Two Bits

For many years there were three landmarks driving home from Durban on the M4 – the Seabelle Hotel at Desainagar, the Ghost House at Seatides and finally – now you knew you were about to be home – a single white electric light above Robin Townsend’s farmhouse on the hill above the now Alberlito Hospital.
Well the Seabelle in still there, but now the other two are no more. The single light has multiplied into a sea of lights marking the spot where the coastal village is rapidly becoming a sizeable town, even a city one day, and the Ghost House is sadly no more.
The house was still occupied in the early 80s. Rose remembers getting a call from the lady who lived there, wanting to place a classified advertisement in The Courier. She wanted to know if Rose would collect the money from her.
The amount was tiny, maybe R5 (our motto then, as always, was ‘many a mickle makes a muckle,’ as the Scots would say) but Rose was so curious to see the house that she made a special trip in her Beetle. It was surrounded by casuarina trees then, a shadowy ‘Cruella de Vil’ building in the gloom. Rose didn’t get more than a fleeting glimpse inside and the lady was perfectly pleasant, not some hunched crone with a crow on her shoulder, but her curiosity was satisfied.
It was a stately old dowager of a house that had stood there, staring out to sea, for 90 years. The full story appears elsewhere in today’s paper, but it was built by an Indian immigrant who arrived from India with little in his pocket, and made a fortune. One can imagine the great parties that must have been held, the families arriving by car, rickshaw and on foot.
Then about 25 or 20 years ago, the house was abandoned and gradually it was stripped of its fittings, windows, doors and even the corrugated roof. Then the graffiti artists got going and the old place developed a second lease on life. It became the darling of wedding and fashion photographers. Heaven only knows how many wedding albums were made against the backdrop of its lurid graffiti.
If it was a landmark for our family, it stands to reason it was a landmark for everyone else who used the coast road. Even so, after 46 years in the news business I can still be taken unawares by the quirky things people are interested in. Don’t know everything yet!
On Thursday afternoon, my daughter Lesley got a call from a friend in Seatides: ‘Come quickly, they’re knocking the old Ghost House down!’ So, camera in hand, she hurried there in time to catch the once fine old home being systematically and quickly torn down by professional wreckers.
She put a story with a brief history together after a search through our archives, and posted the story onto our website, Facebook and Twitter. Now this is where I get astonished.
Between Friday and Monday morning, Google Analytics tells me that 52 125 people visited our website to read the story, each spending an average of 2.42 minutes. So it wasn’t simply a glance – they wanted to read the story and examine the photos.
Facebook has even wider reach: the story reached 181 091 Facebook users and in addition the post was shared 1 407 times. It’s like a spiderweb – those shares will turn into more eyes reading, but Google doesn’t know how to measure that (yet).
From the flood of comments we have received, a great, great number of people really connected emotionally with that house. It tickled their imaginations, fed their fantasies and connected with them at a base level. It was a beautiful house that aged so well, and even in death was born again into a new life.
My guess is the land will be developed, probably into a hotel. Pity they didn’t save a part of the house to be incorporated into whatever goes up there, like Zimbali did with the old farmhouse at the country club. But who knows, maybe they did save something. It will be interesting to see if the old dame lives on.
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You’ll never believe who I bumped into on my way to the eye doctor! Everybody!