The Guarulhos Poltergeist (O Poltergeist de Guarulhos)

Guarulhos lies north-east of São Paulo. In 1973 a working-class Pentecostal extended family lived there in two connected houses. At the centre of what followed was Noêmia. She was 21, newly married and pregnant. Her husband Marcos was 29. Their daughter Ruth was a year and a half old. Pedro, 55, shared the household with his wife, three daughters and two sons. The names in published accounts are probably pseudonyms.

27 April 1973. Sofa cushions carried long, wide parallel slashes. Mattresses were mangled "as if someone had come through with a machete". Folded clothes and blankets were cut, as were Bibles at Psalm 91. Noêmia said she "felt a shiver" just before she found the cuts in the mattress.

And there was a figure. Pedro saw "the hand and arm of a beast, a monster, not a man." Its nails were 14 to 15 cm, curved, black and shiny, and its hair was red, fine and bright, like a red jaguar's coat. Noêmia saw a hairy creature, like a jaguar, gorilla or monkey, with a horrible face and big teeth. Prayers and Bible readings ended the first phase on 1 May.

Late April 1974. Stones hailed down onto the roof with no discernible source. Cuts appeared in groups of three, four or five, as if produced by claws. First on Marcos, then on Noêmia's daughter, then on Noêmia. "I am always putting out fires, constantly," Marcos said. Sprigs of rosemary turned up in his jacket pocket and under the bed, beside kitchen knives laid in a cross. Missing money was replaced by folded slips marked with red crosses. It all came at dusk and at night.

The couple moved to Noêmia's parents in Artur Alvim. The poltergeist followed them. More than once, a mysterious pair of women tried to enter the house. Noêmia saw that they carried a clear plastic bag with candles and rosemary.

A third phase began on 28 March 1975. Stones fell. Money vanished. Noêmia lost a tooth in her sleep. "I didn't feel any pain," she said. It ended when church leaders anointed the corners of the house with a special oil.

A brief story in a local São Paulo newspaper drew Hernani Guimarães Andrade of the IBPP, the institute he had founded in 1963. Andrade taped hours of testimony, photographed the slashed furniture and had Noêmia psychologically examined. She passed. He visited again in 1976, and for the last time in 1984. His colleague Guy Lyon Playfair, later known for Enfield, at first thought a coati might be to blame.

Andrade's verdict, in O Poltergeist de Guarulhos, was sorcery. A sorcerer, spirits that obey the sorcerer, and magical practices. He linked the creature to the Umulum spirit of Umbanda and Quimbanda. He rejected recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, finding no sexual repression or family conflicts. Marcos suspected an old lover.

In 1990 Michel-Ange Amorim reassessed the monograph in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. He proposed a living agent hypothesis, weighing religious context, expectancies and possible personality disorders. Anthropologist David J. Hess read both sides as mirrors of culture. Andrade's sorcery expressed Latino values such as personalism. The American RSPK model expressed Anglo-Saxon values such as individualism. No hoax finding was ever published.

Hess's paper ended up among the CIA's STARGATE parapsychology holdings. In 2025 Charisma News asked whether the CIA had confirmed the existence of demons. Nothing shows the CIA ever investigated. The case has been called "the best documented case of a purported poltergeist in Brazil".