Captain Hicks’s ghost still patrols a Middelburg farm

During the Anglo-Boer War, a Captain Hicks was placed in charge of a group of fearfully inefficient “poor whites”. It was said they were only in the war for the money and so inefficient that poor Hicks was at a loss as to what to do with them. The locals jokingly called them DMTs “Delirium Military Tremens”. This group of misfits and Hicks were stationed on the farm The Willows, near Middelburg, and it was here that the poor captain was shot dead right on the doorstep of the house by a Boer sharpshooter. Locals say his ghost still roams feebly about at certain times of the year. No one has any explanation as to what became of his sloppy band of soldiers.

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