At the Barandas turnoff 19 kilometres before Uniondale, you’ll find one of the world’s most famous ghosts – the Uniondale hitchhiker.
On a cold, rainy Good Friday night in 1968, Maria Charlotte Roux was killed there in a car accident. It is said that since then the apparition of a hitchhiker matching the description of Roux appears at the spot every Easter.
The southern seas of Africa are among the most treacherous in the world. Circumnavigating the continent was especially risky for earlier boats – and if navigating the waters wasn’t tough enough they also had to contend with the most famous ghost ship in maritime history.
Legend has it that in the mid-17 th century a Dutch trader, Der Fliegende Hollander – The Flying Dutchman, – ran into trouble while rounding the Cape. It now sails the seas in search of other ships to take messages home to their loved ones.
For many ghost-watchers, the fabulously spine-chilling Rudd House in Kimberley is the archetypal South African haunted house. Sprawling and squat, its deep shaded verandahs lend to the air of menace.
Inside, a baby can sometimes be heard crying in the nursery and there is often the terrifying clatter of glass and cutlery being flung on the floor in one of the two dispensaries.
At Matjiesfontein, the Victorian village in the Karoo, the past and the present are inseparably intertwined. So do not be surprised to find that some of the visitors are staying forever.
Among these are the spirits of founder Jimmy Logan and Lucy, who has never checked out of her hotel room. Wearing only a negligee, she’s often spotted in the corridor.
The Kimberley Public Library, now the Africana Museum, was founded in 1882 and housed opposite the Kimberley Club in a magnificent building with wrought-iron gallery, spiral staircase and sparkling chandeliers. Dyer, the city’s first qualified librarian, arrived in 1900 from England, where at one time he had worked in Buckingham Palace.
But he was also a fraudster, misappropriating funds until auditors caught up with him in 1908. Rather than go to prison, he took cyanide, and his ghost can still be seen dressed in Victorian clothing rearranging books and files in the stacks section.
The Port Elizabeth Public Library on Market Square is one of the most beautiful buildings in South Africa. Erected in 1902, it is a fine example of Art Nouveau Artistic Baronial with dramatic Elizabethan touches.
Its resident ghost is of caretaker Robert Thomas who devoted the last 31-years of his life to the library. Since his death in 1943, staff say doors open and bang shut of their own accord; books are removed from shelves and stacked on the floor; and books fall for no reason.
The Castle of Good Hope is the oldest building still in use in South Africa. And the most haunted. For over a century it was the centre of life in the settlement. There was ceremony, glittering balls, and extravagant banquets.
There was also disease and the horror of executions. It is little wonder that it is crammed with apparitions, including those of Pieter Noodt, the most hated of all Cape governors, and the beautiful Lady Ann Barnard who haunts the ballroom.
Issie Smuts, the wife of statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts, was adamant that their Irene house, Doornkloof, now Smuts House, was haunted.
Of most interest was her regularly sighting of a ghost of an elderly man with ‘a Kruger-style set of whiskers’. He is purported to be the keeper of a secret regarding the whereabouts of Boer treasure buried on the property.
The great cleft in Table Mountain is known as Platteklip Gorge, or Platteklip Kloof. At the foot of the gorge is the suburb of Oranjezicht. This was the estate of the Van Breda family, worked by hundreds of slaves. The double-storied house was haunted, and the ghost photographed in 1900. The building was demolished in the nineteen-fifties, but the ruined bandstand, and the oak trees, may still be be seen. A shadowy ghost has been seen among the trees. Another ghost, a member of the Van Breda family, rides about on a white horse. Oranjezicht is one of the places where a loyal slave is said to have hidden her master’s children in a oven, to protect them from rampaging slaves.
For over 300 years, the Cape Town Castle ghost is seen walking along the battlements. It is a tall lanky figure that haunts the castle built in 1665. The ghost of one of the men, who died building an underground tunnel in Johannesburg, haunts the dark passageway to this day. A haunted car is seen racing down the Port Elizabeth Highway causing numerous accidents