Doomed lovers, goëlery and headless horsemen...
Gareth Pike goes behind the cover of Arthur Goldstuck’s “The Ghost That Closed Down the Town”
with a torch and some trepidation.
May 10, 1986
David De Wet was driving towards Bloemfontein late on a stormy night. Suddenly, he was startled to see a bedraggled, rain-soaked teenage girl loom up in his headlights. Naturally he screeched to a halt and offered her a lift. They carried on towards town. The girl did not speak much and had obviously been out in the elements for a while, judging by her shivering, paleness and rain-soaked clothes. He asked her where she wanted to be dropped off, but as they neared the quiet suburban address she had given him, a strange thing happened. She was no longer in the passenger seat of his Corolla; instead there was only a puddle of water on the seat. Arriving at the house in question, a shaken De Wet described the girl to a weary-looking man at the door, who told him that the girl was in fact his daughter - who had died in a road accident two years previously. Every night since then, she had been trying to get a lift back home…
Or something like that, anyway. That was just poetic license,
although it does mimic the story of the Uniondale ghost, a tale retold
many times over in various places by different people.
The names of the driver or the town might change –
but it’s the same enduring urban legend of South Africa’s ghostly hitcher.
But if you even felt the slightest shiver just now, it demonstrates our collective penchant for believing, or almost believing, the ghostly stories that travel our country by night.
What’s more, the above example demonstrates an archetype – the ghostly hitcher – which has popped up in various countries in more than 100 forms. What Arthur Goldstuck, journalist, IT expert and urban legend connoisseur, has discovered in his research, is that people love to tell each other ghost stories, often different versions of the same basic story – lost children; the escaped murderer on the loose; the headless horseman; the man with the hook for a hand... Whether any of these spine-tingling tales have an original grain of truth is of course a subjective matter. But if the stories themselves were ghosts, South Africa would be overrun.
Goldstuck’s latest foray into urban legend, The Ghost that Closed Down the Town, takes the reader on a tour of some of South Africa’s most haunted locations, where things have been going bump in the night (or even the day) for years.
There’s the Nottingham Road Hotel, where fussy ghost Charlotte puts the scares into any unruly resident of room number ten (she likes it to be just so). There are the battlefields of the Anglo-Boer war, practically awash with long-dead soldiers thundering about. In various school toilets lurks a repulsive little Tokoloshe called Pinky-Pinky, which had Gauteng schools in a frenzy in the early 90’s. In fact, walk into any well-established school, heritage sight or hotel, and you’re likely to bump into a ghost – or rather, a ghost story. Goldstuck’s decades of research on the topic involved in-depth discussions with innumerable witnesses of local ghostly phenomena, but sadly for ghostphiles, there appears to be little verification for most of the stories we love to tell.
As the author puts it, “I do believe that most - but not all - claims of the supernatural can be attributed to two sources: the mind, or the milieu. The milieu makes the expectation possible, and the expectation makes the belief possible!” In other words, we are inclined to believe what we are ready to believe.
There’s also a correlation between the state of society and the prevalence of ghosts; a country wracked by violence or war is more likely to have more ghosts than say, New Zealand. South Africa has its share of violence, notes Goldstuck, and “locations of violent death, including battle fields, murder scenes or notorious accident black spots, are more likely to be associated with ghost sightings than those that have no history of violent death.” South Africa, with its turbulent history and mix of cultural superstitions, is ripe for the haunting. Goldstuck stresses, though, that he is not a ‘ghost buster’:
“ I go looking for ghost stories, as well as the stories behind the stories. I wouldn't object to the term myth buster, but even that is giving me too much credit. At best, I get rid of ghosts by explaining them away. Ghosts hate that.”
The Ghost That Closed Down the Town will expose the roots of many of the stories you’ve heard – and a few you didn’t even know were lurking nearby. You might even be inspired to set off and explore our most haunted areas, including battlefields. “These are the most haunted areas in general”, says Goldstuck, “particularly the farm region and battlefields of the Western Cape, Mpumalanga and the KZN Midlands. Cape Town the most haunted city in SA. All schools, and especially school hostels, are haunted - at least by vivid imaginations.”
Of course, even healthy skepticism can sometimes be shaken, and some of the stories Goldstuck revisits are perhaps less easily discarded than others.
In Kwandebele in the early 90’s, a young girl called Bathabile was beset by a malevolent force which hurled stones over her shoulders at anyone nearby. As Major Aaron Mahlangu told People magazine at the time, “There were several police officers…all of us witnessed the same phenomenon. What I saw convinced me that this is a genuine supernatural occurrence.”
In 1986, musician Paul Ndlovu was killed in a car crash. Yet for months afterwards, people kept claiming they had seen him in various parts of the (then) Transvaal. The rumour went around: Paul had been kidnapped by an inyanga and was now a zombie; the walking dead. Truth or fiction? Ask the journalists who were allegedly taken to a kraal to see Paul in person...
Near Lydenburg, Martiens Joubert alleges he was attacked and bitten by a man who had been living, invisibly, in the roof of a farmhouse and using goëlery (witchcraft) against the farmer. After being bitten, Martiens said, “my arm was pitch black.” He related this and many other stories to the author “matter of factly, as if it were a perfectly normal occurrence.”
And so much more lurks in our nocturnal landscape. You need only talk to the person next to you, and they or someone they know will have a story to tell. Here’s one from an old friend of mine, who swears it wasn’t a dream: “Some of us rented a dilapidated cottage down the South Coast a few years ago; the elderly owner had recently passed away. In the early hours, maybe 2am or so, I suddenly awoke to see an old lady with a furious expression, looming over me and sucking in her breath like a vacuum cleaner on high, as if she was trying to suck out my soul, or my life force.
I felt very cold and panicky because this was clearly a malevolent presence. Then I managed to struggle into a sitting position and she disappeared.” After all his research, Goldstuck writes, his conclusion is that “there is enough to convince me that ghosts can exist. Yet, there is too little to persuade me that they do exist.”
What you believe probably depends on what prevails next time you’re woken by mysterious sounds in the middle of the night; your faith that the unknown always has a logical explanation – or the tingling hairs on the back of your neck.
The Ghost That Closed Down The Town
by Arthur Goldstuck
Published by Penguin Books.
No comments:
Post a Comment