Podcast
Eish, That's Dark
Episodes
- 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…
- Boesmansgat: The Impossible Retrieval of Deon Dreyer
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…
- Thabo Bester: The Facebook Rapist - Part 2
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 o…
- Thabo Bester: The Facebook Rapist - Part 1
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…
- Spectres of the Cape Part 2 - The Flying Dutchman
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…
- Specters of the Cape Part 1 - The Castle
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 wo…
- Black December - When the Natal Coast Ran Red
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.…
