The Lord Milner Hotel, Matjiesfontein

Matjiesfontein exists because of a railway. The Cape Government Railways opened a station here, on the dry plains of the Great Karoo, in February 1878, and its name comes from a sedge that Khoekhoe people used to weave mats for their huts. A Scottish railwayman, James Douglas Logan, moved here for his weak chest, opened a refreshment stop for passing trains and built a Victorian village around it – a health resort for people with lung complaints, with a grand hotel at its heart.

The hotel, named after the British high commissioner Sir Alfred Milner, has been receiving guests for more than 125 years. During the South African War of 1899–1902 Matjiesfontein was fortified as headquarters of the British Army’s Cape Command, and the hotel was used as a hospital for officers, its turret said to have served as a lookout. The village’s cemetery holds the graves of Major-General Andrew Wauchope, killed at Magersfontein in 1899, and the English cricketer George Lohmann.

After Logan’s era the village declined, until the hotelier David Rawdon bought it in 1968; after extensive renovations he reopened the hotel in 1970, renaming it the Lord Milner. The whole village was declared a national monument in 1975, and today it is a living museum on the N1, with a London double-decker bus tour each evening followed, for those who want it, by a ghost tour inside the hotel.

The best-known of the hotel’s ghosts is Kate, said to have been a young nurse during the war who played cards with her patients; guests say they hear cards being shuffled at night, and that she rattles a door at the top of the stairs. Lucy, in a negligee, is said to drift along the first-floor passages and to be blamed for the sound of breaking crockery that leaves nothing broken. A Lady in White walks the garden of the Logan family home, and a Logan granddaughter told of a door that rattled until she opened it, letting a rush of cold air pass by her to the window.

Shuffling cards and footsteps at night, a door rattling at the top of the stairs, a woman in a negligee in the first-floor corridors, the sound of quarrels and smashing plates with nothing broken, and a woman in a long white dress in the garden.

The hotel’s staircase and first-floor rooms and passages, and the garden and doors of the Logan family house in the village. Stories are told on the hotel’s evening ghost tour.

The Lord Milner’s ghosts feature in Western Cape tourism guides to the Karoo and in the village’s own blog. Its guided bus tour and ghost tour, led by the host Johnny Theunissen, and the Laird’s Arms pub singalongs are a fixture for travellers on the N1 between Cape Town and Johannesburg.