bodies.

There's no telling how many other trees are like this.