Hi! Annabel here. Just celebrated my 6th birthday but I think it’s still safe to say I’m Africa’s youngest travel correspondent. It’s my job to offer advice to you parents vis a vis where to take your young ones. Just don’t sue me if it all goes horribly wrong!
While at university, my father established The Oxford University Ghost Hunting Society (OUGHS). This fearless group of scheming delinquents then scoured England in search of free accommodation in luxurious country houses (inns and pubs were other favoured destinations), armed with tape recorders, cameras, thermometers and other such props designed to convince the gullible fools who were hosting them that they weren’t just a bunch of scrounging charlatans.
OUGHS, it has to be said, was noteworthy for its total lack of success in locating anything remotely supernatural (the only spirits it hunted successfully came in liquid form), but nonetheless it proved habit-forming. Ex-members are still up to their old tricks (and are still not finding any ghosts). My father included. Which brings me to Namibia.
One of the things you will not have failed to notice if you are a regular reader of the daily papers is that this country is not short on bizarre stories. To take just a few examples, a woman in Katutura made recent headlines by turning into a lion (from the breasts up) and threatening to eat her friend. She then threw water at an invisible fire while a crowd of some 200 onlookers either spoke in tongues, laughed derisively or merely looked understandably confused. In another incident a man went berserk after his neighbour became a giant, started levitating and sprouted donkey ears. A ghostly crocodile ate three postmen in Katima Mulilo. A demon elephant came back from the dead and went on a vengeful rampage in Bushmanland. Et cetera.
I could go on – the stories certainly do – but that’s not the point of this column.
If a ghost ever appears in a luxury hotel with a great chef, fine wine cellar and four-poster beds – the Hotel Heinitzberg castle springs to mind – my father would be over like a shot with his thermometer and claptrap.
But most of the hauntings, werelions and ghostly mountains that suddenly appear in the middle of the trans-Caprivi highway causing drunk taxi drivers to swerve off the road and hit trees occur in areas that lack electricity or fluffy duvets or are three feet under water and fizzing with mosquitoes. And that sort of scenario fails to inspire my father’s former investigative zeal.
Being young, with an enquiring mind (and thoroughly tired of his increasingly repetitive ‘the ghost that got away’ stories), I decided that it was time to rouse him from his inertia. “Together,” I informed him, “A hunting we will go! And bring Haunted Namibia to the attention of Flamingo readers!”
His first course of action was lamentably predictable. I caught him phoning Hotel Heinitzberg and in a pathetically ingratiating voice asking whether they were haunted and could he stay there for a week in a room that overlooked the swimming pool to monitor the supernatural activity.
He was informed that they were not haunted. And no he couldn’t.
Next port of call was the Spook House. If you’ve taken the road a couple of kilometres beyond the Daan Viljoen Game Park you’ll have seen the place. Not a mansion perhaps, but a formerly grand farmhouse now abandoned and fallen into disrepair. Quite who it was who coined the title Spook House (or Ghost House) is unknown, but the names have stuck and that is how it is known to Windhoekers, more than a few of whom have 1) had a fearful peek inside the premises, 2) conducted séances where somebody is caught cheating (as usual), or 3) fired up a braai outside accompanied by ghost stories and panic attacks of the type designed to bring courting couples together. Quite who the spook is, is also unknown.
The Spook House, upon closer inspection, had bats, spider webs and suchlike Scooby Doo accoutrements. Of the spook there was no sign. This might not be doing it justice. I’d describe our hunt as perfunctory. After ascertaining that there was no wet bar or free massage service, my father dispensed with the “Temperature is ambient… shows no signs of oscillation… no movement of objects… dog exhibits no evidential negative reaction, but that’s normal, it’s a dozy little mutt…” routine and cleared off in search of fancy restaurants experiencing poltergeists. Without success.
Namibia’s southern coastline is well endowed with ghost towns, thrown up by diamond miners and then abandoned when the stones ran out. Kolmanskop on the road to Lüderitz is the most famous and most easily visited. The hospital, which once hosted a wine cellar for medicinal purposes and the first X-ray machine in the southern hemisphere, is said to have ‘an atmosphere’. It certainly did when we visited. A savage gale was shrieking, slinging grit and making the thing wobble. It also sand-blasted our faces and made visibility not just invisible but agonising. After my father dropped his thermometer and blasphemed, we both fled for the Lüderitz Nest Hotel, where (after management had explained that there were no ghosts and they didn’t need ghost hunters) my father reluctantly reached for his wallet.
An obscenely large glut of oysters and crisp Chardonnay had him briefly bellowing about ghosts at around three in the morning.
Diabolic snoring subsequently plagued the hotel.
A zombie-like figure staggered down for breakfast and then ordered blood.
This was more like it! First a zombie! My father was now a vampire!
After several gallons of blood from Mary, we then went back to our room whereupon he returned to his grave (or more accurately, his bed).
He rose from the dead when the cleaner told him it was check-out time.
We subsequently investigated a few more ghost towns. Atmosphere? Yes. Ghosts? No. Sorry.
But! On the long drive back home my father had that rare thing. A good idea. And it worked!
He announced that he would invite everybody he knew in Namibia who had seen a ghost, had a ghost, or could offer a ghost story to get in touch with him. The results are already astounding. And more are incoming. You’ll need to fly Air Namibia in October to read them. Halloween edition.
