KZN’s Ghost Mountain, muti and the mystery of missing UK tourist Lorna McSorley

British retiree Lorna McSorley (71), from Devon, vanished in a sugar cane field mid-afternoon on 27 September 2025.

Since then, McSorley’s story has become a sensational whodunnit: a swirling jumble of tales about superstition, body parts, ferocious wild animals, treachery and murder.​

It was a sweltering Saturday afternoon when McSorley went for a walk and was soon missing. She was on holiday with her partner of 30 years, Leon Probert (81). It was a package holiday to Kruger, Swaziland and Zululand.

They arrived by coach that day with other tourists and checked into the Ghost Mountain Inn at about 1pm. At about 2.30pm the couple set off for a hike around a nearby lake.

To locals, it was a crazy time to go for a walk: hellishly hot and humid.

Hotel staff advised them against walking because of the time of day and their unfamiliarity with the area. But, the couple insisted, so the hotel staff printed an A4 map showing a route around the lake.

About 800m into the walk, Probert turned back. According to a friend of McSorley’s, he wanted to get a hat.

Last week, in Mkuze, I helped British journalists delve into the story.

I left Zululand with more questions than answers, but talking to scores of locals and walking in McSorley’s footsteps offered some clues.

Muti murder and other theories

Her mystery has captivated Mkuze locals and grieving friends and family, most notably because of the gruesome prospect that she may have been the victim of a muti murder: fodder for the tabloid media.

The UK Daily Mail explored this angle as one explanation for her disappearance in this story, posted over the Easter weekend.

Multiple sources believe McSorley was the victim of a muti murderer, but there are other theories, and Mkuze (about 300km north of Durban) is awash with them.

Some proud locals are understandably miffed that Mkuze got a bad rap because of the suspect story of a single missing foreigner. The town is a springboard to the spectacular tourism offering of game reserves and the iSimangaliso Wetland Park.

Safe or scary?

Locals insist the town of Mkuze is safe.

“It is a tightly knit community where people look out for one another,” a hotel manager said.

“I have lived here for years. I walk my dogs alone around the lake most afternoons. I have never had any issues. People are friendly.”

While this sentiment was widely echoed, it waned further from the town and deeper into the rural areas.​

Ironically, the spotlight on McSorley’s disappearance seems to be putting pressure on police to resolve outstanding local murder cases, but more about that later.

The most puzzling aspect of her case was the fact that she seemed to vanish, though not entirely without a trace.

Probert raised the alarm at about 5pm when she hadn’t returned to the hotel. Staff immediately drove out to look for her, and within hours a sizeable search party was combing the area within a 5km radius.

Dylan Meyrick is CEO of IPSS Medical Rescue. A former policeman, he is a veteran search-and-rescue expert, and his company volunteered services for free, arriving on day two with a six-man team.

This supplemented the police K9 units with three sniffer dogs and an aerial search that included a helicopter and two fixed-wing aircraft. For six days, people searched shoulder-to-shoulder through thick cane and bush.

​Lorna’s footsteps

In total, McSorley appears to have walked about 3.8km before she disappeared.

She and Probert left the hotel, along a tar road for a few hundred metres, and turned onto a dirt road past the Mkuze cricket oval. At a mud puddle, Probert turned back.

McSorley proceeded up a slight incline on the dirt road between the big sugar cane fields, visible in aerial pictures as crop circles.

Some fields were recently harvested, so the view was good. At the incline, she should have turned right toward the lake, but instead walked straight up the dirt road, north, past a few farmworker houses.

At about 1.6km she encountered a farmworker nicknamed “Spider”. They said hello, and he described her demeanour as normal.

She walked about another 1km and reached farm manager Koos Prinsloo’s house. He offered her a lift back to the hotel, which she declined, and she set off back towards the lake on another dirt road running almost parallel to the one she had walked up, but this one was closer to the Mkuze River.

Apart from her possible abductors, Prinsloo was the last person to see her alive.

A day into the search, Prinsloo’s teenage daughter spotted something in the undergrowth between the river and the cane fields. It was the map McSorley had been carrying. It was crumpled into a ball and found less than a metre from the muddy farm road.

The former cop and the crumpled map

A key figure in the search was Francois Nel, a local farm security manager and former police detective with vast local knowledge.

Nel’s relentless work has yielded results that should help the police investigation.

He sees the crumpled map as a sign of aggression. He gave its location to a colleague, who analysed cellphone tower data.

It triangulated four cellphone numbers in a 50m radius around the time McSorley was in the area. One of the numbers was linked to a local man who walked down from the Lebombo Mountains towards town.

The other SIM cards are not registered, so they are not linked to a person with a valid identity number and address. These SIMs are easily bought.

Nel urged the police to trace the phone numbers and the calls they made.

“One of those numbers was used by someone in a car heading north on the N2 towards Jozini or Ingwavuma. The police should have got a court order to pursue that information. Something happened to the investigation. I don’t know, but we are no closer to finding what happened to Lorna.”

Nel suspects she was spotted alone in the cane field by someone who called her abductors, who arrived in the car and sped off with her.

McSorley apparently had a moon bag containing hers and Probert’s passports, about R2,000 in cash, a camera and gold jewellery.​

Lions and crocodiles

Nel says McSorley wasn’t attacked by a wild animal.

“There are no crocodiles in the area big enough to take an adult, and most lions and leopards are collared and tracked. Besides, you would see some evidence of a struggle.”

People involved in the search said Probert was anxious to leave, and the SAPS asked him to stay in the country for a few days longer than he intended.

He allegedly told the search party that the couple did not bring a cellphone on holiday, but was later seen using one.

Meyrick, the IPSS Medical Rescue CEO, didn’t meet Probert but was surprised by his reaction to the tragedy.

“I have been doing this work for 30 years. I expected to find her dead in half a day. We scoured every single field and found absolutely nothing. We interviewed the farm manager and the staff, some people three or four times. Their story stacked up. But I don’t know why Leon left after his partner of 30 years vanished.”

Meyrick questioned the extent of cooperation between the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the British police.

‘Too many red flags’

“I’ve been told the British police have certain information, but the SAPS hasn’t formally requested this.

“The hotel staff were told that Lorna was an experienced walker. I spoke to her friends, who said she wasn’t healthy, nor a good walker, and she had fair skin and didn’t like the heat.”

Meyrick received an email from a friend of McSorley’s who is anxious for the British police to get involved.

“THERE ARE TOO MANY RED FLAGS,” she wrote to Meyrick.

The friend exchanged WhatsApp messages with McSorley before her South African trip. McSorley grumbled about Probert and suggested she was getting her finances in order in the event of a break-up.

Asked by Carte Blanche if he blamed Probert, McSorley’s brother, Geoff Sheward, said: “Yes, I blame him for leaving her. What sort of man leaves his partner out in the wilderness in a strange country?”

Ghoulish

The most probable explanation for McSorley’s disappearance is that she was abducted – but by whom and why?

Both fact and fiction make the muti angle compelling. Let’s start with the latter: ghoulish folklore characterises the scene of the crime.

Author H Rider Haggard wrote about the “strange” Ghost Mountain and its “grey peak rudely shaped like the head of an old woman”.

There, a significant battle took place during the Zulu Civil War. Some call it a massacre in a place still haunted by ghosts.

In 1884, at the Battle of Tshaneni beneath the mountain, King Dinuzulu’s army routed their rivals and the mountain was littered with corpses.

It was an unusual battle in that both Zulu armies were assisted by white fighters: Dinuzulu by Boer forces led by Louis Botha and Lucas Meyer.

Before the battle, the mountain was used as a burial ground, and at night, strange noises and flickering lights were reported.

But stories about Ghost Mountain are distinctly at odds with the cheerful hospitality sector, which is a testament to the tourism drawcard.

McSorley’s disappearance doesn’t appear to have scared visitors away, but it has, in the minds of some locals, tarnished Mkuze’s reputation for warm hospitality and wonderful bush holidays.

Sangomas

The further you drive away from Mkuze into the hills, the more you appreciate the fears associated with muti. Remote homesteads are accessed by long, dirt roads and people live in fear.

They claimed more than 10 people had disappeared in the past seven years, not including McSorley.

A prosecutor we spoke to tried to quell the muti hysteria. It wasn’t “a common occurrence”, but had a big impact on the local psyche.

The SAPS does not track muti murders, making it hard to know their extent.

“People tend to believe the body parts of some people, especially albinos, bring luck and magic powers,” the prosecutor said.

“In one case, an old lady was murdered because people believed she was a witch. Her body was discovered without an arm. The arm was found later and linked to her by DNA. There are powerful sangomas, especially near the Mozambique border.”

Community policing forum leaders Frans Gumede and Bongani Mathenjwa say most of the 10 abductions resulted in the discovery of mutilated bodies.

“These stories are painful,” Mathenjwa said.

“We worry about our kids. It is not safe.”

Last week, CPF and residents met police and the local inkosi, demanding that cops ramp up investigations into local murders.

A former policeman with years of experience in the area told Daily Maverick: “Sangomas give rhino poachers muti, and we came down hard on them. We raided their homes often. They used to make hectic requests for body parts.

“I’m not joking. They wanted the right elbow of a disabled girl. We found a child’s body parts on the property of a sangoma. There was an albino girl killed in Manguzi. I heard a recording of a rhino poacher boasting about how he ate the private parts of an albino girl. Muti is big.”

Professor Velaphi “VVO” Mkhize is a professor of Zulu ancestry and one of South Africa’s best-known traditional healers.

He cautions against widespread misunderstandings about sangomas.

“Unfortunately, the term sangoma is used as an all-encompassing one to cover various types of healing. There is a bad stigma relating to sangomas because of how some behave, mainly due to business rivalry.

“Not everyone is gifted to heal. In many cases, this is a money-making racket, and there are people who use body parts.”

Mkhize says there are scant indigenous studies on the subject, and it suffers from ignorance and sensationalism.

“This is both from the Western media and the fact that most sangomas are not trained. Add to that the fact that many people believe in ‘ukuthwala’, the magic belief that you can be powerful or strong from medicine made from human or animal body parts. It is very hard to break this powerful ignorance.”

Answers

Meanwhile, the frustrated former detective Nel continues to look for answers and follow up leads as best he can while holding down a full-time job.

Surveying the banks of the Mkuze River, he said: “I come out here often. I ask myself what happened to Lorna. This poor woman. A lot doesn’t add up. The cellphones and her bank records would tell us the story.”

The Daily Mail wrote about Probert: “Inevitably, some cruel internet ghouls have placed him under suspicion. The next day, however, when the coach departed, local police kept him behind and, after questioning him, they were satisfied his version of events was truthful.”

Nel has tried to contact Probert to get him to share McSorley’s bank and cellphone records to put to rest speculation about their relationship.

“Couples argue. It could be convenient for some people to focus on Leon.”

The British police directed media inquiries to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, who said: “We are supporting the family of a British woman who is missing in South Africa and are in contact with the local authorities.”

We asked the SAPS a host of questions:

Was there progress with the investigation? Have the SAPS followed up on the cellphone data? Were the SAPS in contact with the British police? Were detectives investigating muti murders in the area, and did the SAPS ask Probert to stay in South Africa to assist with the investigation?

SAPS spokesperson Colonel Robert Netshiunda replied: “This matter is still being investigated. The missing victim is still being sought by police.”

Daily Maverick left a message with Probert. He had not responded by the time of publication. His comments will be added when he responds. DM