Eish, That's Dark

Daisy de Melker was a Johannesburg nurse who married three times between 1909 and 1931. Two of her husbands died years apart, and so did her own son, all in circumstances nobody thought to question until it was far too late. The case unravelled over a fake cat, a poison register signed under a dead man's surname, and a Turffontein pharmacist who recognised her face in the newspaper. What followed...

How does crime and punishment actually work in South Africa? This is the episode that decodes it. We walk through the criminal landscape from the ground up: the difference between common-law and statutory crimes, why there are no jury trials, how the death penalty was abolished in 1995, and what "life imprisonment" genuinely means. Then some curveballs, like being convicted of murder without inten...

Every culture has monster stories, but the best ones are never just monster stories. This week we go deep into five of South Africa's most feared mythological creatures: the Tokoloshe, Pinky Pinky, the Grootslang, the Aigamuxa, and the Inkanyamba. We cover the full mythology of each one, what they look like, what they're said to do, and where the legends actually come from. But the real question w...

It is June 1990. A customer browsing in a fabric shop in Midrand finds a slip of paper. On it, in a child's pencilled hand, is a message: she's being held by kidnappers, and her friend tried to phone but was cut off. The girl says her name is Anne-Mari. Anne-Mari Wapenaar vanished in September 1989. And by June 1990, the only two people ever linked to taking her — Gert van Rooyen and Joey Haarhoff...

In January 1990, a sixteen-year-old girl drugged and handcuffed in a Pretoria cupboard got herself out, flagged down a car, and cracked open the biggest child-abduction case in South African history. This is part one of The Missing Six. We meet Gert van Rooyen, the churchgoing builder with a 1979 conviction the state ignored, and his partner Joey Haarhoff, the "motherly" woman who opened the doors...

No courtroom this week. Just four places in South Africa where the dead apparently never got the memo that it was time to leave. We're covering the Uniondale Hitchhiker on the N9 in the Little Karoo, the famously haunted Lord Milner Hotel in Matjiesfontein, the heartbreaking love story behind the ghost at Kronendal in Hout Bay, and Charlotte - who has been tidying guests' rooms and ringing the bel...

In December 1994, a 20-year-old diver disappeared into one of the deepest freshwater caves on Earth. His torch went dark. His body did not come up. For ten years, he lay there. In silence. In the cold. In the dark. In 2004, an Australian airline pilot saw something at the bottom of that cave that he could not unsee. He made a promise to a stranger he had never met. This is the story of that promis...

A burned body. A death certificate. A closed case. And a convicted murderer doing his weekly grocery shop at Woolworths in Sandton City while the state held his death certificate on file. This is Part Two. We cover the murder of Katlego Bereng Mpholo, the year Bester spent living openly in Hyde Park, the GroundUp journalists who cracked it open, the flight through Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania, an...

Thabo Bester was serving a life sentence for murder and rape when, in May 2022, he apparently died in his cell. The body was charred. The prison signed off on it. But Thabo Bester wasn't dead, and someone on the inside knew that. This is Part One of the Thabo Bester story, one of the most audacious prison escapes in South African history, and the case that exposed just how deep the rot could go. H...

There is a ship off the coast of South Africa that has been seen for four hundred years. It never docks. Its sails are full of wind that isn't blowing. And almost everyone who has seen it first has met a terrible end. A future king of England saw it. Naval officers logged it. Warships swerved to avoid it. Ordinary people watched it from a beach on a calm Sunday afternoon. It shouldn't exist. But i...

The Castle of Good Hope has stood in the centre of Cape Town since 1679, but it has never been quiet. A governor cursed on the gallows and found dead of terror the same day. A woman's skeleton sealed into the walls for centuries. A bell tower bricked shut after a suicide that still rings on its own. Guards who didn't just transfer... they resigned. What was built as a beacon of hope, turned into a...

In December 1957, the South Coast of Natal was full of families on holiday. Hotels packed. Beaches busy. The Indian Ocean warm and green. Then nine people were attacked by sharks. Six of them died. Jess takes Liz through Black December, the most catastrophic shark event in South African history. We cover the victims, the science of how sharks actually hunt (yes, they can feel your heartbeat), why...