Country file · Africa

Haunted places in South Africa

What are the most haunted places in South Africa? The best-known are Castle of Good Hope, The Flying Dutchman, The Uniondale Hitchhiker and The Lord Milner Hotel, Matjiesfontein, among 5 on file.

South Africa’s best-known ghost stories grew up along its oldest colonial routes. Cape Town, founded as a Dutch East India Company supply station in 1652, has the Castle of Good Hope – the country’s oldest building, with a cursed governor and a Lady in Grey – and the sea off the Cape of Good Hope gave the world its most famous phantom ship, the Flying Dutchman. Inland, the railway and the wagon roads across the Karoo left behind Victorian hotels, gaols and lonely passes, each with a tale told to travellers: the card-playing nurse of Matjiesfontein, the toll-keeper of Seweweekspoort, and the young woman who hitches rides on the N9 near Uniondale.

5 hauntings
12 recorded sightings

Haunted places in South Africa

Apparition · 18th century

The ghost lore of South Africa

Many of these stories are tied to the hardest parts of the country’s history – slavery at the Cape, frontier wars, the South African War of 1899–1902, and the prisons and hospitals of the colonial and apartheid eras – and the best tellings keep that history in view. Folklorists such as Arthur Goldstuck have shown how often South African ghost stories behave like urban legends, gathering detail as they spread. The country is also home to many African spiritual traditions, in which ancestors and spirits play a living part in family and community life; those beliefs deserve respect on their own terms and are not the same thing as ghost lore.

Ghost hunters head for Cape Town’s old centre and the Cape Peninsula, the small towns of the Great and Little Karoo, the Victorian quarters of Pretoria and Johannesburg, and the frontier towns of the Eastern Cape such as Makhanda (Grahamstown), with its old gaol.

Ghost-hunting hotspots

Cape Town city centre
Beyond the Castle, locals tell of a ghostly nurse at Groote Schuur Hospital, a woman in white at Rust en Vreugd and a one-legged keeper at the 1824 Green Point Lighthouse.
Cape Peninsula
Cape Point is where the Flying Dutchman is said to appear, and at Tokai Manor a reckless young rider’s hoofbeats are said to return every New Year’s Eve.
The Karoo
Prince Albert’s Swartberg Hotel, the riverbed lights of Beaufort West and the old toll-house of Seweweekspoort make the long Karoo roads a ghost-story trail.
Pretoria
Erasmus Castle, known as “Die Spookhuis”, and the Ou Raadsaal on Church Square are the city’s best-known haunted buildings.
Johannesburg
The Sunnyside Park Hotel’s dancing lady, the old Kensington Sanatorium and several historic schools give the city a crop of 20th-century ghost stories.
Makhanda (Grahamstown)
The 1824 Old Gaol is said to be walked by Henry Nicholls, hanged in 1862, retracing the route from cell to gallows.

Timeline

1797
Lady Anne Barnard arrives Castle of Good Hope
The writer and hostess begins five years of entertaining at the Castle. Her diaries and letters become a key source for the period – and she becomes its ‘Lady in Grey’.
1 February 1878
A station in the Karoo The Lord Milner Hotel, Matjiesfontein
The Cape Government Railways open a station named Matjiesfontein. James Logan soon builds a refreshment business and a village around it.
1899–1902
Headquarters of the Cape Command The Lord Milner Hotel, Matjiesfontein
During the South African War the village is fortified and the hotel used as an officers’ hospital – the setting for the story of Kate, the card-playing nurse.
1936
A national monument Castle of Good Hope
The Castle becomes the first site in South Africa to be declared a historical monument.
1968
David Rawdon restores the village The Lord Milner Hotel, Matjiesfontein
The hotelier buys the run-down village and its hotel and returns them to their Victorian style, reopening the hotel as the Lord Milner in 1970.
Easter 1968
A fatal crash in the storm The Uniondale Hitchhiker
Maria Charlotte Roux is killed when her fiancé’s Volkswagen Beetle overturns on the road between Uniondale and Willowmore.
12 September 1975
A national monument The Lord Milner Hotel, Matjiesfontein
The entire village is declared a national monument, preserving the hotel and its stories.
Good Friday 1976
Anton le Grange’s passenger The Uniondale Hitchhiker
Anton le Grange of Oudtshoorn reports that a young woman vanished from his back seat. A Uniondale constable who follows him back is said, in later retellings, to see a door open and close on its own.
Good Friday 1978
The motorcyclist’s passenger The Uniondale Hitchhiker
An army corporal says a young woman rode pillion behind him at night and disappeared within a couple of kilometres.
Good Friday 1980
Hands on the rider’s waist The Uniondale Hitchhiker
A 20-year-old motorcyclist tells of being gripped from behind by an unseen passenger on the dark road.
April 2014
“Nothing but urban legends” The Uniondale Hitchhiker
Arthur Goldstuck, author of The Ghost That Closed Down the Town, tells a Johannesburg audience the Uniondale story is among the best known in South Africa – and a classic urban legend.
5 November 2018
Castle350 and its ghostly past Castle of Good Hope
During celebrations of the Castle’s 350th anniversary, the Cape Times and the Castle retell the Van Noodt legend as part of a series on its history.