IN THE BEST DOCUMENTED CASE OF A PURPORTED POLTERGEIST IN BRAZIL, A COUNTRY DEEPLY INTERESTED IN SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES, POLTERGEIST WAS BELIEVED TO BE USED AS A WEAPON AGAINST A YOUNG FAMILY.

Pronunciation guide in order of appearance:

Noêmia … NO EM E AH

Zenaide … ZEN AIGH JUH

Hernani (ERR NAH NEE) Guimarães (GEE MAR ES) Andrade (AN DRAH DE) 

Zoraide … ZOR I DAY

April 1973: Guarulhos, São Paulo, Brazil

Noêmia looked even younger than her 21 years. She was stronger than most people realized, and she needed to be, after a long day chasing after two mischievous children. She hoped her husband, Marcos, would get home from work soon. They lived on the family property along with Noêmia’s parents and her brother-in-law and his wife. 

After putting Ruth, 18 months old, in her high chair and cornering Antonio, her 3 year-old nephew, Noêmia sat down to catch her breath. Then she stared in shock at the couch: long, wide parallel slashes marked the cushions. The gashes exposed the fabric beneath. “Did you do this?” she asked the boy, gesturing at the couch. Antonio cried, also unsettled by the sight.

The boy’s nails were not long enough to do damage and the kitchen knives were out of reach. It couldn’t have been Antonio. Noêmia couldn’t understand it. No one else was home, though as she explained later, at one point she had thought she spotted a strange shadow out of the corner of her eye.

Her father-in-law, Pedro, 55, arrived and studied the slashes in the cushions. He was a strong man with thick forearms, jet-black hair and sideburns as full as his heavy mustache.  Pedro was equally stumped, but it wasn’t the last abnormality to be witnessed around the house. On another occasion, Pedro swore he saw something bizarre. “I saw the hand and arm of a beast,” Pedro later insisted. “It was a monster, not a man.” He said the beast’s nails were 15 centimeters long, “curved, black and glossy,” its fur “red, fine, shiny” with a sheen like a jaguar. The vision of the beast disappeared into the night, but it was too real to dismiss as a hallucination or optical illusion. Whatever the explanation, Pedro was left as terrified as his daughter-in-law.

Visions and incidents accumulated. Noêmia was sitting in a chair that began to tear open beneath her. She glimpsed a shadow, just as when the couch was slashed. Another time, she was sewing her dress in her bedroom when she “felt a shiver,” turned off her machine and saw cuts splitting their mattress. Her skin tingled, and she could not believe what she saw next: a creature covered in fur leaning over her bed. In a flash, it vanished.

Could they be suffering some kind of collective delusion? Pedro went to his neighbors, Zina and Zenaide, pleading for the couple to help. Maybe a fresh perspective would shed light on what was happening. Inside, the neighbors found the house in shambles. Furniture and mattresses were mangled, as if someone had come through with a machete. They sat at the kitchen table while Pedro recounted the events.

“O sangue de Jesus tem poder!” yelled Noêmia from her bedroom—the common Portuguese expression meant “the blood of Christ has power,” conveying almost Biblical terror. The others rushed to the bedroom and found Noêmia next to her mattress, with three long slashes in the fabric. Pedro consoled his daughter-in-law, but Zina interrogated her: Couldn’t Noêmia have imagined it, or even done it herself? Wasn’t it too convenient that she had been alone?

Noêmia often felt she had to prove herself more than others did. This also applied to her marriage. She and Marcos married young, and Marcos, 29, was far more experienced in romance than her. Women considered him very attractive. Insecurities could sneak up on her. Did she measure up to the women in his past? Had she really been ready to be a wife and mother? The feelings of being an imposter in life were not unique to her, but, as often the case, they felt that way. Now, she was essentially being called a liar by her neighbor.

As Zina later testified to investigators, while she was asking the tough questions to an overwhelmed Noêmia, the beast’s large hand and long fingers shot in front of her—and Zina passed out. 

When their neighbor woke up, she needed no more convincing. The two families prayed Psalm 91 together, seeking courage: “You shall not fear the terror of the night / nor the arrow that flies by day, / Nor the pestilence that roams in darkness, / nor the plague that ravages at noon.”

There began arguably the best documented case of a purported poltergeist in Brazil, a country deeply interested in spiritual experiences. The investigation produced hours of audio recordings, reels of photographs and a cast of witnesses, all of which contribute to the reporting of the definitive narrative of these events. A foreign journalist who looked into the case at the time thought it was “especially unusual even by Brazilian standards.” In traditional parapsychology, most purported poltergeists are said to revolve around children or teenagers, while here a young mother was deemed the spiritual epicenter. Even rarer, it was a case in which an alleged poltergeist was ultimately believed to have had intentional origins. Poltergeist, in other words, as a weapon.

In the Jardim Rosa de Franca section of Guarulhos, multi-generational families lived together on small, well-kept properties, and neighbors helped each other while tending to keep to themselves. As the city of Guarulhos grew, this barrio retained its character. It was ordinarily a quiet place. But one afternoon, a rapping noise on the roof disturbed Noêmia’s family. Stones hailed down incessantly, continuing into the evening.

When the sounds abated, Pedro climbed a ladder to the roof, and sifted through the mess. At first, they wondered if someone might have been throwing the stones, but they had not seen anyone outside. The next time this happened, the family was outside and watched in astonishment as the stones fell out of the air with no discernible source.

The family struggled to assess additional disturbances. One night, Noêmia awoke to something wet in the bed, and she rolled over to what she would describe as a grotesque, fire-faced beast standing next to her husband’s side of the bed. She later reported that she could see the beast’s teeth glint in the moonlight. She screamed. Marcos shot awake, and in a flash, his arm was slashed open. Noêmia stuffed a towel against her husband’s wound to quell the blood.

In the days that followed, the family discovered various items similarly slashed throughout the house: clothes, pillowcases, blankets—which seemed to somehow have been cut while remaining perfectly folded—and slippers sliced into pieces and arranged into the shape of a cross. The family was particularly unsettled by those religious perversions. As Pentecostal Christians, they represented a religious minority in deeply Catholic Brazil, and feared a perception that practicing an unusual brand of faith could have provoked some evil. The events seemed to convey some message or warning, but it was difficult to guess what. Pedro noticed money disappearing from the house—in its place appeared folded pieces of paper with red crosses drawn on them.

Between the 50 pounds of stones on the roof and their screams of terror, they could not stop rumors and whispers from spreading. They could only hide what was happening from the outside world for so long.

A local Sao Paulo newspaper ran a brief story about the strange occurrences. That attracted the attention of the prestigious Brazilian Institute of Psychobiophysical Research (IBPP). The group was composed of respected scholars, engineers and academics, who prided themselves on investigating purported paranormal cases through a learned, skeptical perspective. In most instances, they were able to dismiss supernatural claims outright, but as details of this case emerged, it worked its way up the ranks.

IBPP member Hernani Guimarães Andrade was a civil engineer, a soft-spoken, grandfatherly man in his early sixties whose scientific background helped earn him a reputation as a skilled researcher of unexplained phenomena. Andrade began to study the Guarulhos case from afar. The family’s desire to remain anonymous indicated that they had no intention to financially benefit from the events; in fact, the damage to their home led to costs far beyond their modest means. The IBPP tracked the location of the events to Guarulhos and the family, knowing they needed help, agreed to invite in the investigators. Andrade and his team began to collect hours of audio testimony from multiple witnesses and photographs.

Andrade shared his files with his colleague Guy Lyon Playfair, a Cambridge-educated journalist. He would later achieve fame for his investigation of the Enfield poltergeist that also attracted the interest of Ed and Lorainne Warren–two of the most famous U.S. paranormal investigators. Playfair had been working on a case in Ipiranga, a region of central São Paulo. Playfair examined photographs of the family’s damaged furniture. At first, he thought the destruction was likely caused by a coatis, a raccoon-like animal that some people in Brazil domesticate as pets. But the family had no pets and few animals roamed in the well-maintained area. Playfair soon discarded that hypothesis and was as stumped as others.

Of hundreds of cases that Andrade and IBPP investigated, this seemed one of the few that they could isolate for a series of “strange characteristics”: disinterested witnesses to events, multiple people witnessing matching visions of paranormal entities, a lack of incentive or ulterior motive among the claimants. The team determined that Noêmia was the center of the incidents. The psychologists put her through a battery of rigorous psychological exams, all of which she passed. Andrade also observed Pedro, the family’s patriarch, characterizing him as an “intelligent, well-educated and communicative man.”

With all the resources and scholarship at their disposal, the investigators struggled to provide answers to the family, who were understandably more distressed than ever. The longer the phenomena remained unexplained, the greater the urgency. Especially when Noêmia found out she was pregnant.

Noêmia racked her brain for reasons that could shed any light on their circumstances. One particular incident came to mind. When she was 17, one night she was tossing and turning in her sleep. When she opened her eyes she saw a large black dog laying beside her in bed. She reached out her hand and felt its thick fur. The dog’s eyes lit through the dark bedroom. Noêmia called for her mother, who came into the room and turned on the light. The animal–or vision of an animal–was gone. Perhaps she was dreaming, but there was also a growing sense that Noêmia had an unusual awareness of the unseen world.

Back at Noêmia’s home with her husband and extended family, in addition to the property damage, spontaneous fires, small explosions and bodily injuries shocked the family. “I am always putting out fires,” Marcos would tell investigators, “constantly.” Electronics short-circuited. When a friend visited with her infant daughter, the child suddenly suffered an unexplained cut on her calf. At other times, the monster--as they had begun to think of the force plaguing them--cut Marcos several times, and then seemed to turn its attention to Noêmia, who reported a terrible pain before finding deep, bloody slashes across her face. Cuts and slashes tended to come in groups of three, four or five, as if produced by claws.

Distraught, Noêmia feared for the lives of her children and the baby inside her. Deep down, she couldn’t shake a deep-seated fear that the beast, the rocks, the cuts, the fires—whatever was behind this haunting had come for her.

Even when they left their property, they did not feel safe. The poltergeist seemed to follow the family. When they went to Guaianases, a nearby town, to attend a church, Noêmia arrived with her face bleeding from new cuts. When they stayed with Noêmia’s parents in nearby Artur Alvim, cups and glasses shattered. Money disappeared and reappeared. Noêmia continued to be cut, each slash a taunt of more to come. The cuts were usually not deep, but Noêmia feared that the beast’s strike, sooner or later, would be fatal to her or someone she loved.

The family decided to pray together only to find their Bibles cut up precisely at Psalm 91, the prayer they had previously been reciting for protection. Believed by some theologians to be written by Moses or David, the Psalm vows to put the speaker under divine protection in exchange for a triumph over enemies. At the same time, the Gospel of Matthew reports the devil quotes Psalm 91 to try to give in to temptation, suggesting the verses represented both a threat and a weapon to evil spirits. With mounting clues that scripture affected the forces they sought to repel, Pedro decided to lead an exorcism, a ritual of prayers and supplications to drive away evil spirits, with help from other members of his church.

While reciting prayers throughout the house, Pedro suddenly became agitated when he entered one of the bedrooms. To the family’s alarm, Pedro’s eyes rolled back as though in a trance. He walked as if he could see, but his eyes stayed shut. “Eu vejo pelos olhos espirituais,” he said: he saw it with the eyes of his spirit. He saw the beast.

Pedro later described the beast’s fur as red, “beautiful, lustrous.” He saw long, black nails as he had reported from an earlier vision, but as soon as he noticed its form, the beast dissolved from view. Pedro could still feel the beast there as an atmosphere or a pressure beside him. He lunged toward the monster and grabbed it. Pedro would explain he felt guided by the “Spirit of God,” animated by a spiritual power that transcended his material body.

Later he described a fight that he said ensued. He choked the beast while it shook and throttled him, until he managed to throw the creature down. By his account, Pedro stomped on its chest, and felt himself holding something like a sword—which he thrust into the beast. He could feel its blood and then dragged it out of the house. Outside, his trance dissipated, and he returned to his normal state, recounting what he claimed he had seen. Whether Pedro had hallucinated the struggle, influenced by the intense stress and his deep beliefs, or a supernatural event had transpired, the family remained confused and frustrated.

Adding to the terror, Noêmia had a dream that Marcos tied a thread around a tooth that had been causing her pain, and pulled it out—and when she woke, the tooth had actually been removed.

“The tooth was whole,” Noêmia revealed to the IBPP researchers. “Half of the red root” of the tooth was intact, the records reflected, “as if it were forced.” Yet she affirmed: “I didn’t feel any pain.” Marcos hadn’t noticed anything. He reported sleeping through the night. Noêmia and Marcos had prayed before they went to sleep, but even this was terrifying. They were becoming convinced that their desperation to rid themselves of the poltergeist gave it power.

A turning point in their perception of the phenomena came when Marcos happened to reach into his jacket pocket for a handkerchief and something stabbed his fingers. He pulled out a small branch with green, needle-like leaves. It was a sprig of rosemary. Noêmia noticed another sprig on the windowsill. Research revealed these as frightening markers. In some spiritual subcultures, rosemary was used to communicate with the unseen world. It was believed the sprigs had the capacity to draw out evil spirits, and their discovery suggested a malicious actor had baited the forces into their home. Case records further indicate that strangely mangled frogs were found near the family home, another sign of malevolence; frogs (sometimes with their mouths sewn shut) were used in witchcraft.

To skeptics, the family would have been seen as descending into a black hole of superstitions. But to the family and believers, there was no doubt what these clues meant. They had been cursed. It now made sense that the well-respected IBPP had found no scientific explanations. The markers of a curse, or spell, were their most concrete answers the family had come upon to the phenomena’s origin, which in turn meant they could be closer to finding a way to stop it.

The unexpected whodunit had been added to the enigma of the phenomena: Who could have purposely directed spiritual forces against them? What would motivate such a paranormal attack plan?

Anyone with access to the house and property could have been responsible for leaving the rosemary sprigs–that included family members, neighbors and a long list of visitors and guests. Infighting and suspicion heated up, threatening to tear apart the family. They also looked inward, worrying about their own flaws and shortcomings. Noêmia and Marcos felt guilty, as though they were being targeted and in turn bringing pain to others. Pedro worried he had not raised Marcos to be pious enough, somehow triggering the spiritual siege.

After examining possible motives in their inner circle, Noêmia and Marcos began to fear that they could have been targeted by a former lover of Marcos’. The rosemary provided another clue on this front: one of its properties was believed to be an ability to attract men and repel women. One of Marcos’ exes, a woman named Zoraide, had been enraged when she and Marcos broke up years earlier. Zoraide's mother appeared to have been involved in witchcraft, with Marcos recalling the mother doing “uns tipos de trabalhos de encruzilhada”--literally meaning that she worked at the crossroads, but figuratively, that she was involved in sorcery. Marcos had also had a relationship with a much older woman, and after they had a falling out, she had warned him that wherever he went, she would find him.

Hoping for a fresh start, the family built a new home from the ground up, a project led by Marcos and Pedro. Noêmia gave birth to a baby girl, Raquel. The truth quickly sank in: the new home did not make them safe. Without warning, their daughter Ruth would act as if she had been struck by something and enter into a trance similar to the one they had seen overtake Pedro. Terrified, Ruth would insist that she saw an animal, a beast she had difficulty describing. Marcos told investigators that when he would give a kiss to his daughter when returning home from a long day’s work, she seemed “different.” Her face even looked different, her features almost blurred. He said she looked “crooked,” with “hollow eyes.” Noêmia observed a change as well: the child “started to twist her mouth, eyes, hands.” Other times both daughters would enter into spasms, their bodies jerking in swift, wild directions—although epilepsy and other nerve disorders were ruled out by endless tests at the hospital.

Even as the poltergeist appeared to remain especially drawn to Noêmia, the force brazenly acted upon others, throwing apples and cups at visitors. Elza, a teenage babysitter already spooked from a previous encounter in the home, agreed to help watch Ruth. Then Elza began to sink into the same type of dead-eyed trance, causing a new cycle of fear in the household.

One day while Marcos was at work, two women showed up at the house. Noêmia answered the door. She did not recognize the women—one Black, one white, each about 35 years old. They claimed they were sent to “bless” the house, implying they were from her church. Noêmia was suspicious. In their Pentacostal faith, a home was only to be anointed, not blessed. It was not merely a question of semantics but doctrine. Could these have just been curious bystanders who had read about the case in the media, or something more sinister? The women exchanged glances, noticing Noêmia’s hesitation, and changed tactics. They asked if they could come inside to have a drink and use the bathroom after a long trip. Noêmia refused. Before closing the door, Noêmia spied rosemary branches in a bag carried by one of the women.

The women returned on October 4, during a birthday party for Ruth at the home. Noêmia noticed them walking down the street and went out before they could walk into the backyard. One of the women brought a piece of cake wrapped in foil. “I brought it for you and for the kids,” the woman said. She caught the attention of the children, gesturing for them to come to her, but Noêmia stood between them. Agitated, they promised that they would be back. The women drove away in a Volkswagen, which had been parked far down the street, as if—as Noêmia would later speculate to investigators—they wanted to hide their license plates. Noêmia shepherded the kids inside the house and locked the doors.

One day soon afterward, when the family came back from church, Marcos smelled incense in the house. He searched the place top to bottom but found no one and no evidence of entry, as the doors were still locked. The only other clue of an intrusion was their kitchen knives, taken from a drawer and arranged in a cross beneath their bed.

Some older family members, most familiar with ancient spiritual traditions, feared that the mysterious women were practitioners of the dark art of Umbanda—a folk faith that combined elements of Catholicism and native religions. The shapeshifting spirits resembled what was known as the umuluns, which Brazilian spiritists have described as entities that took on various forms, but often having sharp claws and teeth. One particular aspect especially frightened the couple: the umuluns were known to be crooked and strange in their movements, like their bodies were melting in and out of the material world. This was similar to the way that the family had described the almost-imperceptible changes to their children’s faces and bodies, as if the evil spirits were attempting to infect them.

With every logical explanation falling by the wayside, Andrade and the researchers from IBPP were forced to confront the possibility that the hauntings were the work of an Umbanda practitioner. The essential work on the belief system was a 1946 text by Brazilian folklorist Lourenço Braga titled Trabalhos de Umbanda ou Magia Prática. Braga stressed that umuluns were horrific figures, and his descriptions of them matched the sightings in the Guarulhos case: having fur, pointed ears, jutting teeth, long nails and moving in a shaky manner. Andrade theorized that these apparitions might even explain the strange sightings reported by Ruth and other children in the extended family. The children would experience terror when seeing dogs, cats and horses. They would have no reason to recoil at such a common sight in rural Guarulhos. Instead, they had seen umulun apparitions in the perverted forms of these animals. Andrade concluded: “Everything suggests that the shapes [the children] saw were animalistic, but they looked horrendous, terrifying and similar” to the accepted description of umuluns.

The family had not recognized the women who had come around to the house. If a spurned lover was jealous of Marcos’ life with Noêmia, or if more than one ex joined forces with shared hostility, they may have recruited allies to try to ruin the family. Based on other cases in the Sao Paulo area, the researchers concluded that such witchcraft occurred in stages. It began with a conjurer, one who practiced the witchcraft that attracted the umulun spirits. This was followed by the incantatory practices—including the special candles and rosemary—that were placed at the home to mark the person or group to be cursed. If the unknown women were the instigators, the fact that they had to return and renew their efforts helped explain the ebbs and flows of the family’s experiences.

Even trying his best to put aside his commitment to scientific explanations, Andrade and his colleagues at the IBPP were unable to figure out why these umuluns would be “sensitive to certain religious practices,” including particular prayers, anointings, and exorcisms. He conjectured that these spirits were strangely human-like; they could become angry and sought to lash out at those who tried to send them back into the spirit world.

The shadowy figures matched other reports by Noêmia and Marcos of figures stalking their home, coaxing and mocking them like tricksters, all traits consistent with the belief that these were spiteful beings. “This being gets nervous,” Marcos said: it starts to break or throw things like an incensed child. Whenever they spotted the figure, it would flee, “but first he does a little show.”

According to theory, the shapeshifting evil spirits needed to be provoked or conjured through witchcraft, and were anchored toward a spirit, and the anchor increasingly appeared to be Noêmia. A “human epicenter capable of supplying the energy or substance necessary for the incorporeal agents sent by the sorcerer,” as Andrade wrote.

Meanwhile, the family reported that the fires started up again in the house, as though to warn that the struggle was coming to a climax. Newspapers went up in flames, dressers and cabinets charred. “When the fires come,” Marcos said, “I already know that things are not going well and I start to be more prepared at home, more courageous.”

Noêmia had experienced enough. The mysterious women wanted to disrupt and discard her, but Noêmia was tired of all of it. Tired of trying to live up to the pressures of strangers, tired of letting insecurity dictate her actions, tired of being scared. The phenomena had worn on their family. Her husband, such a strong worker, was debilitated from continuous insomnia. Their daughters seemed lost in empty stares and trances.

She no longer wanted to concentrate on what others wanted from her, as she had done on some level her whole life. It was her turn to assert her will. After all the attempts of the church to help them, after all the research and reports of the parapsychology teams, it had become clear to Noêmia, deep down, that the evil had to end with her.

Knowing that prayer seemed to coax the evil spirit out, Noêmia prayed in earnest to lure it into the open. Then one night Noêmia was kneeling to pray, when, according to her account, the evil spirit appeared to her in the form of a grotesque man, fire spilling out of his mouth while he spoke obscenities. She stood up in the dark room, her knees trembling. Marcos slept soundly, seemingly unaware. Perhaps she now stood in that apparently supernatural plane where Pedro briefly had brought their family’s fight. Somehow she was certain she would not be able to wake Marcos. The time had come for her battle.

Noêmia, furious, stood her ground against the spirit—which, according to Umbanda tradition, might have been Exú, known as the messenger of the Orixás, the deities of Umbanda belief. Exú, a shapeshifter, controlled the door between the material and spiritual worlds. Exú often appeared to be black and red, predominant colors throughout Noêmia’s hauntings—the black dog, the red cross, the shadowy beast, the red fur. A dynamic spirit, Exú tended to shift according to context and culture. Although he was a playful spirit with a mischievous streak, the family’s resistance had likely driven him to more violent ways; at his worst, he was known as sinister, and especially angered when he was ignored. Noêmia had to remain steadfast; if she crumbled before this evil spirit, her family would never stop suffering. So she shouted the words of Psalm 91 as the fire shot from Exú’s mouth: “Because you have the Lord for your refuge and have made the Most High your stronghold, / No evil shall befall you, no affliction come near your tent. / For he commands his angels with regard to you, to guard you wherever you go.”

Noêmia felt a severe chill wash over her body—a feeling like her skin was covered in ice—but she did not back down. The feeling became a kind of cleansing, a purge of the fears and terrors that she had lived through. As she would later describe, Exú vanished before her eyes, and suddenly she was back with Marcos, the room and the house finally feeling safer.

The family reported that the spiritual torments did not return. Word spread about the incredible events. But while the family had suffered financial hardship, they never attempted to profit from their experiences, guarding their privacy. In fact, their identities and addresses remain unknown to the public to this day, though records obtained by Truly*Adventurous include their full names and the locations of the events.

The women who repeatedly showed up at the family’s house were never found nor positively identified. Braga’s text about umuluns came with a stern warning: whoever decided to conjure these spirits as a way to gain revenge or cause violence against someone risked the wrath of God.

The parapsychology investigators involved in the case called the Guarulhos events “one of the most thoroughly investigated cases of its type on record.” Their investigations into the events extended from 1973 to 1984.

In the United States, the CIA monitored the case and compiled some of the case records in their Stargate Project, a study of how psychic phenomena could be weaponized or defended against by the government. Those documents, which represent a largely incomplete telling, were declassified in 2003. They give no indication what the CIA was attempting to glean from the case.

The events continued to haunt investigator Hernani Guimarães Andrade until his death in 2003, the same year that the U.S. government declassified the Stargate documents, which included analysis of Andrade’s investigation. Andrade was fascinated by the fact that the poltergeist appeared to have intelligence, something quasi-human. The force seemed to react specifically to the recitation of Psalm 91 and other directed exorcisms and rituals. Andrade feared that the umuluns that had terrorized Noêmia and her family still lurked and could someday take over humans if we did not find a way to better understand how to defend against them.

NICK RIPATRAZONE has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and is the Cultural Editor for Image.

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