Ashes to Ashes: Remembering Krem (Part 4/6)

Ashes to Ashes: Remembering Krem (Part 4)
Retold by LoreKeeper Casstiel of the Bridge of Souls on 27 December 2013
Regarding the events on 26 July 2008
Genius Territorialiss at the ghost town of Krem, North Dakota

After that, things seemed to become surreal; it must have been the stress and shock.  We had reached some kind of breaking point and each one of us dealt with it in our own way.  It drove an eternal bond between us, this place where the Horsemen had rode, and maybe that is why later we Awakened and decided to espouse and contrast their legacy, even though at the time we didn’t know it.

Like I said, we never considered a human was lurking around slashing tires.  After seeing those specters we were down the rabbit hole and anything could be stretched to be blamed on the ghosts.  Any mundane misfortune that followed was seen through the paranoid lens of hysteria.

Kairos fiddled with his phone, trying to get a signal.  We turned on our flashlights and leafed through the journal. Turns out it was the final legacy of John Kruckenberg, the town Sheriff and we quickly recognized as the shooter ghost.  He had made his final journal entry before strangling his wife and putting a bullet through the top of his head.  It filled in some of the pieces, over time I painted a picture of the reasons for the events that followed.

The things we saw were not ghosts I later discovered in my occult studies, these were illusions created by the cursed terrirtorialiss of the town. See I believe now that there ere only two ghosts in what was left of Krem.  The Sheriff Kruckenberg and the town itself.  Either the undying ameba of the town itself or a violent joining of the guilty townsfolk as they died.  The ghost of the town was a hurt thing that wanted to continue to harm anyone who crossed its path.  It either wanted to be put to rest or return to its former glory.  Sheriff tried to keep it in check as the town crumbled around him.  By his actions, he wanted the place put to rest and the curse finally ended.  They were two forces in counterweight, tied together by fate and a necromantic bond.

You see, the bad luck started when the North Dakotans of Krem settled along the railroad (the same unused track that made up that bridge).  They also started to mine after spotting coal in a nearby cave.  The Babyshead Coal Mine was a place of hearth for the town, coal mining for heat in the harse winters.  But they found something in the earth, something akin to the Darkness That Thirsts in the Bakken Oil formation.  Maybe this darkness was related to Nergal’s Acamoth and maybe not.  A rock that looked like a carved baby’s head set just above the cave’s mouth.  Creepy thing.  This small token of Native American power was created from the heart of the underground and left there.  The miners started mining where Mandan Indians had explored and dug first.

The Babyhead mine passed its darkness on to 16 year old maid, Alma Kruckenberg, the Sheriff’s daughter.  John Kruckenberg went to the church to have Lutheran Reverend Heio Janssen perform the holy rights of Exorcism.  The priest was a fool and the darkness of this dark force passed on to him.  Demonic possession, maybe a spirit, an Infernal, or even something associated with the Gentlemen or other Abyssal entity.  The Priest raped her, being driven by this evil, became pregnant.  The exorcism was a failure.  In fact the force stayed with him.  He tried to cover up Alama’s pregnancy by poisoning her.  After two doses she died in a bed in the priest’s house and the reverend tried to burn down his house to cover it up… but the Sheriff was relentless.

He later claimed he didn’t know why he did it, said he was “driven by the devil.” Heio was arrested and charged with murder after he tried to cover up what he did.  It wasn’t until John placed the burned body of Alma and the unborn baby that he confessed what he did.  This is where the Reverand’s story ended.  He was left to himself to rot in North Dakota jail system for ten years until he killed himself in prison 10 years after the murder.  He tried to live a life of penance but was tormented by his or other inner demons.

The preacher charged and incarcerated the town never returned to normal.  Before he was sent from Krem there was a riotous outcry from the Krem population.  There was no way that Reverand Janssen could have done such a thing.

But then Alma came back, before the sheriff, and he kept it a secret.  Not very well though.

The town went into decline and sightings of the resurrected Alma fueled the hysteria and bedlam to take root.  Eventually the town was so desperate that they lynched young Alma (they recognized her as the center of this curse) and hung her from the railroad bridge and buried her in the Babyshead Coal Mine.  Before she was pushed over the side with the noose around her neck she vomited a gout of flies and planted her curse upon the town with her death cry.  Soon after the railroad company sent notice that the tracks would be moved.  The grieving sheriff John Kruckenberg watched Krem descend into ruination as the curse of the horsemen descended upon the town.  A massive dust storm and plague of locust tormented the farmers there, the usual badness spoken in hushed whispers of gossiping teenagers keeping up the oral tradition that the older folk long forgot.

The Sheriff’s mounting hate and need for revenge was great and when things got their worst he gunned downed the townsfolk in the street.  The Sheriff tried to keep his own version of order but was eventually driven into his jailhouse by rioters.  The place was lit on fire by maniac rioters and he put a bullet through the top of his head to escape the flames forever.  No doubt to find the flames of hell instead.

Then again, maybe there was no curse and no dark force.  Only the evil of men and the ghosts created by their violence.  We assumed that there was actually a curse and the Sheriff certainly collaborated that.  But maybe this was a century old witch hunt.  Maybe the town’s spirit or ghost is what awoke first and started pushing people.  Maybe it broke all its toys.  Perhaps we should take another trip to Krem and ensure that the place is now silent.  With our Awakened eyes we could finally put the pieced together.  I know that Indra recently took a visit there with Kairos and Nergal.  They took auditory readings and dosing that suggested that the Genus Territorialiss or ghost of the town was now slumbering or gone forever.

Those that had already moved away returned to a desolated town but they took the wood and useable materials with them.  The Kruckenberg family of cousins and relatives still flourishes for one thing.  Perhaps this is why Beulah is the site of a peculiar darkness tied to the coal mining and oil production of the region.  Perhaps the Hellmouth is a dumping ground for unusable supplies from Krem or the like The curse was distributed but the core of the town remained and the Sheriff forever repeating his actions to prevent and destroy the darkness that took his daughter’s life.

The journal was bad enough, a haunting all its own when we read from the back moving backwards in chronological entries, but the old corroded revolver was even worse.  Loudon held it, and was plagued by urges and nightmare imagery.  As for as intelligence goes it was gold but even through it helped provide context for the hauntings it was terrifying.  I kept worrying that somehow the revolver would work, the sliding chamber would not open but perhaps there were four bullets left and ready.  Maybe the Sheriff would push him to rampage on us.  By the time we took it away from him our trip was almost done.

We didn’t get a signal but we again spotted the nearby farm and welcoming lights…