Ashes to Ashes - Remembering Krem (Part 1/6)

Retold by LoreKeeper Casstiel of the Bridge of Souls on 27 December 2013
Regarding the events on 26 July 2008

Casstiel takes his time, get another drink and swirl it around, watching the scotch roll over the ice cubes creating distortions in the fluid as the alcohol mixes with a tiny bit of melting water.  “This was three years or so before we all Awakened.  And even before we started taking up hunting things.  We had no knowledge of the fallen world’s supernatural influences.  We were just young adults going to College and finding work.  The night that all changed was the night of my birthday, maybe the summer of 2008, might have been sooner.  We used to have a tradition among my high school friends that no matter where we moved and worked we would always make it home for a late July birthday out at Sacagawea Lake.  

So I just turned 22 that night so it’s already been at least 6 years since then.  The parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles had gone to sleep in the trailer.  We were sitting around playing liar’s dice on the enclosed deck and trying to decide what we wanted to do now.  We watched the thick clouds roll over the still waters of the bay. 

Now, I need to stick a disclaimer in here right away.  Since I was initiated into the Imperial Mysteries surrounding the events in which Loudon died, one year ago today, I touched the Supernal.  And when you touch the Supernal it touches you.  I am not sure if my past changed slightly or I moved to a parallel universe in which events went a little different.  So this version of our trip to Krem may be a little off from how things actually went down for you all.  But it still is a story about our departed friend and how I and his blood brothers overcame our first brush with death.

That first night it was Kairos, Nergal, myself and Loudon… our friend Andrew.  Prodigy came later and tried to bail us out.  We were pretty amped up on caffeine and a nice bit of alcohol… the stuff that makes every decision so much better.  The conversation started to get a little dark.  There is an old clay building a little ways down the road near the water front near the Bjerke trailer.  It is a historic state location but we liked to wander through during our childhood and think about the people who lived in it over a hundred years ago.  Weather and vandals had reduced the place to tall clay and sandstone walls and collapsed wooden supports that no doubt were once part of the straw roof.  We had just taken a walk through there that evening before the sun went down, a walk and BS session, carrying our wine coolers with us as we climbed over the flimsy barbed wire fences.  We returned, and after enjoying my grandpa’s outdoor fire barrel and his famous popcorn we started talking about ghost towns and other historic buildings.  Now we were left alone to our own devices the conversation returned to the spooky. 

You see, Hazen and Beulah North Dakota were products of the railroad.  Back then that is how it was, small towns were at the mercy of the railroad companies.  Where the railroad went towns sprung up and farm Co-ops could transport there produce.  That is why you see a large grain elevator in every small town on the northern plains.  When the railroads moved the towns would shrivel up and die.  We talked about historic buildings…and there were buildings in and around those towns and the surrounding countryside that weren’t originally from there.  They had been moved, migrated, and cannibalized from the ghost towns.  You would be driving down highway 200 or 49 and see a decrepit farmhouse falling into decay.  The one near the lake we passed often had a sign next to it reading “Krem Schoolhouse #4.”

There are urban legends about the ghost town of Krem.  Most respectable German and Norwegian farmers would say stoically that they didn’t know anything about the place.  Even my grandparents wouldn’t talk about it.  If I pressed the matter I might get them to say that Krem existed, somewhere between where Beulah and Hazen are now.  People would just change the subject as uncomfortably as possible.  And I wasn’t the only one asking, Kairos, you asked more than your fair share of people and didn’t get squat.  Stoic farmers just shrugged it off like we have seen so many times.  Nothing truly bad could ever happen in a quiet farming community.  I call it the Zone of Normalcy.  Sleepers unsee and their hearts reject the truth of the fallen world they live in.

My ex-wife’s grandparents actually knew people that lived in the town a hundred years ago.  A Neuberger relative was from Krem, now dead.  I never did find any living person who lived in or visited the town.  It had grown as a fascination for me throughout my young life.  Now after several years I had grown even more curious.  Earlier in the summer I went to the Beulah City Library/Police Station and did some research.  There was very little to find, and all the old newspapers seemed to have gaps and missing articles around the time Krem became abandoned.  I did manage to discover that the town used to exist and became a ghost town when the railroad moved away by about six miles to the north.  As a result the buildings and materials of Krem were cannibalized or moved.  Those first buildings became the start of Beulah and Hazen, less than 10 miles to the Northeast and Northwest.

The rumors that had become legend painted a different story.”  Casstiel takes another sip of his scotch and takes a breath to collect his thoughts.  The scotch was Glenn Livet, aged 15 years, a wedding present from another Air Force Captain.  He could feel the warmth spreading from his innards to the tingling of his fingers and it was delightful.  Despite the constant grim topic, this forum was the one in which he felt completely safe… A circle of friends and loved ones that no darkness could penetrate.

“Now all these rumors are from different high school kids in the Beulah/Hazen area that I attended school with, along with various intramural events such as speech, track, or anything else I tried in those last four years before college.  When conversation went to the creepy and we began diving into urban legends and ghost stories Krem would always float to the surface, like a pocket of swamp gas from beneath torpid waters. 

The town had been cursed somehow, its luck ran out and horrible things began to happen.  Plague, Famine, Death, even War among family.  Bad luck, the fifth Horseman had ridden through too by the sound of it.  The usual stuff was mentioned.  Cows stopped producing; chickens stopped laying, drought, bad crops, the local mine was tapped out, and of course the railroad.

The source of the curse?  Demonic influence of course.  A farmer’s daughter got possessed, the local priest tried to exorcise her and failed, or the demon went into him and he raped her… or the preacher just raped the girl and she hung herself on the nearby bridge.  Or the priest failed and she died, the demon cursed the town.  Or the demonic priest was killed by his followers and the infernal creature placed a powerful curse on the town.  Something about a fire, had the town burned down? So many versions.  So many uncited sources… just a bunch of rumors that got more outlandish the more you heard.  Maybe that is why I really wanted to check out the place, sort out some truth from the slim truth pickings and exaggerated speculation of tweens.   

The big sticking point in all these stories that never seemed to change was that the preacher also committed suicide (or was so defiled), and the residents of Krem buried him outside the old German Lutheran cemetery, his headstone sitting by itself in the prairie field adjacent to the fenced in boneyard.