Travellers looking for something different this Halloween can explore South Africa's haunted buildings, historic cemeteries and sites associated with local ghost stories through a range of guided tours and themed experiences.
While Cape Town is known for its dark history and houses haunted attractions such as the Castle of Good Hope and the Tokai Manor House in Table Mountain National Park, ghost tours are also available in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Parys, Durban and Gqeberha.
“Dark tourism is for the people who are interested in ghosts or crime but it also offers insights into the history of each city, the unique architecture of many haunted buildings and paranormal sciences,” Mark Rose-Christie, a dark tourism and production specialist at South Africa's Mystery Ghost Productions.
Mystery Ghost Productions offers guided walking tours, themed dinners and overnight experiences incorporating local ghost stories, historical crime cases, theatrical performances and demonstrations of paranormal investigation techniques.
The tours explore infamous old war monuments as well as the lesser-known haunted churches and cemeteries, historic buildings and scenes associated with some of South Africa’s most prolific murderers, gangs and their victims.
Heidelberg’s Old Jail
The Old Jail, or Old Gaol, in Heidelberg, Gauteng, dates from 1888. The building was initially built to be used as a jail, a local hospital and a home for the unhoused before it became a British prisoner-of-war jail during the Second Anglo-Boer War.
Mystery Ghost Productions’ Old Jail Sleepover experience combines a tour of the facility and some ghost-hunting exercises with a night of ghost storytelling and a sleepover.
Joburg’s haunted hotel
In Johannesburg's Parktown suburb, Mystery Ghost Productions hosts themed ghost dinners at the Victorian-era Sunnyside Park Hotel.
Initially built in 1895, the hotel has been home to one of the earliest mining magnates of the city, as well as an infamous British Commissioner. According to multiple reports, the hotel, its rooms and grounds are teeming with ghosts of its past inhabitants and guests.
Mystery Ghost Productions offers a Ghost Dinner experience including a tour of the hotel, storytelling about the resident and countryside ghosts and a Spook Show, a popular form of musical and theatrical entertainment from the Vaudeville and Victorian eras. This is followed by a three-course dinner in the hotel attic.
