Events: Halloween with the Johannesburg Mystery Ghost Bus Tour

Published November 2, 2015

This past Friday night or Halloween-Eve as I’ve dubbed it (it works right? No, ah bugger it!), Mindless Pixie and I decided to celebrate Halloween in style – by riding around in a bus in Johannesburg and visiting some of the more famous haunted sites around the city.

We started off at the Pound & Penny Pub, which is located at the luxurious and very ‘Old World’ feel Sunnyside Park Hotel. I was inside and oh man, it really has a very Victorian feel to it. Something which I truly appreciate, being of British heritage myself. There was a slight delay in departure as there was quite a bit of confusion as to the starting place of the tour. Many of us made our way down to the bus, and waited there, but it turned out that we were meant to meet at the sundail, further down the path from the Pound & Penny Pub.

Many people came dressed up for the ocassion. Dressed up as all sorts of ghostly and ghastly characters. I saw a Wolfman in a shower gown, several Billy The Puppets (No Werner wasn’t there), a couple of zombies and several devils. It’s pleasant to watch cosplayers in action, because there are always a large variety of DIFFERENT costume choices, but Halloween is a different creature. Here you get people who have probably never even heard of cosplay, dressing up as ghosts and zombies and their ilk and the creativity of normal non-geeky people are put on display. I loved it!

We then embarked the bus and made our way through the streets of Johannesburg, being enthralled by various stories of the ghosts of Consitution Hill’s Women’s Prison, the old Transvaal Children’s Memorial Hospital, Victoria Hospital, the Supreme Court and several more stops. A lot of focus was put on one Daisy Demelker, a lady who killed two of her husbands along with her 21 year old son, who supposedly haunts some of the buildings we passed.

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We then proceeded to the Devonshire Hotel in Braamfontein where we stocked up on spirits of a different kind. After inibriating ourselves a bit, we ventured into the hotel’s “Tudor Room”. A room which I can only guess was used (and still is today) as a conference room of some sort. We were told a ghost story which for me personally caused the hair to raise on my neck. During the story, the lights were turned off, the candles blown out and Mr. Rose-Christie scared the living bejesus out of several patrons on the tour.

We then proceeded out of the CBD towards Kensingon, making our way past the Kensington Sanitorium, a house with reported poltergeist sightings on Roberts Road, Jeppe Boys Highschool (with a sad tale of two friends who was born on the same day, worked at the school and finally died on the same day in World War 2 – a commemorative gate was constructed for them – truly heart touching) and then finally the Kensington Castle on High Road, Kensington. Although the latter is now a privately owned residence and tours are not allowed in.

The next leg of the tour saw us travel back towards the CBD and being regalled with EVPs (Electronic Voice Phenomena) the history of Ponte and its suicides as well as a dramatic “Springbok-radio”-like reading of a classic ghost tale – Spook Wagon of the Spokeveld.

Our next stop was at a favourite watering hole, Moyo at Zoo Lake, where we were taken on a dowsing excercise. What is dowsing you ask? Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:

Dowsing is the action of a person–called the dowser –using a rod, stick, or object hung from a string–called a dowsing rod, dowsing stick, doodlebug (when used to locate oil), divining rod, or pendulum–to locate such things as underground water, hidden metal, buried treasure, oil, lost persons or golf balls, etc.

It was quite an interesting excercise and both Pixie and myself enjoyed it to great effect.

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Our last leg of the tour involved some more EVP, which included some truly terrifying sounds and then we finally made our way to the Braamfontein cemetery. At this point it was already 12:30 and besides the loud music that was blaring from a night club across the road, it was still pretty eery to be entering a graveyard this late at night. I have never been in a graveyard after dark, and let me tell you, it was quite an experience. Before entering though, Mr. Rose-Christie entertained us a bit with his illusions in the form of a key bending trick. We then proceeded into the cemetery where we were treated with various tales of gruesome deaths and ghosts that were reportedly spotted in the cemetery in the past. We finally ended our tour by being doused in complete darkness. No flashlights, no candles. Just the darkness, the tour group and the cemetery. Mr. Rose-Christie told the tour group another scary story and well…the effect of the setting, his words and our imagination was enough to send goosebumps up and down my spine.

I truly enjoyed our experience on the Johannesburg Mystery Ghost Bus tour and I highly recommend that everyone, all across the country check it out at least once. Check out our video above to see a visual representation of our tour, as well as Mark Rose-Christie telling you a bit more about the tours. There are various tours available in the many cities in South Africa. They can be found in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth, Durban and Cape Town.

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For more information on the Mystery Ghost Bus Tours in South Africa, have a look at their various information pages below.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/MysteryGhostBus

Website: www.mysteryghostbus.co.za

Find below a few videos from the organisation itself.

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NiteFenix

Editor-In-Chief / Entertainment Editor at Geek Node

Jonathan has been a journalist for several years. Writing primarily about video games, and occasionally films and television series.

He spends most of his time talking crap on Twitter and looking for the meaning of life in all the wrong places.