Erasmus Castle

The Boksburg Historical Association dates it to 1903; Anton Jansen, who restored it in 1989, says it was finished in 1904 at a cost of £6,800 and named Bella Vista, on a design simplified from an American pattern book. Armscor, the state-owned defence company, bought the farm for its head office and restored the house from 1975. The ghost stories have a short paper trail: the lit windows and night moans entered Wikipedia in 2015, and the name of the ghost, George Dean Erasmus, was added there anonymously in 2020. The 2004 newsletter cited for both says neither, and attributes the nickname, "probably", to an Al Debbo film of 1949. In February 2026 the house was closed, held up by scaffolding while Armscor looked for a heritage architect.

Erasmus Castle stands on a rise in Erasmuskloof, on the eastern side of Pretoria, on land that was once the Erasmus farm Garsfontein. The Boksburg Historical Association toured the house in August 2004 with Billy Nel, environmental and media manager for the owner, Armscor, and its newsletter BHA News (no. 118) summarised the family history he gave them. In 1855 Carl Erasmus left the Drakenstein district of the Cape with his wife Johanna and trekked north to the Transvaal. He acquired the Rademeyer farm at Garsfontein when, in the family story, Rademeyer "agreed to swop his property for a horse and a pair of corduroy breeches". The first farmhouse was built in 1860 and a second about thirty years later. Carl had eleven sons, and the eldest, Jochemus, took over the farm. The mansion was built for Jochemus, and its two published accounts disagree on dates and designers. The newsletter says it was "Completed in 1903" and that Jochemus commissioned "a Dutch architect, Van Der Benn, to design the home in 1896", with an English assistant, St Clair, and an Italian builder, Monte Bello, "who imported most of the building materials". The second account is by Anton Jansen, whose firm A J Konstruksie restored the house in 1989. In a letter of 1 June 2015 to the architectural historian Nicholas Clarke, published on the artefacts.co.za register of South African buildings, Jansen writes that Jochemus approached the Pretoria architect J. W. Leslie Simmonds in 1903, at his father's insistence, because his house of 1890 no longer matched "his status as a farmer, merchant and entrepreneur". Simmonds showed him an American book of house designs. Jochemus wanted the Carson Mansion, which was beyond his budget, and F. van der Ben, a Dutch architect dismissed from the public service for refusing the oath of allegiance to the British government after the South African War, simplified it as Simmonds's draughtsman. "The house was built in 1904 at a cost of £6 800 and christened Bella Vista." Asked who the architect was, Jansen answers "None by name": the design is "a conglomeration of Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom, JW Leslie SIMMONDS and F VAN DER BEN". At the end of the 1960s the Erasmus heirs sold Garsfontein to the Pretoria Municipality for a road scheme that was never built, and Armscor, the state-owned defence company, then bought the farm for a new head office complex. From 1975, according to the newsletter, Billy Nel, Dr Elise Labuschagne, Hannes Meiring and Anton Janson restored the mansion. The two original farmhouses were taken down and rebuilt stone by stone closer to it to make way for the offices and roads, and the vandalised family cemetery was moved into the old cattle kraal. The artefacts.co.za record names Meiring van der Lecq Thomas and Ronga as the restoration architects of 1989. The house has since decayed. In 2022 Karlien Thomashoff, quoted in an update to the same record, found that "no maintenance has been done for years", that scaffolding was "holding parts of the house and roofs in place" and that the graveyard "shows signs of vandalism and neglect". In February 2026 the Pretoria paper Rekord, as reported by Getaway magazine on 18 February, said that a restoration expected to begin in 2024 had stalled for want of a qualified heritage architect. Armscor's spokesperson Stephens Ledwaba said a service provider had since been appointed and that the work would take about six months once it started.

Erasmus Castle is on Armscor property in Erasmuskloof, Pretoria; the artefacts.co.za record gives its street as Nossob Street, and the Wikipedia article places it at 25°48′56″S 28°15′43″E, the point used for this entry's map pin. The first version of that article captioned its photograph "The Castle seen from Delmas road, Erasmuskloof". Getaway reported on 18 February 2026 that the house is closed to visitors and that barricades and scaffolding have been put up to stabilise the structure and deter vandalism. Broken windows have been boarded up and roof leaks temporarily sealed. Floors and the veranda are unsafe; photoshoots and site visits are "currently off the table". Armscor said that once the building is restored and deemed safe it is open to ways for the public to enjoy it. Older sources describe visits arranged with the owner: the Boksburg Historical Association was shown round in August 2004, and Wikipedia still says that public tours or cultural gatherings "can be arranged", arrangements that predate the closure reported in 2026. The two farmhouses rebuilt near the mansion and the relocated family cemetery are inside the same property. In 2022 the outbuildings were in "relatively good condition" and the graveyard showed vandalism and neglect, according to the update on artefacts.co.za.