7 Brazilian ghost towns have hair-raising haunted legends worthy of horror movies

In horror movies, scenes in which the heroes find an abandoned city are common and, after some time wandering around the place, they witness voices, screams, noises or apparitions of creepy and frightening beings.

But you don’t have to travel far to feel the thrill of a thriller. Brazil, from North to South, has abandoned cities of which many fantastic stories are told. They are places that prospered in other times and went into sudden decline. Or dreams of invented cities that didn’t work out.

O Incredible.club created an itinerary of 7 villages forgotten in time in various regions of the country. And it tells legends that “haunt” these places. Have courage and try to unravel these mysteries!

Igatu is a district of the city of Andaraí, in Chapada Diamantina, in the interior of Bahia. The place is sought after by adventurers who make trails to discover the abandoned city, built with stones on top of a mountain. For this reason, it is called the Brazilian Machu Picchu, although unfortunately it is not as well preserved as the Peruvian city.

Xique-Xique de Igatu, as it was initially known, was a very wealthy city, where 9,000 people lived during the diamond extraction cycle in Bahia, in the 19th century. With the scarcity of precious stones, people left and many of the houses were destroyed by the miners themselves, in their eagerness to find more fortune.

Today, less than 400 people live in the small village next to the ruins, where some stone houses from the mining period remain, the church built by a prospector who promised to find many diamonds, and a cemetery. Igatu served as the setting for the films Abril Despedaçado (2001) and Besouro (2009).

Legends and Mysteries of Igatu: There are those who believe that Igatu is the lost city, discovered by pioneers on top of a shining mountain, mentioned in the enigmatic and anonymous Manuscript 512, from the 18th century. wandering over the mountain and walking through the streets. These lights would have the power to enter people’s homes and make them disappear.

Ceará’s sertão also has its ghost town, the small Cococi, founded in the early 18th century. It was abandoned in the second half of the 20th century because of severe droughts and political problems. Only two families still live there, in the midst of houses that are being turned into ruins and taken over by vegetation. Cococi lost its status as a municipality and is now a district of neighboring Parambu.

The place attracts travelers, TV reporters, photographers, onlookers and religious believers. One of the few buildings still preserved in Cococi is the Church of Our Lady, which welcomes Catholics for the novenas that take place from November 29 to December 8. It is the only event that manages to shake, once a year, the almost dead city.

Legends and Mysteries of Cococi: It is said that the one who cursed Cococi was a priest, forced to say the same mass twice by order of a powerful family who arrived late to church. For those who believe the story, the plague took hold and so the city was abandoned.

Another legend from the region is about a cowboy who, at night, passing through Cococi, found a hungry and frightened girl, whom he took in and took home. One day, the cowboy went out to drive the cattle, promising his wife to return in time for Christmas dinner, which they would celebrate with the girl. When he returned, days later, he found his own house in ruins and he was told that the place had been abandoned for years, that she had lived there alone, until she was very old, the wife of a cowboy who left her alone, without giving an explanation of her whereabouts. .

Fordlândia was a village created by the auto magnate Henry Ford on the banks of the Tapajós River, in the Amazon jungle, in 1927. The American businessman, worried about the high price of rubber he imported from Asia, decided to have his own rubber plantation in Brazil. and being able to directly extract the raw material for the manufacture of tires. For this he built a village with houses, hospital, school, swimming pools, squares, golf courses and other facilities.

Ford’s tropical venture failed for several reasons. The main one was the lack of experience with the Amazonian climate of the agronomists he hired: the trees were planted in the wrong way and suffered from the attack of various pests. In the late 1940s, with the death of Ford, his son decided to close the project and the city was emptied. At that time, new technologies allowed the manufacture of rubber from oil.

Legends and Mysteries of Fordlândia: The location is not a municipality; today it is a district of the city of Aveiro. Nor is it a total ghost town, as it became famous: there are still people living in the village, amid abandoned buildings and industrial sheds.

What superstitious people say is that it’s just not good luck to visit Fordlândia. They believe that, there, wander the spirits of people who sought fortune and failed to obtain it; failed like the city itself invented by Ford.

Those who do not believe in legends and prefer the real view of facts will enjoy reading Fordlândia — The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten City in the Jungleby historian Greg Grandin, who rescues history in detail.

The town of Airão, founded in 1694, was the first settlement established on the banks of the Rio Negro, even before Barcelos, the first capital of Amazonas. Until the Second World War, Airão was important in the extraction of rubber. With the commercial decline of the raw material, the city saw its main source of income dwindle and, from the 1950s, its population was decreasing until the total emptying of the village.

Today, ruins of what were once the beautiful colonial mansions of the place remain, renamed Velho Airão (or Airão Velho). Due to the recent interest of tourists in getting to know the city lost in the middle of the jungle, some families have returned to inhabit its surroundings, working as guides for visitors.

Legends and mysteries of Velho Airão: Mystics say that the mood in Airão is charged and haunted: the spirits of the enslaved Indians drove away the residents of the city, who founded Novo Airão, still on the banks of the Rio Negro, but closer to Manaus.

Another legend says that the population began to be attacked by fire ants and, seeing no other remedy, was forced to abandon the place.

If Hollywood were Brazilian, dozens of horror and mystery films would have already been shot in Paranapiacaba, a district in the municipality of Santo André, in São Paulo. The place was never an abandoned city, but its deactivated railway park is known as such for its dense fogs (characteristic of Serra do Mar) and for a series of supernatural accounts.

The village was founded in 1867 to be the operations center for the São Paulo Railway, an English company that operated the railways connected to the port of Santos. With the decline of this type of transport from the second half of the 20th century, Paranapiacaba lost its importance, but it maintains the charm of the buildings left by the English – there is even a replica of the famous Big Ben clock from 1890 and imported from the United Kingdom!

Visitors can take tourist trains departing from São Paulo and Santo André to discover this picturesque corner and stroll through the railway park, with its stations and old locomotives that sleep in the open. Time travel becomes more “English” as the afternoon mist settles over the park. And it’s time to tell scary stories…

Legends and Mysteries of Paranapiacaba: There are several tales from the beyond involving the city and its inhabitants. So much so that a festival called City of Terror has already been organized there, with groups of actors reliving these accounts.

Not even the house of chief engineer Daniel Fox, builder of the railroad, escapes the myths of the village. His mansion was nicknamed Castelinho and today it is a museum, but there are those who swear they hear strange noises coming from the rooms. The same happens at Clube Lira Serrano, where employees claim to hear the steps of a ghost dancer on stage during the early hours of the morning.

Even an invisible train is considered a “ghost” in Paranapiacaba. Superstitious people say they hear the sound and movement of air from a composition whose boiler exploded, coming out of a tunnel. In the surroundings, legends persist: they say that in the Poço das Moças waterfall, three girls would have drowned and to this day haunt the region. People who camped there said they heard the sounds of axes being struck at night, without any tree branches being knocked down.

The village of São José da Marinha de Ararapira, on the border between Paraná and São Paulo, was once a commercially important warehouse and a mandatory stop for travelers and traders. The village was founded in the 18th century by the Portuguese crown, had a busy social life for over a hundred years, but began to decline in the first half of the 20th century.

Until the 1920s, the city was São Paulo, but it was transformed into Paraná territory by decree. The parochialism of some residents made them leave there to found the village of Ariri, in the São Paulo municipality of Cananéia.

To make matters worse, the construction of a canal in the 1950s meant that the village, now isolated by the waters, began to suffer from erosion, which progresses more and more and causes the buildings to collapse. That was enough for the total abandonment of Ararapira, today a district of the municipality of Guaraqueçaba.

The village relives its glory days every March 19, when Saint Joseph’s Day, the patron saint of the place, is celebrated in the 18th century church. The cemetery, maintained by residents of neighboring villages, is still used to bury people. Of region.

Legends and mysteries of Ararapira: Sensationalist television programs aroused the interest of tourists in the village, which can only be reached by boat. Visitors are attracted by ancient macabre legends or even those invented by “reporters”.

A phantom woman dressed in white, waving at the oncoming boats, is one of the phenomena narrated by the superstitious. Spirits of children leaving their graves, the smell of blood on the path that leads to the cemetery, groans coming from the police cells and the church bell that tolls alone are other common reports, many of them fed by the boatmen who take tourists to the abandoned city. .

Vila de Biribiri is a district of the mining town of Diamantina, built…