Off Air... with Jane and Fi - Ghost Mountain: part one - Beware, crocodiles

Episode Date: June 13, 2026

If you've inhaled all this week's episodes of Off Air (rightfully so) and you're looking for something else to get your ears around, how about some true crime from our sister podcast, The Story?Introducing Ghost Mountain, a new three-part series from The Story. Seventy one-year-old British tourist Lorna McSorley went out for a walk near South Africa's Ghost Mountain. She never returned. In the first part of this three-part investigation, we travel to the remote, superstitious heart of KwaZulu-Natal to retrace Lorna’s final steps. As the police search hits a dead end, bizarre rumours begin to emerge - including talk of witchcraft and an illicit trade in body parts.Host: Jane Flanagan.Producer: Harry Stott.Executive Producers: Taryn Siegel and Kate Lamble.We want to hear from you - email: [e-mail] more: Disappearances stoke fear of more ‘witchcraft murders’ after Briton vanishedThis podcast was brought to you thanks to the support of readers of The Times and The Sunday Times. Subscribe today: http://thetimes.com/thestoryHost: Jane Flanagan.Producer: Harry Stott.Executive Producers: Taryn Siegel and Kate Lamble.Clips: Newzroom Afrika / Youtube.Photo: Getty Images.You can get in touch - email: [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is that ghost mountain? That's ghost mountain. Tell me a bit about that mountain. The name Ghost Mountain comes from people staying there, and it was a secret burial place. And they said the mountain was haunted. At the southern end of the Jagged Le Bombo Mountains is a peak with a peculiar shape that looms over this corner of South Africa.

High on its slopes is a sacred cave where generations of local chiefs are buried, their mummified bodies wrapped in black bullskins. If you go there, you get eaten, you get assaulted by the coast and the forefathers and stuff like that. That was the myth of the story of Coast Mountain. Beliefs like these remain deeply rooted in this part of Kwazula Natal, a large province and the Zulu homeland on South Africa's eastern flank.

It's a superstitious place. Traditional healers are consulted rather than medical doctors. Healers, known as Sangomas, commune with ancestral spirits to diagnose problems, physical or emotional. People are still here, believe it or not, they'll still believe in witches. And here, if you want to get in big trouble,

and you tell one out, I will go to the Sangoma and I will lawyer you, Lawyer means in Zulu means I will put a curse on you. They will kill you for that. They take it very serious. The beauty of this landscape, its historic battlefields, pristine coastline and game reserves, are a magnet for tourists.

But beyond the fences of the high-end lodges, it's more like the Wild West. Poaching is rampant, organized crime is unchecked. The murder rate is among the highest in the country. And in recent years, there are increasing reports of something more sinister still. People have started to disappear. There's a market for, let's say, white women. What they do is they wait for a lifetime.

You could have been the first one today, walking, taking pictures. Hey, they would start talking to each other. We saw a white lady going out of the gate of Coast Mountain or wherever. She's walking alone. Come. They have a market for everybody. There's a market for you right now as you sit here. They're just waiting for the right time to take you.

My name is Jane Flanagan, Africa correspondent for the Times. I'm in Kuzula Natal to investigate the disappearance of a 71-year-old British tourist, Lorna McSawley. On September the 27th, 2025, she took a walk near Ghost Mountain, and then she vanished. The search for a missing 70-year-old tourist. has entered its fifth day at Ghost Mountain in Mku, the northern Guazulu Natal. Over the past six months, I've been travelling across South Africa and the United Kingdom trying to discover what happened to Lorna McSorley. The more questions I asked, the stranger the story became.

It appeared to be linked to chilling traditions and a gruesome trade. He's gone without a trace. nobody knows where she is what happened I was dumbfounded I didn't think anything like that existed let alone in this century when the police investigation reached a dead end I kept looking and found leads they had missed

or ignored from the times and Sunday times this is Ghost Mountain Episode 1 Aware Crocodiles I've spent my of my career reporting on Africa, including the past eight years for the Times.

It's a vast and endlessly challenging beat. I've stood on Chad's border with Sudan, interviewing families fleeing the genocide in Darfur. I've walked with Rangers in eastern Congo risking their lives to protect endangered guerrillas. I've interviewed African presidents, warlords and rock stars. Few places can take you so quickly from humanity at its worst to its best. which is why nowhere has held my curiosity quite like this continent. It was in early October 2025 that I started seeing reports about Lorna McSorley's disappearance in Kuala, Nautil, or KZREN, as South Africans call it.

The local media became engrossed in the hunt for her. The search for a missing 70-year-old tourist has entered its fifth day at Ghost Malang's disappearance. She was last seen on Saturday. Hiking at Ghost Mountain in Imkuzhe in Kwa Zudu Nuttel. I know the area well from reporting, mostly on its volatile political scene, and also from family holidays,

walking between its famous battlefields at Isantilwana and Rourke's drift, snorkeling in the Indian Ocean and night safaris watching leather-back turtles hauling themselves up the beach to lay their eggs. As the news broke of Lorna McSorley's disappearance, I was busy shadowing a leading South African politician for a profile. But the name Ghost Mountain caught my attention. The woman was last seen when she went hiking with her husband, who says he turned back halfway through the hike while she proceeded alone.

Missing persons' case is a depressingly common in this country. But a foreign tourist, going missing near a well-known hotel, was always going to attract attention. A huge hunt was mounted involving police and volunteers with dogs, drones, boats and aircraft. Theories came thick and fast. She'd been taken by a crocodile or another predator. Or kidnapped and a ransom demand would come.

The hope that she was simply lost and would soon be found faded fast. And strangely, nobody at the scene appeared to know much about her. Reports in the media identified her by the wrong name and said she was from Germany rather than Britain. Part of the reason information was so scarce was that Lorna's partner, who had been walking with her, no longer seemed to be there. He has not been unseen, so us personally have not been in contact with him or had any discussions with him. To kind of aid in the search, you know, what type of person she was, what she would she have done in a situation if she had gotten lost, you know, Unfortunately, without that information also does make our search a little bit more difficult

because we can't quite predict what you might have done. When someone goes missing, it is important to know as much as possible about them. To understand how they might cope. Are they physically fit and capable, resourceful? Would they panic or stay calm? When the official search couldn't find these answers, I started digging. I looked into Lorne and McSawley's back. and that of her partner to see whether either held clues as to what had happened.

I discovered she was born not far from London, so my journey begins not in Kuisulu Natal, but in Hertfordshire, on a quiet suburban street in the town of Royston. She was a fun loving person. I mean, she'd light the room up when she came in, and she loved to dance, wildlife and music. And she can be quite fun. funny, but also quite emotional at times. Jeff Schuard is Lorna McSawley's brother. I went to see him in March this year. I would.

I haven't had enough tea today, I don't think. I'm going to have a cup of tea. Is that all right? Yes, it's all right. Thank you. Family photographs and prints of World War II planes fill the walls of his home, where we sit down for tea and biscuits. Jeff is speaking about Lorna's disappearance for the first time. He shows me a picture of her. There's a good picture of her as she would like to be known.

Her tiny feet. Oh yeah, she was very, very small. Getting away with ladybird shoes. Lorna and Jeff grew up not far from here in Hertfordshire. After their parents separated, the siblings were raised in different households and saw very little of one another. It was only years later that their relationship deepened.

When she joined the army more or less straight from school, I believe she was in signals. And when she got married, I didn't know her first husband. But after that, we became closer. Lorna's time in the army took her to Northern Ireland, Germany and Cyprus. The experience gave her a lifelong appetite for travel and adventure. After her marriage ended in the mid-1990s, Lorna met Leon Probert,

the man she would travel to South Africa with in September 2025. He was not her husband, as had been reported, but her partner of 30 years and a decade older than her. I have had several phone conversations with Leon Probert in recent months, and he was clearly uncomfortable talking about Lorna's disappearance. He declined to contribute to this series, so I asked Geoff about their relationship. He came from Bristol.

He's got that Bristol accent quite strong. And I was taking the Mick out of it once. I was going, oh, you're from Bristol. And he just sat there in that chair, stony-faced. He said a word. No, we didn't know a lot in the Holman. Lorna and Leon lived in Devon, far from her family and friends.

Jeff would visit occasionally, though he told me he preferred to stay in a local guesthouse. A photograph from one of those trips shows the three of them on a day out. Jeff is smiling at the camera, his arm around Lorna. Leon stands stiffly apart from them, looking into the distance. I thought she was happy because she stayed with him for 30 years. And she was a well-connected woman and she had a brain on it. She had all the means possible to just leave him if she was unhappy.

If I had to sum her up, it would be resourceful, resilient, and above all, loyal. She was totally loyal. From Devon, Lorna maintained several close and long-standing friendships, including with Gina. They were at school together in their teens. I met Gina at her home in southwest London. Lorna always sent beautiful birthday cards. The inscription inside says to the bestest friend in the world, love and hope everything is always good for you.

And that's exactly the sort of person she was. She put a huge store on her friendships. So how did Leon fit into all these important friendships and relationships? He didn't. Lorna used to like to come away for the weekend and Leon never came with her. She always came on her own. I think she liked to come and just be herself

and enjoy the friendships. I think like a lot of people in relationships, she was a different version of herself. She was, I would say, not as bubbly, more subdued. I did ask her once, if you're that unhappy, why do you stay? And I feel quite bad now that that probably shut down the dialogue. Had they done a lot of wildlife holidays,

What had been the building up to this one? No. They've been to Greece a lot. They've been to Egypt. Singapore. You knew about the South African holiday that was coming up. That seemed like quite a big one for them. What had Lorna mentioned about it?

Just that she was excited about seeing the Big Five and taking lots of pictures. And we were looking forward to seeing them when she came back. Lorna visited Jeff and his family shortly before that trip to. South Africa and made an unexpected gesture. Yes, that's when she gave the children the money. She wrote two checks out, three thousand pounds each, for the children. And I said to her, why are you doing it?

And she said, I might not get another chance, word for word, which I thought was a strange thing to say. So it was shortly before her trip to South Africa, was it seemed like it was planned that she would give a gift to your car? No, no. They're not very close, my children. Lorna. I don't know if she was worried about me and my health or had some sort of vision about herself. But it was only a few days before she went on

holiday to South Africa and she went missing, I think, on 27th. In calls with her other friends, I heard about Lorna's passion for animals and nature, her love of dancing and her ready sense of humour. No one saw her as reckless or naive. Lorna and Leon left the UK on September the 22nd, 2025 for a packed two-week coach tour of South Africa with the travel agent Tui. After spending their first few days spotting wildlife in Kruger National Park, they travelled through the tiny kingdom of Eswetini, formerly known as Swaziland, before crossing back into South Africa and arriving in Makuzi. It's a tiny rural town of fewer than 6,000 people that sits in the shadow of Ghost Mountain, the ideal place to savour more of the country's wild, natural beauty. They checked into a four-star lodge at around lunchtime on Saturday, September the 27th.

Just a few hours later, Lorna McSawley had vanished. I arrived in Quasulunitat on a hot, humid day in January. 2006. It had been four months since Lorna's disappearance and I was keen to discover what had happened to her. I crossed the Tugela River into the remote rural north of the province. It was this breathtaking scenery that inspired the Victorian adventure novel King Solomon's Mines, a tale of lost kingdoms and hidden treasure. In the distance, Ghost Mountain rises between the farms and reserves as though it belonged to another world. But this is no tourist fantasy.

Kwazula Natal is a hotspot for organised crime, including rhino poaching, with gangs making fortunes from the illegal trade in Horn. In the absence of effective policing, landowners employ their own well-equipped security forces to protect infrastructure and wildlife. Leopard tracks. How often do you see leopard?

There's a lot of leopards, yeah. But mine in night, I have cameras all over the place. So you only see them at night. Francois Nell is wide, gruff and impatient, a typical boer, boer meaning farmer in Afrikaans. He speaks with a thick accent and often slips into Afrikaans or Zulu when words escape him in English. Francois heads security for the largest farm in the world.

Mukuse area. He and his men regularly go up against rhino poachers and gangs stealing equipment. Umcouz is actually a, it's a lawless town. Nobody looks after the lawyer. I mean, dockets gets lost. Cases doesn't get investigated. He wears shorts, leather boots and a khaki shirt stretched across his vast torso. A gun sits at his belt. Lona McSorley disappeared on land Francois protects. He was among the first to be alerted and offered to show me the route she took that day. She wanted to go to this dam. I'll take you to this then. With a man eating crocodilesies. Lorna and her partner Leon set off for a walk from their hotel, the Ghost Mountain Inn, at around 2.30 on Saturday, September the 27th. It was a windy afternoon, a boat trip on the nearby

by Jasini Dam to see crocodiles and hippos had been cancelled. Instead, they headed on foot for the nearest lake. Lorna brought her camera, but not her phone. The two-and-a-half-mile route was considered safe enough for the hotel to provide them with a route map and let them walk it alone. So is this sugar cane? What is this band-o? We're here now.

And this is where they'd walked to this point together. Yes, and then around about here. He decided, no, he's going to turn around and go back. Come back the way we'd just come. So he went all the way back and he went into the church. About 15 minutes into their walk, Leon turned back. He told me he found it too hot and have forgotten his hat. Lorna carried on alone.

In her 70s, fair-skinned and prone to burning in the sun, she was now heading by herself into the South African book. Her friends told me she was not especially fit. Yeah, she had to turn this road. She was supposed to take the right here. Walk around the pivot. It's just not far. She had to turn the right and she had to be at the dam.

But she made, yeah, she made the wrong decision. We don't know how that she read the map or she made a mistake. According to the hotel map, Lorna should have taken a track on her road. her right towards the lake. But she was soon lost and way off the route entirely. It may be that she was affected by the heat and humidity. She was carrying no water. Or perhaps the tall sugarcane fields confused her sense of direction.

But luckily, she came across a farmhouse where she asked for help. What I remember, it was around about 3 o'clock the afternoon. when the dogs was, I've got a lot of dogs, was barking. Kour's Prince Lou is one of the managers on the farm where Lorna was walking. Beneath a baseball cap, his face is deeply tanned and his nose misshapen from an earlier rugby career. His farmhouse is about a mile from Ghost Mountain Inn, the hotel where Lorna and Leon were staying.

My wife went out of the house and she came back and said, there's a lady here with a map that wants directions to the dam to so look at the crocodiles and the heapers. So I went out and I spoke to the lady and I told that she's totally on the wrong way. She's got to go back with the way she came off and I showed her on the map which way to turn. So how did she seem to you? Was she hot? Was she stressed?

No, no. It's okay. You can see she's hot. because she was walking, you know, but she wasn't stressed. She was calm, spoke fluently. There was no, nothing in a voice that says, hey, I've got a problem. You understand? It's weird how it happened.

Was it unusual for you to see a visitor, a guest from the hotel, walking around the sugar cane kit? No, no. I've seen it a couple of times. Sometimes you see just one guy or a guy and a woman. but I've never seen a woman at her. So you offered her a lift to the dam or back to the hotel, but she said she wanted to walk.

No, she wanted to walk. Kus told me he waited at his gate to make sure Lorna was on the correct track before going inside. We don't know if she stayed on the right path or ever reached the lake. Kus is the last person we know to have seen Lorna alive. Back at Ghost Mountain Inn, by 5.30pm, Leon felt uneasy. The walk should have taken 90 minutes at most. Three hours had passed.

He told the hotel that Lorna was missing. A senior staff member first drove the route expecting to find Lorna exhausted. When she didn't, the alarm went out to the police and across the local farms radio network calling for help. Soon a hunt was underway, workers, landowners and neighbours, converged on the area, including Kuz. That night, around about 7 o'clock, I got a call from a guy that said they are looking for the lady.

The lady is gone. And so I grabbed my kids and my wife and everybody, and we started looking for the lady. The farm's head of security, Francois Nell, was leading the team of volunteers. We were about 10, 12 vehicles driving up and down, up in all the farms. When you get a report like that, a missing tourist,

and it's a Saturday night, is the feeling like we must do it or are people... No, we must do it. Because we know the area. This is not the place to get losty. We know the urgent of a white lady walking alone in Zuland is not... I usually say this is Zululand, not Disneyland. We know what is going to happen. You're either going to get marked or peaked up.

What is marked me? Robbed. As night fell on Ghost Mountain, the search team had found nothing and were beginning to fear the worst until they stumbled across the first big clue, which we'll hear more about after the break. On the evening of September the 27th, 2025, local volunteers had spent two hours searching for Lorna McSorley

in the sugar cane fields beneath Ghost Mountain. Francois Nell, who heads security on the far where Lorna went missing was directing the volunteer hunt. It was getting dark very soon. We decided to call in the drones, which is thermal drones, to look for maybe she's sitting somewhere and waiting for us or she's scared or whatever. But when we put it up the drones, we couldn't find any heat along the rivers, in the fields.

The thermal drones would have detected the heat of a person in the bush. They found nothing. But then Coos Prince Lu, the local farmer who was the last person to see Lorna, made a vital discovery. He was out searching with his wife in their car. His two daughters were searching in their own. My youngest child saw a paper frumbled up next to the road. And she told my sister, stop, stop, stop, there's a paper. And they found a map.

When we found a map and we saw it was wrinkled and stuff like that, we knew, okay, there's only one place giving out maps like that. This was the hotel map that Lorna had tried to follow, discarded on the side of a track about half a mile from Kuss's farmhouse. When we found the map, it was like, okay, then we had a direction, and then we knew she had to be here. She had to be here or she had to pass here. So that was actually the best lead we had on that stage.

Now they had an area to focus on. There were still people driving right through the night looking for up and down. In every hour they phoned message now. They didn't find anything. So yeah, that is when we decided we were regrouped the next morning and start calling for it is in and call for reinforcements. At first light, the hunt resumed. force of the police and local private security networks was deployed.

Tracking dogs, drones, boats, a helicopter, fixed-wing aircraft and scores of volunteers on foot. Lorna's partner Leon Probert made a statement to police, but he gave the search team little other information to work with. The only photograph they could circulate was the hotel's copy of Lorna's passport. He was very dull, as I remember. He was sitting in the police man, and the policeman was my friend, is one of my best friends. And he said, he was sitting there like a puppet,

just like staring in front of him, where I will be like berserk. I will tell you, listen, I'm going to walk and look for my wife. I will walk in these bushes. I will not even be scared, even if I'm a foreigner. That made him suspicious.

Shortly after Lorna went missing, Leon was already making plans to leave, but Lorna had been carrying their passports in her bag when she disappeared. Staff from Tui, who flew to South Africa to support him, helped him get emergency travel documents to fly home. On September 30th, three days after Lorna had disappeared, I received a press statement from Ghost Mountain Inn

that said Leon Probert had left the area. A week later, Lorna's friend Gina received a phone call. It was on Tuesday, the 7th of October. My mobile phone rang, and it was Lorna's mobile number. And it was actually Leon on the phone saying that something dreadful had happened and Lorna was missing in South Africa. And obviously I was really shocked and queried what had happened.

And he told me that she had gone out on her own to go and find a leak with a hippo in it. And I questioned that and said, I thought it was unusual for a... anyone want to go on their own walking in the bush in South Africa, let alone a woman, and he told me that she had insisted she was going. My first question to him was, when did this happen? And he said, Saturday.

So I assumed he meant the fourth. And it wasn't until I looked online and saw the newspaper reports and News Africa television interviews that I realized she'd gone missing on the 27th of September. Gina contacted the search team on the ground in Kuzul Natal. And at that point, I thought it might actually help them look for her. I had no idea. It was almost two weeks later. What I don't understand is why a partner of 30 years would not want to stay in the area

and be there if she was found because you would want to be there to look after your partner, wouldn't you? You wouldn't want to say I want to go home. The same day Leon rang Gina, he also. called Jeff, Launa's brother. My phone rang and it came up, Lorna. So I said, hi, Lona. How are you? Because I knew she'd come back from holiday.

And Mr. Brobert said, it's not Lorna, it's me. And I've got some bad news for you. And he said, she went missing and told the story about how he went with her and then went back to the hotel. I was just in deep shock at the time. and it wasn't until later on when it all sank in that I thought, oh, I fancy living her on our own in a strange country, in the wilderness,

with all sorts of nasty saying it about it or could be, potentially. The last time I spoke to Leon was in April when I phoned with an update on what I had found out on my trip to Ghost Mountain. He asked me not to contact him again, saying he preferred not to be reminded about what had happened to Lorna. I told Geoff, Lorna's brother, and he said he wasn't surprised to hear that. As far as Leon was concerned, he wants to draw a line under it all.

It's a bit soon, but he didn't want to face up to what happened. After the hunt produced no clues except for the map, Leon's departure from the walk with Lorna and then from the scene was drawing local suspicion about his possible involvement in her disappearance. But it was too far-fetched. How could an elderly man possibly plot a crime during a coach tour of a country he'd never visited before?

During my several phone calls with Leon Probert, he showed little emotion about the case, except in one conversation when his voice broke as he spoke about the guilt he felt at leaving Lorna to walk alone. If I had stayed with her, he told, me, the chances are nothing would have happened. As the police investigation stalled, Francois Nell and his team looked again at the various theories about Lorna's fate, an animal

attack, a robbery, and they ruled them out. But rumours and local talk began to centre on one unbelievable explanation. When was it you really started having a bad feeling about what had happened? I thought, you know, if this lady was just lost, somebody will see her, a local cattle boy. Let's say she wandered so far off along the river. There's so many people fishing and they will say, yeah, we saw her, you know, we saw this white lady and she went in this direction and let's say she ended up in the district road. There will always be information, but there was no trace of her. We spoke to locals, as I said.

They didn't even knew she was walking there. And that is when I started saying, listen, I think we must look at this thing in a different way. As I said earlier, this is a place where traditional beliefs and superstitions dominate. Some of the community people, they are very superstitious. They are very afraid.

of this tour doctors, you know, this witchcraft stuff. And they told me about four or five days after it, if you haven't found something by now, you will never find it. Reporters deal in facts, but the deeper I dug into Lorna McSawley's disappearance, the more I realized that I had to take the beliefs of this place seriously. I came to understand that it was these low-soupleasured, myths that could, in fact, reveal the truth of what happened to her.

Next time on Ghost Mountain. We are also scared for us, our lives, because now we are not able to go out at night because you'll never know when you're going to be going to be going to missing yourself. According to sources, we have nine alleged bodies. I found three years. My daughter said to me, it was like aliens had just come and just taken them. And I said to her, like, you can't, what do you mean? Surely there's something.

And she said, no, there's nothing. From the Times and Sunday Times, this is Ghost Mountain, a series for The Story. I'm your host, Jane Flanagan. The producer is Harry Stott. The executive producers are Taran Seagull and Kate Lamble. Sound design and composition is by Mao Lassetto. We'll be back to. Tomorrow with episode two of Ghost Mountain.