This ordeal turned a very religious anti-paranormal family into stern believers! Here it goes.
This story happened between 1986/1987. My father bought a farm in the Free State province which the locals called Gapamadi. It is Sotho for "the place where the blood flows".
The first week or so everything went without incident. I was about 3 at that moment so this story is partly what I remember and mostly what I'd been told! Around the third night in the new farmstead there came a knock at the master bedroom's window. My dad opened the curtain to found no-one there. Just as he got into bed for the second time there it was again, but this time from the kitchen at the other end of the house. So my dad got up, again to find no-one there.
As he turned his back on the door all hell broke loose. The knocking started again but went in rapid succession from one window to the other covering the whole house! As my dad gathered all of us together it suddenly started hailing STONES!
It went on like this for the rest of the night until the first African Plovers started their calls in the morning- suddenly all went completely silent! Apparently it did not only torment us as the owners of the farm. The farm workers who were left the next morning didn't want to start work out of fear for the Tokoloshe (a small creature used by witches to cause a haunting, see the following for more info: http://www.vanhunks...okoloshe1.html) that they believed was responsible for the phenomenon. Most even left the same day!
Things slowly escalated from there on, as if testing my parents' tolerance to its presence. I started calling for my mom lots of times, while playing, bathing etc, telling her to make the "Uncle" leave, only for her to find no-one there!
Other spirits also started walking around the house and garden. I believe that these were former owners and inhabitants of our farm. They appeared to be wearing clothes from the early 1900's. There was an older gentleman around his sixties, smoking a pipe (the smell of pipe smoke would sometimes fill the living room), together with a young man around his early thirties haunting the house. On bright sunshine days a women also around their thirties would be seen cutting roses from the formal rose-garden, a young girl judged by her height to be around 5 years of age running around her mother, both of them wearing bonnets as was the custom among Boer-folk for centuries.
A few nights later, most of my family awoke due to the activity heard the neighing of horses in the old stone kraal (corral). There was the sound of hooves on the ground, the muted voices of men talking or discussing something, the sound of the heavy old iron gates being swayed open followed by a voice calling: "Voorwaarts manne!". It roughly translates from Dutch to "Charge men!" The 'horses' would then bolt from the opened gates circling the house accompanied by the sound of horse whips being used to encourage the horses to run faster. This usually lasted around 30 minutes every night. The creepy part is that the kraal was used by the Boers during the Anglo Boer war of 1899. There is also some British graves in the middle of one of the cornfields as reminder of a Boer victory during some unnamed battle during the year 1900.
One day my mother cried out in fear- our healthy Boerboel dogs were lying on their backs with their eyes turned back in their sockets, their mouths would foaming. At first my parents thought that they were poisoned. My father fetched the pick-up, put them on the back and rushed towards town to take them to a vet. Just as my father exited the gate at the border of the farm, the dogs suddenly got up and acted as if nothing was wrong. This then continued countless more time, the dogs being immobilized for up to 15 minutes!
Things quickly got worse from this point onwards. The stone throwing escalated, the sound of stones raining on the corrugated roof got worse and it started finding human targets to throw stones at. My father and my 17 year old brother were on the patio one evening as we started to get used to it as it had not hurt us at the time. Suddenly a stone had hit my brother on his forehead- immediately forming a bump. My father and brother both described the sound a high pitched whizzing noise as if shot from a slingshot.
The next day my father installed strong spotlights around the house and cut all of the lovely fruit trees surrounding the house down in an attempt to catch the culprits but to no avail! Everything continued as usual with no-one in sight, it seemed as if the rocks being thrown materialized from thin air.
At this stage it started to focus on my brother. He stayed in his own roomy one bedroom flat about 10m from the main house as it only had three bedrooms and we were four children. He was studying for a year-end exam when something unseen but hairy and touchable started attacking him from his back. My brother was into body building at the stage and already had the big burly Afrikaner built at that age standing 1.98m tall and 105kg's heavy with little fat. Strangling him for 25 minutes on and off a epic struggle ensued, when he finally broke loose from the creature's grip he was covered in blood and looked like he was strangled using a garrote wire, his chest cut by claws or blunt metal blades! Today, in his forties, he still bears the scars on his chest.
He was not the only victim as it turned out. My mom was lying on the bed, reading as she usually did around the afternoon, when suddenly she became paralyzed by something unseen. Shortly thereafter a bulldog just appeared in the bedroom door. My mother said it felt like eternity as she soaked in every detail of the entity. It also was a Boerboel dog but he had a white spot between his eyes whereas ours had black masks. His face was tinted reddish pink as if by blood, red slime dripping from its mouth. The dog then started to proceed towards her, jumping on the bed and then climbed onto her pinning her down and paralyzing her, staring her in the eyes. After what must have felt like an eternity, he just jumped off and left the room. It happened a few times more, even at night with my father next to her, being paralyzed she could not alert my father.
My aunt being a stout Protestant Christian came to visit as she did not believe the accounts related to her by my mother. My niece, who was around 15 at the time, came with her. The first night being there, activity was a bit quiet. My sister and my niece were sitting in the bath that evening when a stone came flying through the window cracking the bath between them. That first stone seemed to act like a catalyst as the now normal activity immediately resumed. My Aunt decided to brave the night and sleep over. When we woke up the next morning my aunt and niece were gone, they packed their bags in the middle of the night and drove the nearly 400km's home. I actually admire her for her bravery as she had to go outside and walk the 20m's to her car! She said something had happened in the spare bedroom shortly after switching the lights off. Until this day she refuses to tell us what exactly did happen!
Although the activity usually started around dusk and continued until the first African Plovers called in the early morning hours, activity started to happen during daylight hours as well. There would be whispering around the house, two dark shadows moving throughout the house, these same two dark shadows also circled the house every night. We believed that they were the cause for the poltergeist like activity. It is actually reported by the natives that Tokoloshes usually worked in pairs! The only time activity now ceased was when the police or people who did not have a close bond to the family visited, immediately resuming after they left.
It was also at this time that spontaneous fires started around the employees' homes. It started out almost as if harmless but one day some of the employees came bashing at the door screaming that one of the other worker's house was burning down with flames already seeping through the windows. He was on leave and the door was locked from the outside with a strong deadbolt, when the door was finally opened they witnessed that only the edges of the kitchen cupboards were burning. After the flames were distinguished and all of the smoke subsided they were shocked to find that there was NO damage apart from the burst windows and smoke damage.
My parent now got desperate as my father had put all of their savings into a deposit for the farm. Selling it then would have financially ruined my parents. The church did not seem to care, besides they alleged that my parents did this for attention! My parents used to be respected people in town as my father was head of the traffic department and a deacon in church. Suddenly people laughed behind their backs, most of town had abandoned my family at this stage. Some even accused my brother of staging it all.
My dad now was being fed up of nothing working, and contacted a traditional African witch-doctor from the old Bophuthatswana he had heard of. When the witch doctor came he first asked for a glass of water, looked into it and told my father things of a very personal nature very few people knew off- certainly no one in the town we stayed at! The witch doctor started to perform a cleansing ritual before he removed a few boxes filled with stuff like fingernail clippings, hair etc. He then went on to tell my dad that the previous owner had put a curse on the farm as he was peed off because he went bankrupt and wanted no-one else to stay for too long.
The night after the cleansing a storm came up but instead of thunder there was the crying of a baby... Very freaky! The wind blew from the one border fence of the farm to the other, about 1500 hectares, and then almost everything stopped as suddenly as it had started! Most will not believe me but trust me, sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction!
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