Young Emily Daniel was lying in bed, peeping out from under the bed-clothes. It was not a large room, but she was proud to live actually inside the castle. None of the other girls at school could boast that, apart from her own sister! Her father was Brigade Major of the British troops stationed at the Castle. The blue-painted door of her room was open and she could vaguely see down the long shadowy corridor outside. Out of the half-darkness came a figure wearing a long grey cloak. Emily thought it must be her mother and wondered why she was covering her face with her hands.
‘What is the matter, Mummy?’ Emily cried out, hoping to cheer her up.
The grey figure came to the very end of her bed – and then it vanished away into nothing. Emily realised in cold fright that she had just seen a ghost.
The ‘Lady in Grey,’ as she has been called, has also appeared in Government House – the fine building beside the Company’s garden and next door to Parliament in Cape Town.
When Sir Bartle Frere was Governor of the Cape, just over a hundred years ago, his wife was in her private sitting-room when a messenger arrived. He knocked on the door, looked in, apologised and went away. A while later he returned and said, ‘I’m so sorry I interrupted you earlier, your Ladyship. I didn’t realise you had someone with you’.
‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘I was alone.’
The messenger stammered, ‘But I saw your visitor. A lady dressed in grey was standing right next to you.’
Lady Frere gasped with shock. ‘That must have been our friendly ghost,’ she exclaimed. ‘I didn’t know she was visiting me.’
The Lady in Grey has been seen on gala occasions at Government House, and walking sadly along the corridors of the Castle. Some people say there was once an underground passage linking the two buildings. Fairly recently the skeleton of a woman was discovered near the old Castle gateway (now walled up) which faced Table Bay. Perhaps those sad bones were what the ghost was looking for, as her grey shadowy figure has not been seen again.
The old walls and buildings of the Castle of Good Hope have been carefully restored during recent years. Quite possibly the workmen did disturb a few of the old ghosts. Even tough military policemen have been convinced that they saw ghosts on the battlements some nights. The rebuilders made one interesting discovery. The dark lower room thought for so long to be the dreaded Donker Gat in which prisoners were locked was only a gunpowder store. The real ‘dark hole’ was under a further corner of the Castle, and alongside what is thought to be a ‘torture room’. A stout iron ring is still fixed to the rounded, brick-lined ceiling, and the bare stone-walled prison chamber has only one slit high in the wall to let in a single shaft of daylight.
Stroll in under Van der Stel’s gateway, between the pointed walls named Leerdam and Buren, and you will be walking back into some of Cape Town’s earliest history. Guards in their traditional costume of blue jackets with orange cuffs, red-striped white trousers and plumed hats parade with silver-bladed halberds. You probably will not see any ghosts in the sunshine amongst the newly-painted cream walls and dark green window-frames. But who knows who might be watching you from beyond those small, dark panes of glass?
It might be a woman in black, last seen in 1952. It might be a headless figure in a long white coat, which frightened two visitors in 1954. Or it might well be the angry spirit of Governor Noodt.
Pieter Gysbert Noodt was a hard man with a viciously fierce temper. He kept harsh discipline over all who lived inside the Castle. When soldiers were caught trying to run away in 1729, four of them fought to escape. They were arrested and brought back to the Castle where they were sentenced first to be flogged and sent to Batavia, and then this was changed and they were sentenced to death. Legend and history tell different stories whether the death sentence was delivered by the Council of Justice or by Governor Noodt himself.
To the soldiers of the Castle, this punishment on the four who had been their own comrades seemed cruel indeed. They sympathised with the four in the Dark Hole. The prisoners asked for a minister of their own Lutheran faith to visit them. They spent the night singing and praying, paying little attention to the fine meal – a customary privilege of those condemned to death which had been provided from the Governor’s own kitchen.
At nine o’clock the next morning, the entire garrison of the Castle was present on the parade ground, with the full Council of Justice, watching as Governor Noodt read the sentence from the ornate pillared Kat Balcony. He then retired to his own quarters while the condemned men were led inside a large tent where the gallows had been prepared. Here, the onlookers were moved to tears by the way the four prayed and said goodbye to each other. As the last man was being led towards the waiting rope, he turned and yelled towards the Governor’s quarters, ‘You, Governor Noodt, must take responsibility for this! I summon you to appear with me before the Judgement Seat of God’. Then, the drums rolled and he too, was hanged.
When the Council of Justice returned to the Governor’s residence to tell him that his orders had been carried out, they found him sitting in his carved wooden chair. There was a horrid expression of mixed rage and terror on his face. He was dead. The doctor, summoned in haste, said that the Governor had died of a heart attack – but what had caused it? No-one dared suggest the reason.
The cry, in Dutch, ‘Noodt is dood!’ grew from a frightened whisper to a resounding shout. ‘Noodt is dead!’ was good news to most of the soldiers. A cruel governor had met with a suitable end. So, perhaps it is hardly surprising that they say his ghost still prowls the stone-cold, empty rooms. Guards patrolling at night wonder if the footsteps they hear coming along the slate-paved battlements or the cursing voice from some upstairs room might belong to Governor Noodt paying the Castle one more ghostly visit.
The Castle of Good Hope
This fort, built by Jan van Riebeeck, was found to be too weak and too small. So in 1665 work started on a new stone castle with a five-pointed design. It was completed in 1679. In those days, the sea rolled close to the castle wall. Simon van der Stel had the sea-facing gate blocked up and replaced with the present entrance. Though bristling with guns, the Castle never had to fight off any attack. When Prime Minister Cecil John Rhodes suggested a small part be removed, Maria Koopmans-de Wet retorted that his nose was only ‘a small part’ of his face. He should try cutting that off and then look in the mirror! The Castle was left undisturbed.