The road
The inspiration for Murder at Misty Ridge and the ghost we didn’t invent
The road that inspired “The Haunted Highway” — and the ghost we didn't invent
There is a road through the KZN Midlands that most people never take.
It runs parallel to the N3 as part of the road from Durban to Johannesburg — quieter, slower, less travelled — winding through a landscape that changes mood with the weather. On clear days it is beautiful in the way that only the South African countryside can be: wide skies, rolling farmland, the particular green of the Midlands after rain.
But on the mornings when the mist comes in — and in this part of KwaZulu-Natal, thousands of feet above sea level, it comes in often, low and thick and unhurried — the road becomes something else entirely. The fences disappear. The hills vanish. The farms on either side exist only as suggestions. And if you happen to pass a certain set of stone gates in those early hours, half-hidden in the grey, just on the other side of the railway line, you might find yourself wondering about the school just beyond them.
Its name, in our books, is All Saints College, the school where I was born and the school that I later attended.
A fiction rooted in something real
When we published Murder at Misty Ridge — the first novel in the Haunted Highway Mysteries series — we made a decision that we knew would be immediately obvious to anyone who knows this part of the world: the towns in the book have been given fictional names. The dam has a new name. Even the highway itself has been reimagined.
But the road on the map at the front of the book is drawn from real life. Anyone who has driven that back route through the KZN Midlands will recognise the rises and bends and the particular quality of stillness that settles over it after dark.
We have changed the names to protect the places — and the people. But we could not have invented the atmosphere if we had tried.
What we also could not have invented, and did not attempt to, is the ghost.
The author of the Haunted Highway Mysteries writes under a pen name, as do all our authors in our different cosy mystery series. This is a choice we made deliberately and carefully, after much discussion, because much of the series draws on real places, real roads, and real stories, and a layer of distance allows those stories to be told with honesty and without consequence for anyone who thinks they recognise themselves in the landscape.
But there is one detail that cannot be disguised, because it belongs to the books themselves: the ghost at All Saints College is real.
More precisely: the ghost that local legend associates with the school is my father.
I am aware of how this sounds. I am also aware that those who know the history of the school, and the stories that have accumulated around it over the decades, will understand exactly what I mean.
I grew up with this knowledge. It is not something that was discovered later, or researched for the purposes of fiction. It is simply part of my life: the way certain stories become part of a family, passed down not quite as warnings, not quite as pride, but as something in between.
When it came time to publish a mystery series set on that road, in that mist, near that school, it was never a question of whether Mango the ghost would make an appearance. Only of when.
What is real, and what is fiction
For readers who like to know where the line falls:
Real: the back road, the landscape, the mist, the school and Mango the ghost, the atmosphere of the KZN Midlands, the map at the front of the book.
Fictional: the town names, the dam’s name, the highway’s name, the characters, the crimes, the author’s name.
Undecided: whether my father’s ghost approves of the whole enterprise. We have chosen to take Mango’s silence as consent.
The ghost of All Saints College does not appear in Book One. Nor does the school. Not yet. But when it does, those who know which school we mean will find, we hope, that we have treated it with the respect it deserves — and the atmosphere it has always possessed.
Book Two is coming. And Mango is quietly waiting his turn.
Richard Lyon
April 2026