SA’S MYSTERY GHOST BUS FOR PORT ELIZABETH (5 SEPT, 2015)

27 August 2015
SA’S MYSTERY GHOST BUS FOR PORT ELIZABETH (5 SEPT, 2015)

Magician and illusionist, Mark Rose-Christie, in full dramatic flair, who owns and created the Mystery Ghost Bus tours of South Africa. He will be guiding the PE tour on 5 September.

The ‘Mystery Ghost Bus’ - a first for South Africa - starting out way back in 2001, with such well-known celebrity hosts such as ex-Police File presenter, David Hall-Green, to play the role as the initial celebrity tour guides around the country, sees SA’s national ghostly night tours roaming dark eerie streets at night, where the tours are now in their 15th year of operation.

Having  appeared to date on more than 25 television programmes nationally & internationally, clocking up over 200 radio hours, and appearing in countless press & magazine articles around the world, most experience the same as say London’s “TNT Travel Magazine skeptical reporter, Tracy Melass, who found: “Even I felt a tingling sensation down my spine”.

So much have the tours captured the public’s imagination in SA, that they’ve become a ‘cultural phenomenon’, having encouraged several ghost investigator teams to arise around the country over time, such as SPITSA (Supernatural Paranormal Investigation Team of South Africa), plus assisting with the scripts for television series such as SATV-3’s “Phantom” (hosted my Mike ‘Yebo Gogo’ de Pinna), and even being included in SA television soapie scripts like “7de Laan”.

In recent times, the public have insisted that the owner & creator of the tours, illusionist Mark Rose-Christie,  perform the tours himself, since he adds other ‘dimensions’ to the tours with his magic & illusion skills. And so these says he guides all of the tours countrywide, except those in Cape Town, who are guided by Mike Makin. This has seen Rose-Christie plan for his imminent move to live in Johannesburg permanently, where he will also be launching Mystery Weekends Away – a weekend featuring a Victorian ghost tour, theatrical murder dinner, and archaic relic hunt to boot – yet another first for SA.

Port Elizabethans are in for a treat on the PE tour, which will run on 5 September, the PE tour having amassed so many stories over time, that national ghost authors such as the late Pat Hopkins included several of them in his well-known book “Ghosts of South Africa”. Rose-Christie has been key to providing ghost authors with ghost stories around SA, one of which was given to Hopkins regarding the nerve-wreaking story of Richly House - today ‘The Brazenhead’ – which features as a permanent fixture on an old antique-fashioned ‘ghost story board’ at the entrance to this, one of PE’s most haunted buildings.

The ghosts are still very active according to the current manager, the staff having encountered what seems to be the nun who hung herself in the eerie tower which predominates the building - but with several new stories emerging, one of which was recorded by an international film crew.

A completely new story for PE is the Phantom Hitchhiker of Target Kloof, who seems to be the ghost of an accident victim who died along the bend at the bottom of the road some decades ago. He is no mere ‘replay’ ghost however, but rather an ‘interactive’ ghost, much like the Uniondale Hitchhiker. And so if you’re riding down the kloof late at night, you may well find a bloodied teenage boy sticking out his thumb to hitch a ride with you near the bridge. They say some types of ghosts appear near water, although in this instance, he actually died at this haunted spot.

Ed Gutsche, son of the famed yachtsman & business tycoon, Phil Gutsche, related to Rose-Christie that when his family resided in ‘The Coach House’ in Walmer, as a young child he distinctly recalled that at night, the door of his loft-type bedroom would open very slowly, and then just as mysteriously, shut. Even though there was never any wind. It was as if someone was coming in to check up on him.

Tracking down the Gutsche’s former housekeeper, Nona van der Burgh, in England, Rose-Christie was able to confirm that this strange occurrence could only be due to a previous housekeeper before Nona’s day, who died on the premises, and still comes back to check up on the children, for whom she he apparently had a deep concern. Ever since, hurried footsteps are heard around the house, particularly upstairs where the entity haunts the most.

More well-known is the ‘The Spookhouse’ of old Walmer on Villiers road, but nobody ever knew why the ghost appeared there, or even who he was. This changed when Paddy Crellin told Rose-Christie that she and her two sisters would literally bump into whom they called the “old railway man”, who walked down the main passage at any time of the day or night. Rose-Christie, who has a knack for piecing ghostly puzzles together, and will only relate a story if it has a credible reason to exist, eventually came across reports of the famous ‘Harding Murder’ of 1959. Harding’s daughter, Barbara, was murdered at the then popular ‘lover’s lane’, a bushy piece of veld off Burt drive.

Police Lieutenant P du P Fourie said the murder was so brutal, with her head having been badly battered with rocks, that it shocked even the most-seasoned of the C.I.D. detectives at the gruesomely bloody scene. Rose-Christie then found that Harding had in fact worked for the railways, hence the Crellins' story was true. And, there is also every reason for Harding to appear at ‘The Spookhouse’ of old Walmer, for he is a typical example of a ‘crisis’ ghost, who is still looking for his murdered daughter, which he sadly never finds.

‘Replay’ ghosts are always place- and time- specific, appearing at the same time & place. They’re not actually ghosts, but instead what Dr R C C Clay said are more like “like holograms, playing out their roles in the great cinema of time”. According to the ‘Stone Tape’ theory, when we are alive, the force fields around our bodies can be imprinting on the environment, when we perform repeated actions (eg: walking through the same doorway daily), later replaying, just like a video, once we have died.

A typical ‘replay’ occurs in the old South End Cemetery, where the tour’s guests visit a grave near to the famous wartime hero and his horse who is buried alongside him, where a ghost is seen laying what must be flowers down on the nearby grave. This repetitive action during life is imprinted on the environment, and simply repeated, or indeed ‘replayed’, after death.

Some of the other stories on the PE tour, apart from those already mentioned, are the Old Seaman’s Mission (today the South End Museum) phantom; a few haunts in central, such as the Athenaeum’s/PEMADS’ Little Theatre; and around Park Drive is the once prestigious Park Hotel (later called Sharley Cribb), the phantoms of Mannville Open-Air Theatre, and the Irish early park villa, ‘Knockfierna’ (which means ‘Fairies on the hill’, and is today the St. Georges Prep school).

Further along the route is the sad ‘little boy’ ghost of the Provincial Hospital, who died before his grandfather could travel to see him; plus SA’s most famous poltergeist story of the well-published poltergeist house near the hospital, which suffered 71 fires before it was razed to the ground by the final fire; and then it’s on to Grey High School with its ghostly white clock tower and the phantasms of two previous rectors.

Besides the haunted pub stop at The Brazenhead (Richly House), is another at the old Maritime Club, which sports the shade of none other than Mel Tanner, who was a countrywide rugby press reporter, but better known as the “greatest fly-half to play with or against” according to rugby stalwart, Louis Luyt. Tanner haunts the very same dark candle-lit dark room in which Rose-Christie presents the Tanner story, with dramatic flair and a clever scare to a seated audience - some of whom are not seated for very long.

On the tour Rose-Christie will be performing para-psychological demonstrations such as bending keys (so bring your old or spare keys along), and mind-reading, where he is able to tell a volunteer exactly what playing card they are merely thinking of. That’s right, they don’t physically pick the card, they merely ‘think’ of it.

This, to demonstrate that humans have force fields around their bodies (remember the ‘Stone Tape Theory’) – you know that time when you touch a door knob and you get a shock in the form of a spark – where Rose-Christie lets his force-fields overlap with those of the volunteer, and hence he can detect what the person is thinking.

Rose-Christie’s presentation throughout however, is enough to turn skeptics into believers, where even hard-nosed scientists come to find that at least Replay ghosts and Poltergeists could exist, since they have somewhat of a scientific explanation for their modus operandi - the latter due to R.S.P.K. (recurrent spontaneous psycho-kinesis).

With a meal at the start; additional pub stops en-route, to get into the spirit and calm your n-e-rr-ves (meals & drinks not included in ticket price); EVP’s (electronic voice phenomena); Dowsing Rods audience participation; live & dramatically studio-recorded stories, with eerie sound effects & haunted music; a dark haunted room; and much more - including the climactic ending in the cemetery at midnight (of course) - Rose-Christie says that the Mystery Ghost Bus of SA present more than any other known ghost tours in the world.

The tours only run in PE every five or so years, and just for one tour, where more information can be found on the website www.MysteryGhostBus.co.za which also has a promotional video you can watch … if you dare!! Also find ‘Mystery Ghost Bus’ on Facebook. Tickets for the PE tour are priced lower than the rest of SA, at R 300 per person. The tour starts at 7pm from the News Café, Boardwalk Casino, at which you can have a meal & drinks beforehand.  Bring ‘pub & grub’ money, a torch, camera & flat walking shoes. Bookings are now open at www.QUICKET.co.za for the tour on5 September.