Shacks over ghosts plea

Residents in a new housing development near Durban are claiming that they’d rather move back and live in shacks than live there – because they claim that it’s haunted.

And yes, this comes from the pages of South Africa’s most reasonable and least sensational daily newspaper, the Daily Sun, which even Colin turns her nose up at on the bottom of her crate. But still, it’s worth sharing.

One resident, 32-year-old Fikile Ngcobo, told the Daily Sun that every night the ghost of a “mysterious woman” drags a coffee tin along the floor of her house.

Wait the what now? A coffee tin? Does the mysterious women bring the tin with her? Or is it a coffee tin that you happen to leave on the floor each evening before retiring? If it’s the latter, perhaps consider not leaving it there and then there will be nothing to drag. If it’s the former, then maybe some sort of rudimentary floor covering is required to muffle the sound.
Either that or an exorcism. That might also work.

Another resident, Phindile Khumalo (54), told the newspaper a ghost tried to strangle her every night.

Recurrent attempted asphyxiation? Suddenly, the coffee tin issue seems rather trivial, doesn’t it? Unless it’s a Ricoffy tin, which would be both annoying and offensive – the Steve Hofmeyr of spiritual incarnations. But I digress, and I shouldn’t, because any act of nocturnal throttling is a serious matter. I was going to suggest locking your bedroom door, but that won’t stop a ghost, because they can walk straight through doors – I’ve seen it on Ghostbusters.
Was there slime involved?

“I sometimes wake up and find that all the lights are on, even though I switched them off,” Khumalo said.

Yeah, that’s probably just an electrical fault.

The Daily Sun reports that the “ghosts” may date back to a village that stood on the site many years ago, before the area became a sugar cane plantation.

Either that or they are disturbed by the damage that the high carbohydrate harvest is doing to the nation’s health. This could be a warning from the spirit world that we all need to move to the Noakes fad diet.

Ngcobo said she had heard that the village’s graves had never been moved and that some of the dead people’s descendants were living in nearby Ndwedwe.

Well, this was the plot of just about every 1980s horror movie, and they are all factually correct, so it seems likely that this may actually be the reason behind these ghostly occurrences (apart for the light switch thing). Quite how the developers failed to address this when building the complex is beyond me. But then they also did the dodgy wiring in the lighting circuits, so perhaps it’s not that surprising.
But the points of reference are all there: Poltergeist, Pet SemataryAmityville (technically not a burial ground thing, but did feature a moving coffee tin) etc etc. And despite the fact that we now have a likely explanation for these frankly terrifying events, it seems difficult to find any way in which they can be prevented from continuing.

“We would really appreciate it if they could come and take the spirits of their dead relatives,” Ngcobo said.

Oh. Yeah. That might work.

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