New Ways Old Grudges Werewolf KarstnerLtd

Whispers

"Failed early vaccine experiments." "Nazi blood science." "Trials of chemical pesticides and herbicides on unknowing subjects." "Lysenkoism on the high prairie."

                   - Some Commonly Held Beliefs About Karstner, Ltd.

Rustles

Back in 1932, a man named Gerhard Karstner got off the train in Williston, North Dakota with a lot of luggage and a thick stack of papers. Born in Germany around 1906, he had emigrated in 1927 with an eye to applying chemicals to farm life. The concept was new then - back before DDT and the bald eagle - and Karstner had some novel ideas. Even at the time they were poorly understood by the public and are moreso now, but they all involved the application of chemicals at different stages of farm life.

With loans from a bank in Bismarck and, it was rumored, a shady grant by a federal government trying to fund industry and job creation during the Depression, Karstner acquired large tracts of cheap former farmland. The Dust Bowl had just begun - and farmland became a lot cheaper when it ceased being farmland and became wasteland. His company, Karstner Chemicals, Limited, was never a huge employer - at its peak it had fewer than 15 permanent employees on the payroll. But in order to ensure the chemicals "took", Karstner used relatively large numbers of manual laborers with picks and shovels. Their jobs were to ensure that the chemicals sprayed, misted, dribbled or thrown by the bucketload over the ground were thoroughly worked into the dirt. The company paid good money, especially with the Depression on. Whenever the handbills went up and word spread of the company doing another test and needing workers, there were always at least ten times as many that they needed.

Contrary to what people told each other later, there were no widespread stories about weird deformities or crippling diseases among the workers. Sure, one or two of them a year died of something painful and horrible - but there was no shortage of causes for that, and the vast majority of them originated somewhere other than the numbered, neatly sectioned experiment grounds (Karstner did not like to call them "fields" unless something was growing in them) where they worked. Karstner raised a few eyebrows and more than a few tempers by employing Native workers alongside white men - then as now, race relations were tense and occasionally ended in violence. But a few judicious firings and refused rehirings ensured that after a while everyone put their hatred of each other aside to earn some money.

Rumbles

What was less surprising was Karstner's focus on trying to solve the Dust Bowl problem - it ravaged farms and farmers all the way from South Dakota to Texas and blew Oklahoma topsoil through the streets of Washington D.C. Sun or cloud or blizzard-like dust storm, Karstner and his employees could be seen out trying to make their products work and get them to "take". It was no use - no matter what they did or how many chemicals they added, everything rose up and blew away with the next strong wind, and there were a lot of those. None of the winds have ever taken any responsibility for it - they do what they have always done, they say, it's everyone else's fault for putting themselves at risk. Were it not for the huge risks to Kinfolk, both human and wolf, some of the werewolves would have agreed - especially the ones who did not understand what some of the chemicals did.

Karstner himself was always friendly, but never lit up rooms or inspired crowds. Everyone who met him agreed that regardless of how things were going, he really did mean well. His company, however, was less popular. Mainly due to it not solving the seemingly impossible Dust Bowl problem, Karstner Chemicals was seen as worse and worse for the local area. Had Karstner worked magic he and his company might have been better remembered. Instead, because he could not, his company throve for five years, then shrank for three and staggered for ten before expiring in a forgotten heap in 1950. The company never lost its focus on agricultural chemical products, but took up sidelines wherever it could to boost its revenue stream - Karstner and his two administrative staff dealt with both Dakotas and Montana in the late '30s, and when World War II broke out they supplied food preservatives to the Army. Karstner was, after all, very intelligent and very sharp - he just had the bad luck of picking a totally impossible problem to solve.

When the contracts stopped coming and bigger companies started emerging both in the US and Canada, Karstner Ltd shed its few jobs and more and more of its nearly worthless land in an attempt to stay afloat. By 1949 the company knew this was unsustainable, and Karstner, by now a broken man, worked on putting the corporate affairs in order for the inevitable death, autopsy and estate sale. The doors closed and the lights went out on May 3rd, 1950. On May 4th Gerhard Karstner was found in his car with half his head missing and a shotgun between his legs.

Rumors

It wasn't until 1955, long after Karstner had been buried in an unremarkable grave in South Dakota, that the stories started coming out. Men who had worked for him as teenagers in the early '40s were losing their hair and teeth. Ranchers downwind of the company property reported that animals had been giving birth to twisted wrecks for a decade, but nobody ever listened to their complaints. Wives of Karstner employees, both permanent office workers and temporary soil-turners, said, and local records backed up, that they almost always gave birth to girls. What's more, their children were more likely to have mental and physical problems than other people's children. Known locally as "Karstner Kids", few of them achieved much in life, and tended to bankrupt their families with medical bills. One man is known to have killed his own Karstner kid daughter, then gone looking for Karstner's own grave, but was caught by sheriff's deputies before he could carry out whatever he was planning.

Then there was the old Karstner production facility, which nobody wanted. The state wouldn't come by and knock it down because, they claimed, it was an environmental hazard - whether or not that was true, and it probably was, locals said the state was just being cheap, which was also probably true. The building is still there and more than one parent is known to have bruised a child's backside for trying to go exploring in it - back in the '80s a lot of barbed-wire fences and intimidating signs were posted around the perimeter, warning of all the different cancers you could get as a result of going in. Consequently, some children and teenagers like to convince other, more gullible children that there's a monster living in the old chemical plant, or a horde of zombified Karstner field workers, and that all they're waiting for is the rusty chains on the doors to finally fall apart before It or They burst out.

Riddles

Was Karstner totally on the up-and-up? It's never been clear, especially in light of the company's contracting with the state and federal governments during a time when unethical experimentation was hardly unknown in the United States. He strongly disavowed Nazism and his only son earned a Silver Star fighting in Europe as a paratrooper, but his pronounced German accent always made some people skeptical, even in a part of the country known for its Germanic population. It's mostly a question for old men and women, as few people born after the late '40s have any direct exposure to Karstner or his company.

Are there any chemicals left? The EPA, possibly because of local lack of interest in federal interference in anything, never got around to listing it as a Superfund site, and the only survey ever done occurred in 1983, which is when the barbed wire went up. Local farmers and ranchers get on with plowing and raising herds because they have no choice and most by now are far enough removed from the 1930s that they don't think or talk about the aftermath of chemically enhanced Dust Bowl storms on their properties. There's never been a survey of that, so nobody really knows how far any contamination went. The groundwater is still drinkable, except for those times when fracking gone wrong makes it flammable, but that's a recent phenomenon.

What's up with the ghosts? Locals who live near the old company building claim that they've seen spectral hitchhikers in old clothes on the roadsides at dusk and dawn. In 1998 a town drunk put his truck in the ditch after, he said, swerving to avoid a baby that was inexplicably lying in the road in the middle of the night, but when he staggered out to look for it with a flashlight, there was nothing there. Nobody ever bought Karstner's old house after he committed suicide, and it's still there, abandoned and slowly falling apart - like his corporate building, his house is too inconvenient and expensive for anyone to want to renovate or demolish.

Were there any other Karstner holdings anywhere else? Most people of all ages say there weren't, but there are still two or three old-timers, men who turned his dirt back in the '30s and '40s, who say he wasn't alone. Their stories have changed a bit with the years and cheap booze, but they all hold a few points in common: Karstner quietly signed a contract with the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology as the academic year ended in 1946, bringing in a long-lost Americanized rich cousin in a last-ditch effort to keep some aspect of the company viable. He allegedly spent a soaking wet summer there doing nobody-knows-what, but in August the contract was terminated, there was a bitter public disagreement and an undignified brawl, and he was back at his old plant in September. One of the old timers swears he met the cousin in Rapid City in late 1946 and saw him there again at high noon in July in early 2005, and the man hadn't aged a day. Most people don't put a lot of stock in the old men's stories and mark them down as being inspired by Thunderbird, Ripple and Night Train.

Reputation

Among werewolves today, the old company grounds is something of an oddity - there haven't been any major sightings of anything untoward at the old building in years. An occasional chemical Bane attacking local water or earth elementals, sometimes a hideously mutated fish or frog found or pulled out of the river. Sept elders and a few old Kinfolk can recount stories of their parents or siblings going to secluded ranches to kill deformed monstrosities that tore their ways out of pregnant cows, sheep or horses, but none of those have been seen in decades.

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