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.