From 12 Siblings to 7: The Deadly Pattern Haunting a Zimbabwean Family

The Nota family has watched seven siblings die since 2000, their marriages collapse one after another, and claim unseen forces are destroying their lives.

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In Overspill, a neighborhood in Epworth just outside Zimbabwe’s capital city of Harare, the Nota family members go to bed each night not knowing if they’ll wake up the next morning. They don’t know if their marriages will survive another week. They don’t know if invisible hands will touch them while they sleep. For twenty-five years, they’ve watched their family shrink from twelve siblings to seven, their children grow up fatherless or motherless, and their community whisper that their homestead is cursed.

The Deaths That Won’t Stop

The Nota family’s troubles trace back to 2000, when the family patriarch, Sekuru Fraction Nota, died. His wife, Mbuya Menalla Pangeti Nota, followed him nineteen years later in 2019. The couple had originally come from Boma District in Malawi, crossing the border into Zimbabwe to build a new life. Together, they raised twelve children and eventually watched their family expand to include fifty-two grandchildren.

After Mbuya Menalla’s death in 2019, something shifted. The deaths that had been sporadic became relentless.

Mai Agnes Nota is 54 now. She’s one of the seven siblings still alive. When she talks to reporters about what’s happened to her family, she describes watching five of her brothers and sisters die since 2019. The deaths happen during the same period each year, which has turned what should be ordinary calendar months into a countdown of dread for the surviving family members. Some of the deceased fell sick briefly before dying. Others died suddenly, with no warning, no time to say goodbye or understand what was happening. The victims included both men and women, and the deaths didn’t stop with the Nota siblings themselves. In-laws married into the family have died. Children have died. Grandchildren have died.

Mai Agnes used a specific image when describing what it feels like to watch her family disappear. She said they’re dying as if they were ants being swept away. Just small, helpless creatures caught in something too powerful to resist or understand.

The family now lives with a mathematical certainty that feels like a death sentence. Only seven of the original twelve siblings remain alive. That means five have died since their mother passed away in 2019. For a family with fifty-two grandchildren, the fear extends beyond just the immediate siblings. They worry openly about all those grandchildren, about whether the same pattern will continue into the next generation.

The Marriages That Fall Apart

Loveness Nota is 41 years old. She’s been married five times, which is the kind of statistic that sounds almost impossible until you hear what happened to each husband.

Three of them died. Just died. Gone. The other two left her, and she says she still doesn’t fully understand why they walked away. Maybe they sensed something. Maybe other people in the community warned them. Because word has definitely spread throughout Epworth about the deaths that seem to follow anyone who marries into the Nota family.

Men in the community now avoid her. It’s not subtle. It’s not whispered. It’s just openly acknowledged that being involved with Loveness Nota or any of the Nota women carries a risk nobody wants to take.

She’s not alone in this experience. Her sisters face the same pattern. The family’s daughters get divorced frequently, or they become widows while still young. The sons watch their wives pack up and leave, abandoning marriages for reasons that often aren’t explained clearly. Extended family members have started accusing each other of witchcraft, and relatives who used to support each other now fight among themselves, each suspecting the other of somehow causing or perpetuating whatever curse has settled over the family.

VaFriday Nota, who’s 55 and one of the surviving brothers, told reporters that no one in the entire family maintains financial stability. Nobody. He attributes this to goblins that beat them and destroy their ability to keep jobs or build any kind of prosperity. It’s not just unemployment in the traditional sense. It’s a pattern where family members get jobs and then lose them. They start businesses that fail. They make money that somehow disappears or gets spent on emergencies and medical bills and funerals.

The pattern has created a social stigma that extends well beyond the immediate family members. People throughout Epworth say the Nota homestead has goblins. They say it openly, matter-of-factly, the way someone might warn you about a dangerous intersection or a house with an aggressive dog. The fifty-two grandchildren are growing up knowing they carry a stigma. They face the very real possibility of being unable to marry or maintain relationships simply because of their last name and their family connection.

The Invisible Attackers

The financial problems and the deaths and the collapsed marriages would be enough, but there’s more. Family members report being physically beaten by forces they cannot see. Women and girls in the household describe being sexually assaulted by invisible beings. These aren’t vague complaints or metaphorical descriptions. They’re specific accounts of physical attacks happening at night while family members sleep, leaving them traumatized and afraid to stay in their own homes.

The family can’t keep jobs, as VaFriday mentioned, but it’s not just because of poor performance or bad luck. People lose jobs in ways that don’t make sense, getting fired for unclear reasons or finding their workplace suddenly hostile. They experience frequent car accidents when they travel. Not fender benders or minor mishaps. Serious accidents that the family has come to expect as an inevitable consequence of getting in a vehicle. Some family members have stopped traveling altogether because the pattern of accidents and misfortune on the road became too dangerous and too predictable to ignore.

Three weeks before the family spoke to reporters in November 2025, they discovered something at their father’s grave. Someone had placed a pot on top of the burial site. Inside the pot was a knife. Alongside the knife were pieces of cloth in different colors, arranged deliberately. No one in the family knew who put it there. Nobody saw anyone approaching the grave. The items just appeared, and the family immediately understood them as a message or a continuation of whatever supernatural attack has been destroying their lives.

There’s another detail from further back, from the day Sekuru Fraction Nota was buried in 2000. During the funeral, someone threw old copper coins onto his grave. VaFriday mentioned this specifically when talking to reporters, saying that from that exact moment forward, no one in the family has been able to prosper financially. It’s as if the coins marked the beginning of their financial curse, a physical act that bound the family to poverty and struggle. He also mentioned that when their father was buried, money and other items went missing from the family, though he didn’t specify exactly what items or clarify whether they disappeared during the funeral itself or in the days and weeks afterward.

The Cultural Context

The Nota family’s experience doesn’t exist in a vacuum. What they’re describing fits into a specific cultural framework that’s common throughout southern Africa, particularly in Zimbabwe and South Africa. In traditional beliefs across this region, creatures called tokoloshes, or ondofa as they’re known in some Zimbabwean communities, are supernatural entities that can cause harm when sent by witches or vengeful people. These aren’t abstract concepts or ancient myths that nobody really believes anymore. These are beings that many people in southern Africa consider absolutely real and genuinely dangerous.

Tokoloshes are typically described as small, dwarf-like water spirits. They’re associated with rivers, lakes, and swamps. According to the traditional descriptions, these creatures can become invisible by swallowing a stone or drinking water, which makes them nearly impossible to defend against because you can’t see them coming and you can’t see them when they attack.

According to legend, the only way to keep a tokoloshe away at night is to put bricks beneath each leg of one’s bed. This tradition of raising beds on bricks became so common in South Africa that it was once nearly universal in domestic workers’ quarters. You could walk into almost any home with hired help and see the beds in the workers’ rooms elevated on bricks or concrete blocks. Many white South African families assumed this was just a preference or a cultural practice they didn’t fully understand. The workers knew better. They were protecting themselves from tokoloshes that might attack during the night.

These creatures are believed to be created by witches to harm their enemies, and are known to rape women and bite off sleeping people’s toes. The sexual assault aspect is particularly prominent in tokoloshe accounts. It’s not a side detail or an occasional report. It’s central to how these beings are understood to operate. The toe-biting might sound almost comical if you don’t know the context, but it’s part of a pattern of physical violation and mutilation that makes tokoloshes objects of genuine terror.

Goblin attacks are reported with enough frequency in Zimbabwe that in 2022, Majiji Primary School in Bubi District was forced to shut down after teachers and students reported being sexually harassed by invisible entities. Not a brief closure for a day or two. The school stopped functioning entirely. Teachers fled. Students stopped attending. Parents pulled their children out. The community had to hold emergency meetings and call in spiritual healers to try to address the problem before anyone would return to the building.

In the Kezi kingdom, over 300 women in Ward 3 reported waking up with no underwear and seeing signs of possible sexual assault, with victims ranging from teenagers to women in their eighties. Three hundred women in a single ward. Not scattered reports from isolated individuals, but a mass phenomenon that affected an entire community. The ages of the victims spanned six or seven decades, from teenage girls to elderly grandmothers. One widow named Theodore Ncube described feeling an invisible being getting intimate with her every single night. Her daughter reported the same experiences.

The phenomenon isn’t limited to one region or one ethnic group. In 2019, a local prophet claimed goblins were responsible for the deaths of ten members of a single family in Nyanga, Zimbabwe, and in 2018 they were blamed for the deaths of two children in Ziqaweni Village. That same year, goblins were blamed for killing scores of livestock in the same area. Animals slaughtered mysteriously, their deaths attributed to the same invisible forces that were attacking people.

Traditional healers in southern Africa sometimes offer goblins for sale to people who want to use them for their own purposes. This is an actual business with actual prices and actual customers. One traditional healer named Sekuru Kafura advertises goblins for $2,500 U.S. dollars, explaining that they are living things with specific rules attached, including “blood goblins” that must be fed on blood and vegetarian varieties. He describes himself as business-minded and flamboyant, and he operates openly, advertising on Facebook and responding quickly to inquiries on WhatsApp. When someone expressed interest in buying a goblin, Sekuru Kafura explained the different types available. Blood goblins require regular feeding with blood and are responsible for much of the chaos and violence attributed to these creatures. Vegetarian goblins are supposedly less dangerous but still powerful. He mentioned mysteriously that several global presidents own such goblins but wouldn’t specify which world leaders he was referring to. The price is steep enough that most people can’t afford it, but Sekuru Kafura maintains that goblins aren’t for everyone anyway. He calls his creatures “clean goblins” and says that’s why he gets invited to appear on television and radio programs.

The Search for Help

The Nota family faces their situation without the support network that might help them understand or address what’s happening. They have no close relatives in Zimbabwe who might offer guidance or protection. Their parents migrated from Malawi decades ago, which means the family exists somewhat isolated in their adopted country, vulnerable to accusations and lacking the extended family connections that often provide support in southern African communities.

Younger relatives within the family have started accusing the older generation of practicing witchcraft themselves. These accusations create divisions within an already fractured family, with people who should be supporting each other instead turning on one another, each suspecting the others of being the source of their collective misery.

Traditional leaders and church prophets in the Epworth area know about the family’s situation. The Notas aren’t suffering in secret or keeping their troubles private. They’ve reached out for help. They’ve appealed publicly for spiritual or traditional intervention to end their suffering. Various practitioners have been consulted over the years. Some have attempted rituals or ceremonies. None of it has worked. As of November 2025, the family continues to live in fear, watching for the next death, the next divorce, the next inexplicable disaster.

Patrick Nota, one of the brothers, was killed by unknown people in Ruwa in 2006. The circumstances of his death remain unclear. Whether his murder connects to the family’s other troubles, or whether it was a separate tragedy that just added to their collective grief, nobody in the family seems certain. The death happened during the broader pattern of family deaths, but it was violent and involved identified human killers rather than mysterious illness or sudden unexplained death.

The family found those strange multicolored ribbons tied to their father’s grave three weeks before speaking to reporters. These weren’t casual decorations or offerings from well-meaning visitors. The ribbons were tied deliberately, and the family interprets them as evidence of ongoing supernatural attacks, proof that someone is actively working against them, maintaining whatever curse or spell has been destroying them for twenty-five years.

Some family members have tried to flee the household to escape the invisible assaults. They’ve gone to stay with relatives or friends. They’ve tried to establish new lives in different places. The problems follow them. Employment remains scarce for anyone bearing the Nota name. Jobs that seem secure suddenly disappear. Workplaces become hostile. Relatives sometimes get expelled from jobs or housing for unclear reasons that their employers or landlords struggle to articulate.

Mai Agnes, VaFriday, and Loveness all spoke to reporters, but they represent just three of the seven surviving siblings. The others remain alive but carry the same burden, the same fear, the same social stigma. Together, these seven siblings watch their fifty-two nieces and nephews growing up under the shadow of early death, failed marriages, and financial instability. They fear their grandchildren could all perish because of whatever force has been systematically destroying their family for the past quarter century. The grandchildren are being raised knowing their family history, understanding that they might inherit not just genetic traits and family stories, but also whatever curse has claimed five of their aunts and uncles and countless other relatives.

The family describes their situation with a sense of helplessness that comes through clearly in their interviews. They’re not just sad or grieving. They’re terrified. They’re watching a pattern repeat itself year after year, and they have no effective way to stop it or even slow it down. Every year when the death season approaches, they wait to see who will be taken next. Every marriage in the family carries the weight of all the marriages that have failed before it. Every child born into the family comes with the knowledge that they might not reach adulthood, or that if they do, they might watch their own parents die young.

Efforts to independently verify the family’s claims were unsuccessful at the time reporters published their accounts in November 2025. The deaths themselves are matters of public record. Loveness really has been married five times. Three men really did die. The divorces happened. The widowings are documented. Family members really have lost jobs and experienced car accidents. The cause of these events, the explanation for why this particular family has suffered so extensively, remains a matter of belief and interpretation rather than verifiable fact.

The community in Epworth has drawn its own conclusions. They say the Nota homestead has goblins. They warn people away from marrying into the family. They talk about witchcraft and curses. Whether these explanations are literally true, or whether they represent attempts to make sense of a tragic pattern of misfortune, depends entirely on your worldview and what you’re willing to accept as possible.

The Nota family is suffering. Seven siblings remain alive out of twelve. Fifty-two grandchildren are growing up in the shadow of inexplicable tragedy. Marriages collapse. Jobs disappear. Fear is the dominant emotion in their household. After twenty-five years of this pattern, they’re still looking for answers, still seeking help, still trying to understand why their family seems to be cursed in ways that defy rational explanation.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

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