Haunted by white ghosts! The curse of Dipokong

I love the Daily Sun, that scurrilous South African tabloid that plumbs the depths of human gullibility. Despite its unashamedly tabloid credentials and dubious news claims, it is a highly professional newspaper that has refined the formula for mass-market sensationalism down to the finest element of punctuation. Just in case you don't realise how sensational each story is, almost all headlines end with an exclamation mark.

As in any good sensationalist publication, this one is littered with the dark deeds of aliens - but as in illegal immigrants, rather than Elvis abductors. However, it is only a small step across the border into the land of urban legends, ghosts and other nomads of the paranormal. But don't they just know how to milk the legends that cross their desks!

The Daily Sun will become a regular visitor to this blog. But meanwhile, my all-time favourite from its pages combines racial fears with supernatural fears, and of course adds plenty exclamation marks and capital letters. It was the front page headline story on 19 March 2008, and is the story of the houses that were:

HAUNTED BY WHITE GHOSTS!

Our houses built on mlungu graves!

By Isaac Khumalo

HOUSES are cracking and small sinkholes are appearing.
Maybe it's just the rain and soft earth ...
BUT LOCAL PEOPLE BELIEVE THEY ARE HAUNTED BY THE GHOSTS OF MLUNGUS WHO DIED IN THE AREA LONG AGO!
Their township is built on ground that was once farmland in the apartheid years.
It's the curse of Dipokong - "ghost town" in seSotho and seTswana.
People say that when their township was built in 1969... the houses were built on top of mlungu graves!
At the time, say older residents, the children of the dead came carrying candles to take away the bones of their forefathers.
But they didn't take ALL the bones!
And now the remaining bones have been dug up by road workers!
For residents this was a relief.
They hope their troubles are now over.

The story then continues on page two, under the heading, "People fear cursed town!" It has a photo of a resident, with the caption reading: "Maki Lekgola says six people are buried in her yard", and a photo of the road contractor who found the bones, standing alongside a road excavation. And then it delves into a classic tale of a haunting:

They have grown used to the sound of their wardrobes moving at night... and the sounds of water from the sink when no water is running!
Some people who visit the area at night are found the next morning ... many kilometres away!

For evidence, the aforementioned Maki Lekgola (51), showed the newspaper a crack in her dining-room. And, she told them, outside her home she had built a stoep (veranda), "which soon sank into the ground!"
Even more alarming, and clear evidence of massive supernatural intervention, was the experience of Martha Tatai (49):

"Last year my aunt visited us for an ancestral ceremony. At night she went to an outside toilet and she got lost.
"She was found in Vanderbijlpark, about 35km away!"
Martha said her aunt had told them that "a white woman gave her a lift in a car".
"My aunt does not want to hear anything about visiting us after that!"

No mention of whether the white woman was a supernatural entity. That would have been a neat twist on the lady in white from our Vanishing Hitchhiker urban legends! (oops, got to watch those exclamation marks...) Read more about those here.

The story is remarkable for several reasons. One is its naked racism in using the derogatory term mlungu to refer to white people (yes,its sometimes used as a term of endearment, and has positive meanings, but let's not get disingenuous here).

More significantly, the story draws on a well-established Western tradition of tracing hauntings of homes to the location having been an ancient burial ground or the scene of mass murder. Either way, the souls of the dead can't find rest, and disturb the living who find their homes in the same locations.

This is a great basis for ghost and horror stories and movies, rather than for historical fact. Usually, as in the case of The Amityville Horror, there is a factual basis to the story (here we find the gruesome mass murder of the DeFeo family by the oldest son, Ronald DeFeo, who later claimed he had heard voices that told him what to do, and strange happenings reported by the newcomers, the Lutz family). But then the creative spirit takes over, and the result is priests fleeing in terror, and a family's race against time to get out of the house before the ghosts get them.

Most significantly, the original source of the Amityville haunting and the voice that instructed Ronald DeFeo was said to be the fact that the house was built on a site where the Shinnecock Indians had once abandoned the dying, and that it was also the site of an old cemetery. However, these claim are thoroughly debunked at the Amityville Murders web site.

While such terrors are not quite the Curse of Dipokong, that very phrase suggests vengeful spirits waiting in the wings. And what more appropriate source of that fear than the spirits of the white people who had been the perpetrators of black people's misery for so many years before?

The ghost of the mine shafts

This tale of South Africa's haunted mines comes from the pages of Homeless Talk, a newspaper written mostly by homeless people and sold by street vendors who themselves are homeless.

Luke Jentile, a former miner, contributes a column about his experiences under the heading Deep Levels. His April 2008 column is entitled Eerie tale from the shafts. He describes how miners get used to working in darkness, with the headlamps on their helmets often the only source of light. But sometimes, he says, it can become quite dreadful, especially when the veteran miners start telling their stories.

"The truth about these stories is uncertain, or it’s just a myth," writes Jentile. In some cases, clearly, they serve the traditional urban legend role of cautionary tale, with miners told not to go deep in unused sites. And falling rocks are not the only danger:

Jalimbo told us about a mineworker who got lost underground for about five days. He said the man was kidnapped by an underground ghost of someone who died there earlier.

The story went: "There are ghosts here, especially in the 'madala site'. I remember this guy who decided to take a short-cut through the unused site to the station. He got into trouble when his headlamp fuel expired and the light went off. He couldn’t move to nowhere as it was darker than the darkness of the surface. The he tried to move slowly on his knees with difficulty.

"Then something grabbed him by the arm. He tried to pull away but the thing held him tight and took him to a certain place where it gave him a shovel and said to him, Hey madoda, you work here, push down the stof rocks and make clean this madala site. But as he started working the ghost gave him a drilling machine to drill the hols on the rock wall. Next it told him to put the explosives in the holes. Afterwards the ghost told him to get off and rest.

"That went on for five days until this man was found by others who happened to go the same way. But he couldn’t speak, and tried to hide behind the timber packs. The men then rushed to alert the mine authorities, who then sent a rescue team to hunt for him.

"They found him and brought him to the surface. What shocked everybody was the writing all over his body. These were money figures in thousands, a message that the mine should pay him, or else trouble will befall the mine. So he was paid and given a permanent discharge."

It is a wonderful tale, worthy of the best of supernatural fiction; little wonder it gripped the imagination of miners. That it is an urban legend is beyond doubt: such an incident, especially involving numerous witnesses and the mine agreeing to pay out a “pension” as a result of it, would not easily be kept quiet.

The archetypal element of the ghost leaving a warning is a plot twist reminiscent of great horror stories and haunting. But to have the warning written into the victim’s skin is priceless; as a cautionary tale, it ensures that it will not be forgotten by impressionable young miners tempted to take short cuts.

• The publication from which this story is quoted, Homeless Talk, is facing serious financial difficulties. It supports more than 400 homeless vendors who survive from selling the newspaper, and is appealing for public assistance in finance and computer equipment in order to continue helping the less fortunate. If you can assist, phone +27 11 838 6651 or e-mail homelesstalk@webmail.co.za.

Legends that go bump

The following stories are explored in far more detail in my recent book, The Ghost that Closed Down the Town (Penguin,2006), but hang together here because they are so obviously urban legends.

One reason people enjoy urban legends so much - besides the fact that they are convinced these wonderful tales happened to a friend of a friend - is that they are often hilarious, with punchlines that could have been dreamed up by comedians.

But, just as often, people enjoy urban legends for the exact opposite reason: because they are tales so hideous, or so terrifying, that we are able to get maximum impact from re-telling them to nervous listeners.

This is especially the case when ghost stories take on, err, a life of their own. They cross over from the country of the supernatural into the land of urban legends, and are told and retold throughout the world as stories that belong to whichever area the listeners will relate to best.

The haunted hill

On the outskirts of Pretoria, just as you pass the military base on the way to the highway, a short, uphill stretch of road is haunted by a motorist who died there many years ago. If you stop your car there, and leave the brakes off, your car will suddenly start rolling ... uphill! The ghost of the dead motorist is parked in that exact spot, waiting for others to pause there. And when they do, he pushes them uphill with his own, phantom car.

Alas, for ghosthunters, this is a phenomenon known the world over, and in several places in South Africa.

In the United States, a typical example is a tourist attraction called Gravity Hill, where the road slopes slightly downhill, and trees along the side of the road, instead of leaning the other way, also lean downhill, but at a sharper angle, giving the illusion that the road slopes up. In Pretoria, the road architecture, along with bridges and buildings conspire to create a similar optical illusion. An article entitled Physicists Show "Antigravity" Mystery Spots Are Optical Illusions finally laid this ghost to rest.

The vanishing hitch-hiker

One of the world's best-loved urban legends is the tale of the vanishing hitch-hiker: the mystery woman who hitches a ride on a dark and stormy night.

She tells the kind motorist where she lives, and off they go. But when he turns to speak to her, she's gone, leaving just a gust of chill air. He arrives at her home, only to learn from her parents that she died ten years ago, on the spot where he picked her up, and had been trying to get home ever since.

In some versions, he had let her put on his leather jacket, and he later found it hanging over her tombstone.

South Africa boasts one of the world's best-documented versions of the legend, and even attaches a name to the vanishing lady: Maria Charlotte Roux, who died in a car accident on a lonely road near Uniondale in the Eastern Cape on 12 April 1968. At least three motorists have gone on record claiming to have given her a ride since. However, none of their versions are consistent - one involves stereotyped ingredients like hideous laughter and screams in the night.

But another fascinating version does not rely on lonely roads or stormy nights at all. In fact, it takes place in one of the most densely populated areas on the continent. We're talking of Vera, the hitch-hiking ghost of Meadowlands.

Vera was a Soweto socialite who was shot by her lover in the late 1950s, and has been trying to catch a ride home ever since. Legend has it that she waits for a minibus with only one seat free - which she then claims. And when she boards a bus, the legend goes, the passengers will never reach their destination alive.

Besides its international pedigree, the fact that no one could possibly have testified to this actually happening is proof of the tale's legendary nature. Yet, people have told me to my face that they refuse to accept my argument: they simply won't board a taxi in Meadowlands if there are only two seats left - for they will have to take one, and Vera will then take the other.

Read, among many other stories, more about Vera and the self-proclaimed ghostbuster who claimed to have exorcised her in The Ghost that Closed Down the Town.

And read the book that first turned me on to urban legends, Jan Harold Brunvand's first word on the above topic, The Vanishing Hitchhiker.

Trained to help

Trains are mournful creatures at the sunniest of times, with their wailing hooters and the endless rhythm of wheels over tracks, and many is the tale of a haunted train on its way to some ghostly destination. But at a certain lonely railway crossing in the middle of the Karoo, it is the tracks themselves that are haunted.

One night many years ago, a schoolbus crammed with children on the way back from a day's outing was crossing the tracks when it stalled. Before the driver could react, a train approached, smashed the bus, and killed all the children. Luckily, being children, these are compassionate ghosts. They now hover over the crossing for eternity, waiting for other motorists who get stuck, and push their cars over the tracks if a train approaches.

Equally luckily, this is really an urban legend, told as a true story around the world. You can virtually choose any town from a list and claim it happened there - without anyone contradicting you.

Offroad ghosts

For some strange reason, as we've seen, ghost stories and urban legends usually meet up somewhere on the road. And Vera isn't the only ghost haunting minibuses.

Some years ago,an urban legend emerged out of the lonely roads of the Eastern Free State that a haunted minibus has been abandoned on the side of the road. It was stolen in Durban, and the culprit took the side roads through the Free State on his way up to Johannesburg. But near Ficksburg, he abandoned the vehicle in terror: it had been taken over by a ghost.

It is now parked under the trees on the side of the road - and even the farmer who owns the land is too scared to come near.

If you ask the local police, though, they'll tell you the vehicle doesn't even exist. Except, of course, in the land of urban legends.