Matjiesfontein is a railway village in the middle of the Karoo, a single street of Victorian buildings that a Scottish entrepreneur called James Logan built in the 1880s so that trains could stop for water and passengers could stop for lunch. At the end of the street stands the Lord Milner Hotel, turreted and white, looking as though it has been lifted from Bournemouth and set down among the sheep. In the Anglo-Boer War it was requisitioned as a hospital for British officers, and something like ten thousand troops camped on the plain around it. This is the point at which the hotel’s guest list stops turning over.

The best-known of the permanent guests is Kate. She was a nurse, the hotel says, nineteen years old, who liked to play cards with the convalescing officers in the little room at the top of the central turret. The room is still there, up a steep stair from the second-floor landing, with sash windows onto the station and an octagonal table in the middle. There is a plaque on the door that calls it Kate’s Card Room. How she died is not recorded, and the hotel’s own telling leaves it as mysterious.

What people describe is this. Late at night, from the landing below, the sound of cards being shuffled and dealt in an empty room, with a murmur of voices and a laugh. A housekeeper who turned round in the card room to find a young woman in a long white dress, or a nurse’s uniform, standing behind her, who faded as she looked. A locked door onto the roof that rattled in its frame for a full minute while a wedding party stood watching it. The hotel has told these stories for years, and a fair number of its guests have gone up the turret stair specifically to add to them.

Then there is Lucy, who is said to have checked into a first-floor room and never checked out. She is seen in a negligee, drifting along the upper passages and down the main stair, and is generally described as unbothered by the living. Soldiers in khaki have been reported on the same stair. James Logan himself is supposed to keep to the back lounges. Olive Schreiner, who lived in the village for a while and wrote in a cottage across the road, is sometimes blamed for lights that go off in the bathroom of the upstairs pub, though nobody has explained why a novelist would take against a light switch.

The hotel was restored top to bottom in the 2010s. The travel press went to see whether the ghosts had survived the builders, and reported that the staff said yes. New carpets, same shuffling.

Matjiesfontein takes all this lightly and sells it warmly. The village runs a ten-minute bus tour on a red London double-decker and the driver tells the stories on the way. The sceptical reading is obvious: an old timber building in a place where the wind never stops, a war hospital with a memory, a hotel that knows a good story is worth a room night. The Karoo is quiet enough at three in the morning that a deck of cards would carry a long way. Whether anyone is holding it is the open question.