It was a misty full moon night: the spookiest possible atmosphere for ghost hunting. We had gathered at the simple boom gate entrance to Kaapsehoop, that utterly mesmerising village of wild horses, gold mining intrigue and quaint buildings. Reinette van Niekerk, our tour guide for the ghost tour, opened with an account of the history of Kaapsehoop, which burgeoned to a population of 4000 people during the gold rush in the 19th century.
Do you dare to see what’s hiding inside the old Kaapsehoop prison? Photo by: Adele Schormann
We headed off along the hazy streets, and arrived at a ramshackle house - the first of many apparent homes for the paranormal residents of the village. An old lady, widowed by a disease which struck down her gold mining husband, has been seen sitting forlornly on the porch of this house by more than one witness.
Spines now tingling, our next stop was Salvador’s pub, where the frantic screaming of a woman and child, followed by the smell of smoke, is said to appear around 23:00.
“In the 1930s, a woman and her child apparently died when a fire broke out in the building. In other instances, there were reports of people hearing children’s laughter coming from the rocky escarpment but upon investigation, they could find no children,” Reinette explains.
These aren’t the only tales of ghostly children. In the gold rush days, regular measles outbreaks ended the lives of many children, and today their presence is felt in a number of old houses in the village.
“In one such a house, the owner said the children would put their fingers in his ear while he was asleep and by simply saying ‘voetsek’ they would stop. His wife claims that the dolls displayed in the house are suddenly found on the floor,” says Reinette.
We continued on to some of the multiple sandstone buildings abandoned after the gold rush, where items such as a weathered child’s shoe, cobwebs and broken doors did little to calm the nerves. Some of our fellow ghost tourists seemingly couldn’t handle the suspense, emitting startled yelps at the slightest sound of a scurry or gust of wind. We couldn’t blame them – the Kaapsehoop Ghost Tour is a freaky, unique experience. Looking at the photos taken during the night, we discovered strange glowing orbs and smudged white shapes. Trick of the camera, perhaps, but we preferred to believe that it was evidence of Kaapsehoop’s phantoms, ghouls and ghosts.
*This article was written by a TWNA journalist, Dale Hes for My Mpumalanga. For more, follow the link: http://mympumalanga.co.za/phantoms-ghouls-and-ghosts/
