Podcast
Eish, That's Dark
Episodes
- Eish, Who Invited the Demons? The History of Exorcism
Exorcism isn't mostly demons. It's mostly rules. From ancient Mesopotamia to the Vatican, we trace the history of exorcism and the long list of rules written to restrain it. Who's…
- The Murder of Reeva Steenkamp - Part 2
Three verdicts. Two and a half years. One murder. In Part Two of our story on Reeva Steenkamp and Oscar Pistorius, we cover the trial that played out live on television, the eviden…
- The Murder of Reeva Steenkamp - Part 1
Reeva Steenkamp was a law graduate, a model, and an anti-rape campaigner who had a talk to give at a Johannesburg school the morning she died. Instead, in the early hours of Valent…
- Stewart Wilken: Boetie Boer
Between 1990 and 1997, ten people were killed in Port Elizabeth by the same man. Nobody joined the dots. Not for seven years. We tell the stories of the victims of Stewart “Boetie…
- Leigh Matthews: The Ransom That Wasn't Enough
Leigh Matthews was kidnapped the day after her twenty-first birthday in Johannesburg, in July 2004. Her family paid the ransom. She was never returned. Twelve days later, her body…
- The Nasrec Serial Killer
He wasn't a stranger who jumped out of the dark. He was the taxi driver who took them to work every morning, for weeks, sometimes months, until the afternoon he turned off the rout…
- The Unsolved Murder of Anika Smit
⚠️ This episode contains descriptions of the rape and murder of a minor, and crime scene detail. Please take care while listening. She was seventeen, home sick with an ear infecti…
- Alison Botha: Survival Against All Odds
Just after two in the morning on 18 December 1994, a car came round a bend on Marine Drive outside Port Elizabeth stopped for something lying across the road. Alison Botha was 27…
- The Smit Murders Part 2: The Conspiracy
The murders that started this story led somewhere nobody expected: a government slush fund scandal that ended a prime minister's career, an alleged security police assassination un…
- The Smit Murders Part 1: The Assassination
In 1977, days before he was expected to walk into a cabinet position, National Party rising star Robert Smit and his wife Jean-Cora were shot dead in their Springs home. No forced…
- The Krugersdorp Murders - Part 2
By 2015, Electus per Deus was broke, and the skills they'd built murdering for the Lord transferred seamlessly to murdering for cash. In part two of The Krugersdorp murders, Liz ta…
- The Krugersdorp Murders - Part 1
Krugersdorp, 2012. A woman claiming to be a high-ranking witch fleeing the satanic church walks into a West Rand ministry, and instead of doubt, she finds devotion. Within five yea…
- Daisy de Melker - Part 2
Daisy de Melker didn't leave Johannesburg when she died, or so the stories go. In Part Two, Jess and Liz follow her into local legend: the Turffontein house where a curtain is sa…
- Kempton Park Hospital
Twenty minutes from Johannesburg stands South Africa's most famous haunted building: Kempton Park Hospital, empty for almost thirty years. We get into how a state hospital ended up…
- Daisy de Melker - Part 1
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 th…
- Law & Order: Specific Definitions Unit
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…
- The Tokoloshe and Friends
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 Tokol…
- The Missing Six - Part 2
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 fr…
- The Missing Six - Part 1
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 Sou…
- South Africa's Most Famous Ghosts
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…
