Good Friday, 1968, and it is raining on the Little Karoo, which it hardly ever does. A young air force lieutenant is driving his fiancée through the night in a Volkswagen Beetle, heading for her family in Riversdale. Her name is Maria Roux. She is asleep in the passenger seat. About twenty kilometres outside Uniondale, on the road towards Willowmore, near the turn-off to Barandas, he loses the car. She is killed where she sits. He is badly hurt and lives.

That is the part everyone agrees on. The rest starts eight years later.

Easter 1976, the same stretch of road, the same kind of wet, cold night. A man named Anton le Grange, driving from Willowmore towards Oudtshoorn, said he saw a young woman standing at the roadside, pale, with long dark hair, in dark slacks and a dark coat. He stopped and she got in behind him. She told him where she was going. A few kilometres on he turned to say something and the back seat was empty. He drove into Uniondale, shaken, and reported it at the police station, where the duty constable did not laugh at him but got into a police car and followed him back out along the road. On the way, both men later said, the rear door of le Grange’s car swung open and shut on its own while it was moving, and there was a scream from nowhere. Shown a photograph of Maria Roux some time afterwards, le Grange said that was her.

Easter again, 1978. A young army corporal called Dawie van Jaarsveld was riding his motorbike along the same road to spend the weekend with his girlfriend, with a spare helmet strapped to the luggage rack. At the junction he saw a woman waiting, dark clothes, dark hair, and offered her a ride. She put the spare helmet on and climbed up behind him. He had earphones in under his own helmet, and a little way down the road the radio, he said, changed station on its own. Then he felt a bump, as though the bike had gone over something, and the arms around his waist were gone. He stopped. The road was empty in both directions. The spare helmet was strapped back onto the rack, neatly, exactly as it had been before.

There are other accounts, less well attested: lifts accepted and passengers who evaporate, doors that open, a sudden cold, and laughter with nobody attached to it. They cluster around Easter and around rain. Folklorists file the whole thing under the vanishing hitchhiker, a story told on roads all over the world, usually about a girl killed in a car and always about a passenger who is not there when you look. What Uniondale has that most versions lack is a real crash, a real grave, a police constable willing to put his name to a door opening by itself, and two witnesses who went public and never wavered.

The lieutenant who was driving in 1968 was himself killed in a road accident in 1984. The sightings, so the local story goes, stopped after that. The Barandas turn-off is still there, and so is the rain, when it comes.