Seven storeys of brown brick stand behind a fence on Elgin Road, a few minutes from the airport, with every window out and the trees of the car park growing through the tar. Kempton Park Hospital opened in 1978 and had 350 beds, a maternity ward, theatres and a casualty department that served the East Rand. On 26 December 1996 it closed. Not wound down, not phased out: closed, on Boxing Day, with the beds made.

The official reason was low patient numbers. The provincial health department said the place was underused and the staff and patients were moved to other hospitals. What the department did not do was clear the building. For years afterwards anyone who got past the fence could walk the wards and find them furnished: X-ray equipment, theatre lights, incubators, trolleys with the linen still on them, and filing rooms full of patient records with names and diagnoses on them. Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained why a working hospital was emptied of people over a single holiday and then left with everything else inside, and in the absence of an explanation the town supplied its own.

The first were the ordinary ones: a corrupt deal, a hurried cover-up, a sale that fell through. Then the building started to look the part. By the 2000s it was the most visited abandoned site on the East Rand. Teenagers went in at night. Photographers went in for the light through the broken windows. The security guards, by several accounts, charged forty rand at the gate and looked the other way, and airsoft teams ran matches down the corridors. And paranormal investigators went in with voice recorders, and came out with what they said were recordings of screams and breathing in empty rooms.

In 2022 The Citizen sat down with a Pretoria ghost-hunting group whose co-founder had been into the hospital more than fifty times since his teens. The group described figures in white at the main entrance, shadows in the wards, a very tall shape on an upper floor, footsteps on stairs nobody else was using, lights that came on in a building with no power, and, in one visitor’s telling, something that followed her home. Other groups have run public tours. Every abandoned hospital in the world attracts this, and the reasons are not mysterious: a big dark building, with beds in it, where people died, and a closure nobody can account for, is a story waiting for a narrator.

The government has announced the end of it several times. In 2016 the provincial health MEC said the building would be demolished and a new district hospital built on the site, with work to start the following year. By 2018 R127 million had been allocated for the demolition. In 2025 the building was still standing, still empty, still visited, and still without a date. A man who was born in the hospital in 1991 and runs a Facebook group about it put the matter to The Citizen as plainly as anyone has. “The ghost stories and stuff,” he said, “that’s not true.” What is true, and what he was more interested in, is that the province walked away from a fully equipped hospital and never came back.

That, at least, is not disputed by anyone. The rest depends on who you ask at the gate.