Cape Town - As the story goes, the castle guards were alarmed when the bell didn’t ring on time for the 3 o’clock hour. They ran up the stairs of the tower and bumped into a pair of boots hanging from the belfry. There, suspended in the torchlight, was the body of the bell ringer. Since then, that bell sometimes rings of its own accord without anyone pulling the rope.
Do you believe in ghosts? Michael Philip Makin does, and he tells the story of the bell ringer during Mystery Ghost Bus Tours through Cape Town. “The science is what convinces me,” he says. “Because I’m a rationalist.”
Makin, a retired history teacher, offers a different type of ghost tour – less so a thrill ride, more so a “journey into Cape Town’s haunted spots”, he says. His discussion of the paranormal is scientific, measured. Sipping a draught beer under the waning moon, he talks about Einstein and Pythagoras.
“We are all made up of energy and when we die, our energy is transferred, to put it simply,” he says, the flicker of a candle making shades of velvet dance across his silver eye mask. “Energy cannot be destroyed – that’s one of the basic tenets of quantum physics – it can only be transferred.”
What happens to that energy? “We think it’s around us,” Makin says. “And if the circumstances are right, it can be seen.”
But, he says, it depends on a person’s subjective ability to see these things.
Makin is dressed to the nines. A long black robe falls over a crimson paisley vest and silky neck tie. A small black top hat and cane, and white gloves he constantly adjusts as he speaks. He says roughly half the tour crowd are usually sceptics – at the beginning.
“I think everyone inside has this feeling there’s something out there,” he says. “And science cannot explain everything at this point.”
Cape Town, with a long history of colonisation and bloodshed, lends itself to ghostly exploration. A trove of information on haunted spots goes back 400 years, Makin says.
Indeed, from the succubus at the Kimberley Hotel to the woman in the black dress who walks through the walls of the Wynberg Club, Cape Town is a place to get spooked.
l Join the Halloween ghost tours in Cape Town on October 30 and 31, and November 1. Book at www.QUICKET.co.za
Magical mystery tour with stops at pubs
The tour kicks off with drinks at Ferryman’s Tavern at the V&A Waterfront, followed by a brief history of the paranormal on the bowling green across the street. The German Lutheran Church, Little and Arena Theatres, Cape of Good Hope Seminary and Perseverance Tavern ghosts are covered on the bus.
There’s a pub stop and scientific explanations of the different types of ghosts at the Kimberley Hotel. Then it’s on to the Castle of the Cape of Good Hope for an explanation of the science of the paranormal and dowsing rods. The bus moves on to cover the Fenton Road poltergeist, remnants of old District Six, Groote Schuur, “Drie Koppen”, the murder and mayhem of Rondebosch, SACS School and Hiddingh House. Also on the bus are EVP recordings and personal testimony. There’s another pub stop at the Wynberg Club, which has a dark, haunted room, then a dramatic recording classic old radio style “Spook Wagon of the Spokeveld” on the bus.
Final stops are at Tokai Manor and a Constantia cemetery. The bus returns to Ferryman’s with a dramatic recording of “SA’s Most Famous Ghost.”
For tour dates and special events, visit www.mysteryghostbus.co.za
The 7 types of ghosts
By the American parapsychological definition there are seven types of ghosts:
1. Replay ghost: residual ghosts, haunting ghosts or restilgeists; also objects such as ships.
3. Time slip: replays on a grand scale, such as a battle on a field.
2. Interactive ghost: Unlike replay ghosts, these ghosts will interact with you.
3. Single apparition: dis-embodied spirit that doesn’t necessarily take on the shape of a human form or show signs of intelligence or personality.
4. Crisis ghost: also interactive, the figure or the voice of a living person who is experiencing a crisis such as an accident or a death.
5. Poltergeist: interactive ghost capable of physical disturbances such as making loud noises and moving or destroying objects. While most accounts involve movement or levitation of objects or noises such as knocking on doors, some claim they are capable of pinching, biting, hitting and tripping people.
6. Vardoger: ghost of a living person, like a phantom double.
7. Doppelganger: ghost of a living person, but more sinister than a vardoger and sometimes perceived as a bad omen.
Cape Argus