Many people living in Windhoek know it as a ghost house and it is common to see people using it as a place to braai. Yet while the existence of the ruined house is widely known, the history and the identity of the ghosts who might inhabit it is not.
The site still displays signs of the extravagant wealth of its former occupants. The lounge, the walls of which have been painted in recent years with artistic prints, still contains the remains of a large fireplace. The garden apparently once featured a statue, a fountain and an ornamental carved fish from which water flowed into a pond.
The house was originally built during the German colonial period in 1911 to house the farm managers of the Karl Liebig Company, which specialised in cattle breeding.
One of the managers who lived in the house was Alexander Scotland who served as a British secret agent in Namibia during the German period. Scotland claims in his autobiography to have been given an appointment in the German Schutztruppe and to have been responsible for encouraging the guerrilla leader Johannes Christian to agree to a ceasefire with the Germans on December 23, 1906.
However, in 1914, after providing details of the positions of German troops in southern Namibia, Scotland was arrested and imprisoned. After the German defeat by South Africa in 1915 (during World War One), Scotland left Namibia, but continued his work in military intelligence. In 1947 he served as the Chief Officer of the War Crimes Investigation Unit which compiled evidence for use in the Nuremberg trials against Nazi war criminals at the end of World War II.
The impressive house (on 'Neu-Heusis' farm) seems to have provided the headquarters for the management of all the land purchased by the Liebig company. 'Liebig's Extract of Meat Company of London' had purchased 210 000 hectares of land in the Khomas Hochland on September 18, 1907. Perhaps readers know whether the company had any connection with the beef-flavoured drink, Bovril, which was very popular in Britain at this time and based on 'extract of meat'.
In 1939, the South African Government bought the land from the Liebig Company. Sixty-five farms were apparently created from the land and were used to settle farmers from the Union of South Africa at the end of World War II.
In 1945, the 'ghost house' was sold to the Courtney-Clark family. It is not clear when the house was finally abandoned and what is its current fate. The large windows of the house provide beautiful panoramic views across the veld, whilst a deep rocky river gorge bisected by an old dam can be found a short walk away from the house. Perhaps readers know more about the history of the house and its occupants. Or perhaps people might suggest whether they feel the house should be preserved, redeveloped or allowed to continue to decay. After all, one might argue that the beauty of the building is in the way that the elements have worn the surfaces, while the wind hammers the loose corrugated iron sheets on the roof, as if to conjure up the ghosts of Alexander Scotland and the other former residents of the isolated farmhouse.
The name seems to derive from the Khoekhoegowab word ||Hoeses. The word refers to a deep chasm and indeed such a chasm can be found a couple of hundred yards downhill from the farmhouse. Professor Haacke of the African Languages Department of the University of Namibia has pointed out that the local Damara community in this area were also known as the '||Hoesedaman'.
