THE busiest and most notorious ghost in SA must surely be the Uniondale Hitchhiker, who is reported to have appeared en-route to a multitude of southern Cape towns — but she is far from alone.

Pat Hopkins’s book introduces us to a multitude of ghosts from southern Africa and includes three short ghost stories and a Rogues Gallery of our most often-sighted spectral murderers.

Ghosts of South Africa is a must for every reference collection and a grand book to own. Hopkins is a political science and history graduate, and he brings both topics to life in his very readable prose. The average teen is unlikely to read South African history for pleasure or general improvement, but when it is interwoven seamlessly with a ghost story, it is consumed effortlessly.

The greatest number of reported hauntings have taken place in the old Cape Province. Given that it was the area where English culture, with its love of the supernatural, had the greatest impact, this is not surprising.

Hopkins divides his subject matter not only into towns — Ghosts of Kimberley; Ghosts of Simons Town — but also into types of places, like Ghosts of the Roads and Passes, which has fascinating facts about the history of engineering, as well as an entertaining social history of the conditions travellers suffered in the past.

The fabric of our past is examined and covered in chapters on the hauntings of hospitals and theatres, of schools and churches, as well as hotels, clubs and restaurants. Although most South African hauntings are of white, British, Protestant origin, Hopkins has researched widely, spreading his net to cover not only the odd Catholic or nonconformist ghost, but those truly African in origin.

Reports of African ghosts are fairly few and far between and go back only as far as the infiltration of the early Protestant missionaries, but the indigenous past is intriguingly covered in a chapter on Ghost Towns: Great Trek Dorps, and Eastern Escarpment Mining Towns are mentioned, but so are the architectural sites mapping lost walled cities dating back to the mid-16th century.

Surprisingly, Hopkins missed the most famous ghost of all up here in the uncultured north — the Sweetheart of Soweto, the beautiful young woman who seduces men and instructs them to die.

Wonderful characters; good story lines; safe, comfortable, unchallenging and unoriginal: providing you regard this as a well-researched piece of fiction, it is an impressive romance.

It is an excellent and exciting rendition of the history of places and people in SA: it is nicely written and well researched, totally free of the overblown adventure-driven rhetoric that fuels so many South African stories. ( )