The House at Kidds Beach

We were so thrilled to rent the house for our holiday in South Africa. It was right on the Indian ocean and the warm waves lapped right up to the rocks outside. The silver icing-sugar beach and the turquoise sea which sparkled with a million diamonds, was the most beautiful we had ever seen. Built with mainly glass walls, we had the most amazing views of the ocean and the first thing we were lucky enough to see was a pair of whales frolicking in the bay right outside. The locals told us that the whales came back to this stretch of water to calve.

This was to be the holiday of a lifetime but right from the start all was not well.

We noticed a nasty smell which seemed to come up through the floors. It became so bad the kids were sick. It smelt like sewage only worse if possible. We knew it couldn’t be the drains as there was no mains sewage in this part of the world. Each week a lorry, attractively nicknamed The Honey Lorry by the locals, called to empty the cess pit in the garden.

We went to the local market and bought fresh fruit and vegetables. These were put away into the cupboards but were rotten and stinking by morning, lying in pools of black liquid. Fresh steak in the fridge, turned green and had to be thrown away. Bread was mouldy within hours and the water in the taps was a murky, brownish-red colour which smelt like a dead animal. We didn’t fancy washing in it and certainly could not bring ourselves to drink it. We made tea with bottled water, hoping that it was just a temporary problem.

As the smell got worse, a large red stain started to spread up the kitchen wall, apparently from nowhere. The smell by now was so putrid that we were all feeling ill.

This beautiful house smelt of evil. There was a feeling of such malevolence that I feared for our lives. The atmosphere was like a heavy black hand pressing down on our minds and our bodies. This may sound melodramatic, but fear does spur on imagination and we were all becoming very frightened by now. We were only normal people and this was completely outside of our understanding. It became just too much to cope with, so we packed and left our beautiful holiday home and moved into the local hotel.

Nobody seemed surprised that we couldn’t live in the house and locals were very quick to tell us the reason for the feeling of evil that pervaded every inch of the walls

Apparently, when the excavations had been done for the foundations of the house, many bones and body parts were unearthed. Rumour has it that the site was once an African, ritual, sacrificial ground. The bones and body parts were taken away and buried with Christian blessings in another place and a priest blessed the site for the new house. It was quite unpleasant to realise that we had been eating and sleeping above a ground which had been used for pagan human sacrifice and was soaked in the blood of innocent victims.

Maybe this explained all the strange happenings but I know that I have never before or since, felt as frightened as I did, in the house at Kidds Beach.

Jane Manning

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