Phantom View River Resort

Wake up to the sound of the Knysna Loerie!

We are situated in the heart of the Garden Route – on the edge of the Knysna Lagoon and river. Our double–storey lodges are set quite far apart from each other, giving our guests absolute privacy. In relaxed surroundings we offer two and three bedroom en-suite lodges – individually decorated.

Up-Market facilities include: big spacious rooms, verandahs, outdoor furniture, weber and gas braais. There is also a swimming pool in the complex.

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How did the Phantom Pass get it’s name?

THE PHANTOM MOTH OF PHANTOM PASS

By Martin Hatchuel

They say that Phantom Pass, which runs from the Knysna River over to Rheenendal, is named not for a phantom – but for a moth. The phantom moth, to be exact, Letho venus. But the French explorer and naturalist, Francois le Vaillant, spent six months in the Knysna district in 1782, recording all its most important natural phenomena – and if the phantom moth is so well known, why did he never describe it?

And why doesn’t it appear in other texts from the early nineteenth century? ould it be because the phantom moth didn’t exist before 1881?

Victoria Esposito was said to have been the most beautiful of the silk spinners at Gouna. And the silk spinners at Gouna were a group of about forty Italian silk-farming families who were brought to this country in 1881 by the British Government in the hope that they would create a silk industry from the wild mulberries which, according to the Honourable Henry Frederick Francis Adair Barrington, a wealthy farmer in the Knysna District, grew aplenty in the Knysna Forests. But Barrington’s research had been (to be polite) scant, and, of course, South Africa’s wild mulberry – Trimeria grandiflora – bears no resemblance at all to the ‘real’ mulberry – Morus alba – upon which the silkworm prefers to feed. And because of this fussiness on the part of one tiny worm, the silk spinners were stranded without work or means of working – and, with the government embarrassed by their presence and Barrington disinterested in their plight, found themselves left to rot in their clearing in the Knysna forest.

Incensed by this official inaction, the proud and beautiful Victoria is said to have borrowed (without asking permission, of course) one of Barrington’s horses to ride to Knysna where she hoped to find a ship that would take her and her family home. Victoria rode out on a stormy night in September (a month not normally associated with bad weather), her path lit only by the lightning which tore at the sky. As terrified as its rider, the horse bolted and Victoria was unable to do anything more than cling to its neck and hope.

The lightning struck just as the pair emerged onto the high ground at the edge of the forest at the very top of the Pass. It was a direct hit and girl and horse were killed instantly – but the power of the girl’s beauty was so great that, instead of transforming to ash, their bodies were transformed into moths. Exquisite brown and grey moths which appear again and again each year in spring – each one of them with Victoria’s beautiful, baleful eyes etched forever on its wings.