It's sunset on a Friday night and I am preparing for a rather different night out. I need a torch, waterproof clothing, a digital camera and a (large) bottle of sherry. Not only to keep away the cold but to keep away the shivers of a different kind. I am going ghost hunting.
The northern Cape town of Kimberly is renowned for its ghost stories. According to some, the Great Mine Disaster of the late 1800s in which more than 200 miners died when a fire broke out, left many souls trapped underground.
The Anglo-Boer war of 1899 to 1902 also left many dead soldiers, on both sides, haunting the town's old graveyards, or the places where their bodies lie undiscovered. Now I was not sure about ghosts and ghouls. But I knew Kimberly had a rich and diverse history and the tour, run by an unflappable Dirk Potgieter, seemed a good way of getting to grips with some aspects of the town's past.
Our first stop was the old Rudd house, built in the 1870s and donated to the McGregor Museum by De Beers when the Rudd family abandoned their increasingly haunted home in the 1970s.
As the Rudd family expanded, so did the house. The wooden building has 22 chambers and rooms; each one with its own peculiar story. The dining room, for instance, has been the subject of many paranormal investigations by a Dr P.K Le Sueur, a Scotsman who holds two PhDs and an interest in the unexplained.
The cold one feels as these orbs manifest is the ghost sucking in energy for its manifestation.
A few years ago three journalists had sat at the dinning room table to write three horror stories. A photo was taken when they finished. Only two of the three journalists appeared in the picture.
Our tour group was 20 people, mostly nurses from the local hospital on an unusual night out. We practised taking photographs as Dirk instructed. According to Dirk, the odds of an appearance of orbs, or an unseen person in the photograph, are increased with a digital camera.
Download the photos and the taker can sometimes see things that did not originally appear on the view finder.
The nurses, drinking Bacardi Breezer after Bacardi Breezer to appease their obvious jitters, took photos throughout the house, waving their torches into dark corners and shrieking with delight as a prankster in the group hid around corners ready to pounce!
The dining room was dark and dank. It gave me the creeps.
Potgieter told us some of the stories associated with the Rudd house.
Others have heard screams of a child in pain in the nursery.
Potgieter allowed us the run of the house before our next stop. The house remained open for the next ghost hunting group, though I noticed that the man responsible for the key stood outside. Potgieter said he did not like to be there alone even in daylight.
Next stop was the old Kimberly library, now the Africana Library, which houses one of the largest and most valuable collections of old books and manuscripts in the world. The building was completed in 1868.
Bertrand Dyer sailed from England to South Africa some years later, and established himself as the librarian. He sorted and referenced the books in the collection, even then estimated as one of the world's largest, and began the process of restoring and preserving its most valuable pieces. He is also said to have fiddled the account books. When his deception was discovered, he committed suicide by swallowing arsenic.
He took three days to die. Today people still hear the footsteps of a man pacing the library from room to room. Searching for something and not sure where to look? Ask Bertrand.
The book you need will fall off the shelf, no matter how securely it was wedged in. Many people have seen a man in period dress walking the corridors. Shown a picture of Bertrand, they identify the ghost as him.
The librarians are convinced that Dyer's soul haunts the place he loved most. Last year they found his unmarked grave, held a funeral for him and erected a tombstone.
They say that without the efforts of Bertrand, most of the treasures of the library would now be lost.
Next for ghost hunting was the old De Beers boardroom where the sherry flowed. Here, in 1888, mine magnets Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Barnato met to form De Beers.
Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe had their origins in this room, where Rhodes wielded his political power.
The De Beers board no longer holds its meetings here.
Board members would often see a large dog sitting patiently in the corner of the room by the door. They would also hear the footsteps of a man walking through the room, during a meeting, in broad daylight. But there was no one there. The lampshade over Rhode's old desk is said to suddenly start swinging and just as suddenly to stop. Secretaries over the years have claimed that a man wearing old-time clothing sometimes stands in the doorway to watch them as they work.
Later we made our way to the Hull Street Theatre, now a ruin of a building smelling of cats and unwashed bodies. It is here that the Trekboers uitspanned on their way further north. It is also here that an unknown epidemic swept through the camp, killing many children.
One of these children nicknamed "George" is a typical naughty child who loves playing practical jokes, jumping out from where he has been hiding and scaring people silly.
Potgieter refused to enter the building, or go anywhere near it.
"I wear blinkers on this tour and look down at the ground so I don't see anything I cannot explain," he told us.
Three months ago someone on his tour took a photo inside the old building. In the photo a little boy was looking through the window. The little boy was George.
At the Gladstone Cemetery, Potgieter took us to the grave of a Walter JC Fletcher, a second lieutenant who had died during the Siege of Kimberly on October 18, 1899, aged 19.
He was the first British officer to die in the Anglo-Boer war. People still see his ghost.
The latest of these sightings was a few months ago, when a couple refused to enter the graveyard and waited for the group at the gates. When Potgieter asked if they were okay, they described seeing an apparition of a man standing at the head of the grave and watching over the group.
Potgieter then told us to turn off our torches. "You see more in this graveyard without torches."
We visited the grave of American George Fredrick Labram, who designed, built and tested Long Cecil, the canon built by the British to combat the Boers. Labram died in a bomb attack on the Grand Hotel.
Orbs of light are often photographed over his grave, as they are over the graves, side by side, of a couple named Frankenstein.
Later, at the Honoured Dead memorial, Potgieter tells us the story of the memorial's vault, where the souls of 27 British officers are said to still reside.
The clock is ticking slowly towards the witching hour, it is pitch dark, and you suddenly feel that everything could, just possibly, be true.
