The stoep at Tokai is the trouble. Louis Michel Thibault, the French architect who gave the Cape its best public buildings, designed the house in the 1790s for a man named Andries Teubes, and he put its front door at the top of a high raised verandah with fat round pillars, reached by a pair of steep curved stairs that meet in the middle. From the drive it is the most beautiful facade on the peninsula. From the top of the stairs, on a horse, it is a very long way down.

Petrus Michiel Eksteen bought the estate in 1802. He was rich, he had a fine cellar, and he liked a party, and in the version of the story that has been told in the Tokai forest for two centuries, his New Year’s Eve dinners were the biggest in the Cape. At one of them, late, with the table cleared of everything except bottles, he made a bet with his son Frederik. The boy could not, his father said, ride his horse up the front stairs and into the dining room. Frederik went out to the stables.

The guests crowded to the door and watched him bring the horse up the curve of the stoep steps, hooves scrabbling on the stone, through the doorway and into the room, and round the table once with the company roaring and glasses going over. He had won. He turned the horse for the door and started down. On the steps the animal lost its footing, and horse and rider went over together and landed at the bottom in a heap. The horse was dead. Frederik’s neck was broken.

That is the legend. Whether an Eksteen son died on those steps is not something the parish registers have been asked to confirm, and the people who tell the story do not seem to feel the need. What they will tell you is what happens now. On New Year’s Eve, when the house is dark, there is laughter inside it, and glasses, and the sound of a horse being walked on a wooden floor. Forestry workers coming up the road in the early hours have heard a horse at full gallop behind them and turned to find nothing, or seen a rider in old-fashioned clothes go past at speed towards the house and not come out the other side. The pair of them, the story goes, are trying to get it right this time.

The house has had a long life since. In 1883 the colonial government bought the estate and turned it into the Porter Reformatory, a school for boys the courts did not know what to do with, and the plantations that became Tokai forest were planted around it. It was declared a national monument in 1961. It now belongs to South African National Parks, as part of Table Mountain National Park, and in 2023 the parks agency was given R28 million to fix its water, sewerage and power. By 2024 residents were telling the local papers that the thatch was rotting, the marble bath was cracked, the Oregon pine had been stripped out, the statues were missing and the grounds were waist-high in weeds, and one of them called it an embarrassing mess. A year later the Constantiaberg Bulletin found nothing much had changed.

So the finest homestead on the peninsula stands empty behind its pillars, which is exactly the condition a ghost story likes. The stairs are still there, still steep, and on the last night of the year, so the forest says, still in use.