To me, the West End Cemetery in Kimberley has always been a place of quiet comfort, with its tall Cypress and Pine trees, doves cooing soothingly and its air of solemnness: a sense of peace, which was overpowering. I visited numerous times as a child, with my Gran. Every Sunday after a big lunch, my aunt would drive us there in Gran’s 1938 Ford V8, to put flowers on my Grandpa’s grave. Grandpa had died before I was born, so his grave did not hold a great deal of fascination for me, but older graves did, with their almost epic sagas carved into the huge head-stones. I would wander around with a sort of reverence, reading tragic endings to lives.
Apparently, the graveyard wasn’t always so peaceful. During my teen years, I heard some of the wildest tales of phantoms, ghosts, spectres, and all sorts of weird and wonderful noises coming from those peaceful resting grounds. It makes me wonder if the following tale wasn’t one of the origins for all of the nonsense that was spread around. This is typically the sort of thing that would start a “ghost story” when there was no ghost at all. Wild imagination and phobias can play a large part in many “ghost” stories, as I am sure many will agree.
It must have been back in the late 1920s or early 1930s when this event took place. My Uncle Reginald (Reg for short), still a young unmarried chap, had friends living beyond the cemetery. One Saturday night he had visited, but not realizing the time, had stayed far longer than he was supposed to.
In a panic to get home before his parents had a conniption, Reg was persuaded to take the short-cut through the cemetery. One of his friends bravely volunteered to accompany him till the other side of the cemetery, as he had a hurricane lantern. (“Nothing to it”, his friend told him confidently.) Reg had never been through the cemetery at night, so was glad to have the company.
Everything was going well. They strode along, chatting in lowered voices in respect of their surroundings. The hurricane lamp, held aloft, gave sure and steady light, although silvery moonlight cast deep mysterious shadows beneath the trees. The two young men were just about to pass the graves from the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic (which killed well over 2,500 people in Kimberley) when the most terrifying noise erupted from some distance behind them.
Both these brave lads were galvanised into action...running helter-skelter for their lives, in the direction of the cemetery exit gates! To use a cliché, the noise was “enough to wake the dead”! Uncle Reg told me that he had never covered the ground so swiftly before, reaching home in record time. His friend had “disappeared” somewhere just beyond the gates, and he certainly didn’t intend finding out where, at that point in time. It was lucky for Reg that the streets of Kimberley had electric lights. (Aside note: The streets of Kimberley had electric street lights installed, first lit on 1 September 1882 – the first in the Southern Hemisphere and the first in Africa.)
It was only during the following week that Reg found out what had made the horrendous noise in the cemetery and where his friend had gotten to. (In those days, telephones were few and far between.) His friend had turned right at the exit and had run around the graveyard, home, while Reg had turned left to career home. The noise had continued most of the night, his friend told him.
The following day, it was discovered that a stray donkey had somehow managed to get into the graveyard and fallen into a freshly dug, empty grave. It was this pitiful creature, expressing its woes that created such a ghastly commotion. It was duly extricated from its unexpected prison by the disgruntled folks that had been kept from their sleep the previous night. However, it was apparently from then that the rumours started spreading. Mercifully, I never heard these stories until I was well into my teenage years.
Oh, my! Let's see if I can contain my giggling long enough to compose a comment here. I believe you are quite right about mundane happenings giving birth to 'hauntings'. When my father was about 8 or 9 he cut through a cemetery trying to beat curfew back to the boy's dorm at the Orphanage. This would have been circa 1928/30. He arrived badly shaken and late, so of course he was taken to the Mother Superior for punishment. Now even though she was strict, Mother Superior was a fair and compassionate person. Seeing my father's terrified state, she asked him what had happened. He flatly told her, he had seen two ghosts playing tennis! I was never clear on exactly what followed, but seeing he thought he was telling the truth, she decided to investigate and prove to him he was mistaken. So off she went with my father and two other nuns in tow. The first stop was at the caretaker's cottage, even back then there were visitation times, and Mother Superior had no desire to get a habit full of buckshot while 'ghost hunting'. Suddenly, as she was explaining to the old man in charge, my dad let out a shriek and pointed. There! There were the ghosts right between those trees! All looked and sure enough two white figures could be seen moving back and forth as if batting some unseen objects about. The caretaker cracked up, because what they were really seeing was a couple of his white shirts drying on a line. So back to the orphanage they all went. Of course by then the 'ghost story' had made its rounds and apparently the nuns never bothered to correct the account as it helped to dissuade the boys from being late for curfew. Of course my dad never corrected it either, because who wants to be known as the boy who got scared by laundry?
