Travel. South Africa. Culture.
The Ghosts I Met in South Africa
South Africa is the most spiritual place I’ve ever been to.
I lived in South Africa for a year when I was eighteen years old. I had saved up money from working in a retail job, and I knew I had to embark on this exchange student journey to this country which had just ended Apartheid eight years earlier. I learned a bit of Afrikaans before going, and I tried to understand the society I’d be immersed in from books, but nothing really could have prepared me for that year. It was like being thrown into an ocean that would eventually spit me out as a completely new person.
The wildest things that happened to me there were spiritual. It seemed like everyone believed in some higher power. There was a population of Satanists who supposedly inhabited a vast network of tunnels underneath Pretoria. There were devout Christians from the Dutch Reformed Church. There were ancient cultural African beliefs, including talk of local Witch Doctors, and there were people who simply saw spirits all around them. These people were my friends. I had friends from every group.
The stories that you are about to read are true, though uncanny. The names have been changed to protect the real-life people who experienced them. They were some of my first…
