The Edifício Paris Poltergeist, Recife (1985)

Avenida Cruz Cabugá, 64. Santo Amaro, Recife. The Edifício Paris was an apartment building, built in the 1970s according to the blogs that later told its story. In 1985, by the account of parapsychologist Valter da Rosa Borges, the paranormal returned to the front of the Recife press. Local writers still call this the biggest case in Pernambuco ever studied by the IPPP, the Instituto Pernambucano de Pesquisas Psicobiofísicas.

It began on 25 December 1985. Christmas Day. Medicine vials, liquor bottles, jugs and decorative pieces were thrown across rooms or moved around them. In various apartments, objects moved and broke with no explanation. One apartment was hit harder than the rest, and there several medicine vials began to burst without anyone touching them.

The residents called the police, suspecting troublemakers. The officers found nobody playing pranks and left. Samir Abou Hana, a radio broadcaster who lived in the building, quickly put the news on the air. Journalists from Rádio Globo and O Globo got inside and set themselves up in the corridors, hoping to record events as they happened.

Then came the clergy. Padre Guedes, of the Igreja de Piedade in Santo Amaro, was called to bless the apartment. The next morning the glass shattered again, with no one touching it. An evangelical pastor, a medium and a mãe de santo also came. None of them could explain it.

Borges was brought in by a doctor colleague. His own chronology names her as Lea Correia, then president of the Sindicato dos Médicos de Pernambuco. The blogs say a family friend made the call.

Borges spoke with the girl at the centre of it all. While they talked, a bottle travelled from the kitchen towards them both in curved, uneven movements. It burst against the wall. "Era evidente que os fenômenos estavam sendo provocados por um poltergeist," he recalled. "Só precisei identificar quem era."

Who she was depends on the telling. In 2015 Borges described a teenage former nanny who had seen the child in her care killed by a vehicle. "Ela estava traumatizada." His earlier chronology describes an 11-year-old domestic worker with emotional problems. She has never been named.

The accounts part ways here too. Borges told the Diário de Pernambuco that psychological treatment for the young woman ended the problem for good. His chronology says the family was made aware, and within three days everything was back to normal. The blogs say only that after some instructions were followed, the phenomena finally stopped. Nobody, they add, can vouch for how it really ended.

Borges called it recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis. The movements came from the living girl's mind, he said, not from spirits, and were not messages from the dead child. In most such cases, by his account, the "author" is a girl aged 11 to 14. Bruno Tavares, who heard the story from Afrânio Belo, reads it the other way round, as proof that the soul survives death. No source accuses anyone of trickery here, though sceptics often explain poltergeists centred on a teenager that way, and the question stays open.

In July 2015 the Diário de Pernambuco listed the Edifício Paris among five paranormal cases of Recife, timed to the Brazilian release of Sobrenatural: A Origem. Both blogs cite a Veja article, "Atividade paranormal made in Brasil." Yet no newspaper report from 1985 has surfaced online, and no photograph or film of the phenomena has been found. Whatever the reporters in the corridors saw, their record is still missing.