Online Reporter
Emmanuel Kafe and Remember Deketeke
Check Point Desk
High above the sleepy plains of Zvimba, perched on a lonely hill at Lilfordia Farm, stands a 27-roomed mansion so odd and unclaimed, it now lives more in legend than reality.
Locals call it “The Ghost House.” Others call it cursed. Built by the late tycoon Samuel Rahamin Levy – yes, the same Levy behind Harare’s posh Sam Levy’s Village – the hilltop mansion is a shell of its former self.
Elegant, imposing, and oddly untouched by time, it looks less like an abandoned farmhouse and more like the set of a movie that was never finished.
But what makes this house truly unforgettable are the stories people whisper about it – stories that even Zimbabwe’s wildest imaginations might struggle to invent.
Long before Sam Levy arrived, the land belonged to another tycoon – Douglas “Boss” Lilford, who once served as deputy to Ian Smith during the Rhodesian era.
He, too, was wealthy, powerful and rumoured to have secrets buried deep within the farm.
When Levy acquired the property in the ‘90s, he spared no expense building not one but two mansions – one at the foot of the hill, the other seated like a king on the summit.
Then came the land reform programme.
The Government repossessed the land in 2000, and though Levy managed to hold onto the mansion – it was awkwardly situated in the middle of the farm – he never got to live in it.
By the time of his death in 2012, the grand house had already become an unoccupied mystery. Today, it belongs to a man named Mr Tongai Urayayi, sort of-sort of-as he is the farm owner.
Although it sits smack in the middle of his farm, he has never lived in the mansion for the past 24 years. He said the local authority claimed the house is situated on “a hill not reflected on the official farm map.”
The man is equally uneasy.
“Despite it being our farm, we have never stayed there, despite it being a strange house”.
What stopped them the most is that a local church claimed to have leased the property for five years, a lease he said has since lapsed.
If anyone knows what goes on inside those 27 rooms, it is Ashy – better known by locals as “MuZion” – the long-time caretaker at this imposing castle.
He moved in around 2013 when the Zion Christian Church leased the property, and for a time, it seemed prayers might cleanse the air.
But not for long.
Between 2014 and 2017, MuZion claimed the house “came alive.”
He said people heard voices during the day and footsteps at night. Some even claimed to be followed by an invisible presence. “They all left, one by one,” he said.
The stories he narrated on a video that has since gone viral on social media are the kind that slither under your skin. Voices with no bodies. Footsteps pacing empty hallways.
Nights where the air itself seemed to hum with something unseen. At one point, he claimed, the disturbances were so bad that prayers had to be held every Friday – Mughidhi – just to keep the silence from breaking in unnatural ways.
“You would wake up and your clothes would be folded next to you, and you would be sleeping outside without remembering how you got there.”
Despite the expiration of the lease, the church continues to use it, according to the resident councillor.
It gets stranger.
Urban legends tell of gold panners invading the site, convinced the mansion was linked by an underground tunnel packed with gold nuggets.
Others speak of war veterans who briefly occupied the house– only to leave after experiencing unexplained blackouts and waking up outside, dazed and disoriented.
Then there is the story of 50 police-labelled motorcycles, imported from a liquidation sale in Hong Kong and later found stashed at the farmhouse.
That scandal earned Levy a $200 fine in 2000 – but sparked endless conspiracy theories about smuggled treasure, secret storage rooms, and high-profile cover-ups.
Some locals even claim the mansion is connected by a tunnel to a house in Mount Hampden, 10km away. No one has ever confirmed this –but no one has disproved it either.
Not everyone believes in the hauntings.
Zvimba East Constituency Ward 25 Councillor Ruzai Muchauruwa dismisses it all.
“I don’t know where this story of a ghost is coming from. Sam Levy never lived in the house and how come the house could be haunted? Ghost stories? Come on. No one’s ever lived there except the caretaker. People are just confusing torch lights for spirits,” he said.
But the contradictions are hard to ignore. The mansion was built to be lived in. No one ever has. It is still standing, yet slowly decaying.
It does not appear on official maps. It is not zoned and it has no electricity.
And despite being constructed with expensive imported materials and surrounded by farmland now firmly in new hands, no one dares to touch it.
No one has claimed it. No buyer has bought it. No heir has inherited it.
Cllr Muchauruwa said his current focus is to ensure Mr Urayayi is awarded his house, as it’s within his farm.
Mr Tongai Urayayi and his sons, the current farm owners, offer a different, albeit equally strange, perspective.
“The house is not haunted,” Mr Urayayi insisted.
He confirms that he took over the farm in 2000 after Sam Levy was removed, and that Levy built the house but never lived in it.
But then, a new layer of intrigue emerged: “Although he stole the land and the house design from Lilford when they were drunk, with Sam Levy asking Lilford if he is able to sign while drunk.”
This accusation, a drunken pact between tycoons, adds a layer of human drama and potential karmic debt to the mansion’s history.
Mr Urayayi attributes the “ghostly” sightings to more mundane causes: “people could be mistaking them for the torches and the fire being at the house since there is no electricity.”
Despite owning the farm, he cannot live in the mansion himself, as the Zvimba Rural District Council has claimed, arguing that the house on a hill was not on the map of his farm.
As weeds creep up the cracked driveway and wind whistles through broken windows, the mansion continues to exist in limbo-half-forgotten, half-feared.
Whether it is haunted or just unlucky, what is clear is this: something about that house resists ownership.
It stands as a monument to excess, to loss – and maybe, just maybe, to something none of us can quite explain. And so, like all good ghost stories, it waits. Not for a buyer. Not even for a visitor. But for someone brave – or foolish – enough to move in, if the paranormal activities experienced there are anything to believe.
