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Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Unexplained, where each week we explore another true tale of high strangeness, with me, your host, Richard McLean-Smith. If you're new here and you're a fan of expertly told, atmospheric stories about the strange and unexplained, then you've come to the right place. And please subscribe to the show if you haven't already done so. Next up, I'll be appearing at London's CrimeCon on the 3rd and 4th of October. If you haven't been before, it's a fantastic programme of all things true crime related, with special attention given to survivors of crime. The event will be in East London at 133 Houndstitch, again from October 3rd to the 4th. Go to crimecon.co.uk to get tickets, and use code unexplained for 10% off. Come along and say hi, I'd love to see you there. And lastly, a big shout out and thank you to Sarah Barker, who it was who recommended this story to me. Now, with all that out of the way, this is the second and final part of Unexplained, Season 9, Episode 35. A Land of Darkness. My God, in whom I trust, surely he will save you from the fowler's snare and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge. The whole family were gathered under candlelight in the living room of Noemia and Marcos' home. Their heads bowed as Pedro continued to recite Psalm 91. Marcos let out a sudden cry and then something hit the floor. Everybody opened their eyes to see half a brick lying in the middle of the room. It had seemingly appeared from nowhere, and struck Marcos on the side of the head. They each instinctively scrambled back, making the sign of the cross over their chests, as they braced themselves for more. But nothing came. It was May 1974, and things had well and truly escalated since Noemia's terrifying dream, or vision, whatever it was. Cuts began appearing on soft furnishings again, this time all over the house, on pillows, Blankets, curtains, laundry hung out to dry and even clothes that were folded away in wardrobes. One night, Noemia and Marcos were getting ready for bed when Marcos headed off to the kitchen. Still on edge from everything that had happened, Noemia was too afraid to be alone. As she followed him through to the kitchen, Marcos jumped as she screamed out, Stop! Something is trying to grab you! Marcos spun round to find his wife trembling, rooted to the spot, with an anguished look on her face. It was the claw, she said. It came right out of the air and tried to get you. By June, Marcos' father Pedro had had enough. Out of fear that whatever it was might be spreading, he moved his family to Guayanazis, another district of Sao Paulo, about 15 miles south of Guarulhos, hoping the distance might spare them. He begged his son Marcos and Noemia to do the same, but despite everything, neither felt ready to leave. For a start, Noemia was now eight months pregnant, and the thought of uprooting everything was just too unbearable. A few weeks later, Pedro's daughter Clotilde appeared at his new home one afternoon, in great distress. Things had gotten even worse, she said, back at Marcos's house, and she urged her father to visit as soon as he could. And so, the following day, Pedro and his wife Judici and Clotilde travelled back to the property, where they met with a friend who offered to help too. Letting themselves in through the back door, they entered the kitchen, where a pot of stew was bubbling away on the stove, its contents splashing out all over the kitchen surface. with no one seemingly there to manage it. Hello, they called out, but there was nothing in reply. Judici, seeing the pot boiling over, headed over to turn off the gas, then recoiled suddenly. It took her a moment to realise what she was looking at. A pair of shoes were standing up in the pot, lying partially submerged in the stew. Eventually they found Noemia and Marcos huddled together in the living room with their daughter Ruth. Help us, they said. Pedro quickly gathered them all in a circle and once again began a recitation of Psalm 91. But partway through, Clotilde and the friend began to complain they were feeling unwell, as though something were making them nauseous and draining them of energy. Pedro finally snapped. Whatever was terrorising his family had to be stopped now. Feeling a righteous anger rising up inside of him, he told the others to stay put and left the room, determined to find the true source of it all. He'd always considered himself sensitive to the spirit world, and right then he was in no doubt that whatever this thing was, it was there in the house with them now. Pedro moved methodically through the apartment, room by room. He stepped back into the kitchen and looked again at the pair of shoes sticking out of the pot, but felt nothing. Next he went into the bedroom, but again he felt nothing. Then something caught his eye under one of the beds. Bending down, he fished it out. It was a Bible, completely torn and slashed to ribbons. In disgust, he moved into the bathroom, where Noemia had apparently seen a terrifying creature behind her in the mirror. Then he stood completely still. Here, he thought, feeling the hairs rise up on the back of his neck. Whatever it was, was there with him, right then. Some kind of malignant presence, he believed. But no sooner had he felt it, it disappeared. Just then, He had the strangest urge to go back to his old apartment, as if some higher power were directing him to go there, he said later. It was already dark outside as he stepped into the shared garden space and headed over to his old apartment, which now lay dark and dormant. Slowly, hesitantly, he let himself inside. As he later explained it to Anani and Draji, and his team from the Brazilian Institute of Psycho-Biophysical Research, almost immediately he felt the presence again. Then, sensing it suddenly right in front of him, as though it were taunting him, he shot out his arms, and in the darkness felt something solid yet invisible in his hands. It was the creature's throat, he later said. For it felt like a lifetime, Pedro then claimed to wrestle with it, keeping his hands firmly grasped around its apparent neck. Then, feeling as though someone had suddenly placed a sword in his hand, he thrust it forward into the air before him and felt resistance. Then he felt a weight at the end of the apparent sword that seemed to weaken before finally dropping to the floor. An exhausted Pedro then claimed he stamped down onto the ground and felt something under his foot that was now completely stilled. and bleeding profusely. After Pedro's supposed fight with the demon, all strange activity at Noemia and Marcos' house is said to have stopped immediately. But it wasn't enough for Pedro. It was certain that more entities would come, if there wasn't more than one already. Because for him, none of this was a surprise, and all of it was Marcos' fault. According to Pedro, Marcos had drifted too far from his faith, and this was the consequence of it. It isn't clear if Marcos recognised this too, but in the end, feeling isolated now his parents had left the property, he and Noemia agreed to finally leave too. In the summer of 1974, the couple moved in with Noemia's parents in Artur Alvim. about five miles east of Guaya-Nazis, where Pedro and Giudici had moved to. And for a while, everything seemed fine, until one day, 50 cruzeiros, about 25 US dollars in today's money, went missing from the house. One morning, as Noemia's mother sat in the kitchen with her daughter and Marcos, they heard a slap on the ground and looked down to see a small package made of red and white paper on the floor. Marcos opened it up and found the money inside it. A few days later, Noemia's father was home alone when he smelt burning coming from the kitchen. To his horror, a fire had started behind a kitchen cupboard. Hurriedly, he beat it out with a taser. Not much longer after that, Noemia awoke again to find scratch marks on her face. The thing, it seemed, was back. In July, Noemia and Marcos welcomed a second daughter into the world who they named Hakel. Despite the terror they'd been living through, nothing could dampen their joy over the new arrival. But the relief wasn't to last. One night, just after 7.30pm, Noemia stumbled into her local church, where she'd been hoping to attend an evening service, crying and clutching at her face. When she pulled her hands away, the congregation gasped. Her face was streaming with blood. In near hysterics, she claimed that something invisible attacked her just outside of Guaya-Nazis station. Again, strange subtle cuts were found, as though a razor blade had been sliced through her skin in multiple places. It was some time later, during another service at the family's church, a young woman approached Pedro. She wanted to know, strangely, if Marcos and Noemia had left an old nightstand behind at their old home in Guarulhos, because for some reason she'd become convinced that they had, and she couldn't stop thinking about it. There was something darkly wrong with it, she said. A confused Pedro later asked his son about it. As it happened, Marcos had indeed left a nightstand in a small storage room at the back of the property. along with some of his plumbing tools and equipment that they didn't have space to take. The following day, the house's new tenants are said to have seen smoke coming from that same storage room. Inside, they found a fire had broken out and all of Marcus's possessions, including the nightstand, had been completely destroyed. But weirdly, everything else in the room was said to have been unharmed. Eventually, Noemia and Marcos found another place of their own to rent, back in Guarulhos, not far from where their first home was. For fifteen days, they experienced blissful silence. No stones struck the roof, no objects moved in the darkness, and no inexplicable cuts appeared on Noemia's face as she slept. At last, they glimpsed the possibility of normalcy. Finally, they began to just think about ordinary things again. Feeding the baby, finding work, sleeping through the night. Then one night, at two in the morning, Noemi and Marcos awoke with a jolt to the sound of their two-year-old Ruth screaming in terror. They ran into her bedroom to find her cowering against the wall, staring up into the darkness. What happened, they asked. Ruth, looked toward the top of her wardrobe with abject fear in her tearful eyes. Something was up there, she said. Amidst the commotion, baby Hakel had started to cry, so Noemia went to soothe her while Markov stayed with Ruth. Looking past her as he tried to comfort her, he saw that her bedroom window was wide open. Perhaps a stray animal had just climbed in and spooked her, he wondered. A few days after the young Ruth claimed to have seen something in her room, the family were at home eating when two-year-old Ruth became suddenly quiet and still. Noemia screamed in horror as her daughter's face slowly turned purple and her eyes seemed to sink into their sockets. She was having a seizure. Her terrified parents took her to see a doctor immediately who suspected she was suffering from epilepsy. but after undergoing some tests, the doctor found no abnormalities in her brain. With little else to offer but some sedatives, he simply told the couple to keep an eye on her and come back if anything happened again. And from there, things only intensified. Cuts began appearing again on clothing, clothing and upholstery, often in cross-like patterns. Once, during a Bible session with other members of their church, the couple claimed that a Bible was suddenly hurled violently across the room of its own accord. On another occasion, cups and glasses were said to have thrown themselves from a closed cupboard, shattering on the floor. One night, according to Marcos, he was woken by a great crack coming from somewhere in the room. He claimed that he saw a shoe shooting up from the floor. and smashing into the roof so hard that it cracked the plaster. All the while, Ruth's seizures continued, with no apparent diagnosis in sight. In late October, Noemia's friend Aurinda brought her 17-month-old son Anderson over to play with Ruth. Just after 6pm, the two women went to the bedroom together to say a goodbye prayer before Aurinda headed home, with the little boy lying on the bed between them. Arenda had barely closed her eyes when the boy let out an earth-shattering scream. When she opened her eyes again she saw that her son's leg was cut and bleeding profusely from a single gash. It was about five centimetres long and deep enough that pale flesh could be seen beneath the blood. By now word had spread in the neighbourhood. Two children now had been seriously harmed while playing in the house. Understandably Parents stopped allowing their children over, and whispers spread that the house was either cursed or haunted. For their part, Noemia and Marcos said they felt increasingly isolated, as if they had a deadly infection that their neighbours were afraid to catch. By October 1974, it was clear that Noemia and Marcos needed serious help. Having tried to tackle it in private, they finally asked their Pentecostal church for help. And so, on October 25th, 1974, a group of them came, including Pedro, several missionaries from the congregation, and three preachers named Atilio, Vicente, and a third man known only as Deus Dular, God of the Home. As they had in the past, the family gathered together joined hands and, led by the visiting preachers, prayed fervently to the Lord to cast out the dark forces inside their home. And once again, the deep prayer seemed to do the trick. For the best part of six months, the family lived in relative peace and harmony and Ruth's seizures even stopped. But they knew better than to rest on their laurels. As spring approached in 1975, a 14-year-old girl named Elsa came to stay with the family. In late March, Elsa was taking baby Hakel out of her crib when she was struck hard by something in the back. Spinning round, she saw a purse full of money drop to the floor. She later claimed it had come out of the drawer behind her, which was closed the whole time. That same day, around three in the afternoon, Marcos, Noemia and Mrs Maria the wife of their pastor, sat together to pray in the kitchen. Mid-prayer, a glass shattered on the floor near Mrs Maria's feet, causing her to jump back in shock. The only glasses nearby were said to be in the sink, a good few metres away. No one else was in the room. Most disturbingly for the family, however, Ruth's fits returned. Each time her body would stiffen and her eyes would go blank, as though she'd slipped into another plane of consciousness. It left her parents feeling completely helpless. But Marcos, at least, it was hard not to think that Elsa's arrival had somehow brought it all back again. Not long after Ruth suffered another seizure, Elsa was sitting with the family in the living room when she too began to stiffen up. Then suddenly her body began to vibrate and her face contorted into a hideous grin. Moments later, Elsa seemed to come out of it, but was said to have had no sense at all about what had just happened. Eventually, Marcos asked her to stop coming round to the house, for her own safety as much as anything else. One morning in early April, Marcos is said to have been on the roof of their house, with his daughter Ruth carrying out some repairs, when he felt something hard hit his arm. The next thing he knew, a hail of debris was raining down on them, seemingly from every angle. Instinctively, he leapt over his daughter. to shield her from the blast until it eventually passed. It was a few days after that, as they told it to the researchers from the Institute of Psychobiophysical Research, that Noemia and Marcos were lying in bed when they felt something hot between them. Flames began to rise out of the middle of the bed, that the pair had to fight to snuff out. Over the next few weeks, Marcos estimated that he put out dozens of similar inexplicable fires that occurred all over the house. Sometime later, in a strange twist, Marcos was walking to the bathroom one evening when he spotted a single flickering candle in the corner of the hallway. Noemia claimed not to have put it there. Then more and more lit candles began to appear, seemingly in rooms that neither of the couple had recently been in. By then, Marcos and Noemia had taken to sleeping in shifts in order to protect the children. On occasion, Pedro and Giudice came over so they could both get some rest. On one of those nights, with Marcos already fast asleep, Noemia climbed into bed after saying her bedtime prayers. As she lay back on the pillow, The bedroom settled around her with the familiar sounds of night, the sound of Marcos' breathing next to her, the faint creak of the house, and the soft movement of air through the room. Then she moved her arm across to Marcos' side of the bed, only to find it was empty. Looking out toward the darkness of the room, she could just make out his silhouette, standing eerily still at the foot of the bed. Marcos? she called out, but Marcos said nothing. Then he moved forward into a sliver of moonlight, briefly illuminating his face for a moment, which looked unnervingly blank. I have the thread, he said, holding out his hand stiffly. Then Marcos began slowly to move toward Noemia. As Marcos drew closer and closer, Noemia, seemingly unable to move, could only watch in disturbed confusion as he drew right up beside her, then reached out his hand to touch her face. Marcos's fingers felt around until finally they met her mouth and reached inside it. There was no pain in that moment, only the pressure of Marcos's fingers increased and the feeling that something was being wrapped around one of her incisors. Then Marcos pulled hard all of a sudden, and stepped back. In his fingers was a bloody tooth. He stared down at it with that same strange, vacant look. Then Noemia snapped awake. For several moments, she lay completely still, staring into the darkness. She turned to see Marcos back beside her, fast asleep. It was just another terrible dream, she thought with huge relief, but then her tongue felt around her mouth to where one of her incisors should have been and hit an empty, toothless space. Noemia raced to the bathroom and turned on the light. Her tooth was missing. Noemia later claimed she found it in the apartment the next morning, completely intact, with its healthy roots stained a deep red, as if it had been wrenched right out of her mouth. which, as far as she knew, it had. One afternoon in the summer of 1975, Marcos was in the kitchen with Noemia when he went to pull a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket, only to pull a sprig of something out with it at the same time. When Noemia picked it up from the floor, she saw it was a sprig of rosemary. Marcos had no idea how it got there. The next day, Noemia was cleaning the living room when she looked up with shock to see a large branch of rosemary lying on the windowsill. Both she and Marcos claimed to have no idea how it got there. A few days later, there was a knock at the front door. Noemia opened it to find two women in their mid-thirties who she'd never seen before standing outside. The pair sheepishly asked if they could come inside to get some water. Recounting the story to Anani and Draji later, Noemia said that something had immediately seemed off, aside from the peculiar request. When Noemia refused them the drink, the women apparently revealed that someone had actually sent them specifically to bless the house and rid it of its demonic intruder. But when Noemia asked who it was, they refused to answer. In any case, what they were offering, a pagan ritual, went against Noemia's faith, so she declined their help and sent them away. It was two weeks after those two mysterious women turned up at the house that Noemia was gazing out of the living room window when she caught sight of them again sitting in a Volkswagen a little further down the street. She watched carefully as they stepped out of the vehicle. One was apparently carrying a clear plastic bag with what appeared to be candles and several sprigs of rosemary inside. Later, at another church meeting, Marcos was approached by a woman called Nilsa. She clutched his arm and told him in a stern voice that she had had a vision of a woman he once knew sewing a toad's mouth shut. This woman, she is said to have claimed, had then taken the carcass of the toad to the coast and and thrown it into the sea. According to her, the meaning of the vision was clear. Someone had put a curse on his family. When news of the mysterious women and the found sprigs of rosemary got around, others became adamant that this whole time, the family had been the victims of a targeted spiritual attack. Might that explain the strange candles they apparently kept finding in the house too, they wondered. had someone been breaking in to conduct a ritual in their home, one that had summoned something demonic to terrorise them. But who on earth would have done that, they thought. After a while, Marcos began to wonder if an ex of his called Zorreji had something to do with it all, since her mother was said to be a known practitioner of folk sorcery. Marcos also suggested it might have been another woman from Brasilia that he once dated and left disappointed. Either way, Noemia wasn't convinced this was the answer. On August 30th, 1975, the family moved into their third house in Guarulhos, but this one was different, because Marcos and his father Pedro had built it from the ground up. Surely this move, they thought, would provide them with the best chance of a fresh start, a space with no history. Again, at first it seemed to work, and the family enjoyed a sustained period of peace. But soon enough, Noemia apparently awoke one night, hearing that same horribly familiar sound. Stones clattering down onto the roof of their newly built home. Soon after, walking into the living room, she is said to have found another set of bizarre cuts sliced into the furniture. Then a sudden fire was said to have broken out in the living room, apparently destroying decades of family photographs. For Noemia, it was just final confirmation of something she had supposedly been suspecting for a long time. It wasn't the family or any of the properties that were haunted. It was her, which also meant she was the only person who could stop it. In October of 1976, the family called their church for help again. And once more, missionaries came to the house to pray and read scripture with the family, taking care to do it in every room. One night, while praying, Noemia's mind is said to have been suddenly flooded with the image of something hideous. She described it as having the rough shape of a man, but wrong in certain ways. The face was oddly twisted, and the teeth jutted out disconcertingly from its mouth. She claimed almost immediately to know it was Satan himself. And then he spoke to her. And when he did, flames were said to come out of his mouth, licking at the air with each word. Suddenly, unafraid, Noemia claimed she began to speak back, not in conversation as such, but just words spoken from the Bible. but the supposed entity. And for the next few months, whenever Noemia prayed, she claimed to see the same disturbing vision, and each time, she claimed also to fight back with the words of her faith. And steadily, over time, the haunting stopped. The incident simply became fewer and further between, until eventually a complete quiet returned. The years that followed were, by any reasonable measure, ordinary ones. So much so, that when Marcos's father, Pedro, died on the 20th of July 1979, he is said to have done so safe in the knowledge that his son and stepdaughter's family were no longer in danger from whatever had tormented them for so long. Both Noemia and Marcos were said to have been profoundly changed by the experience. Noemia in particular became far more devoutly religious and developed an interest in faith healing and intense worship gatherings. In April 1984, a small team of researchers from the Brazilian Institute of Psycho-Biophysical Research made a final visit to check on the family, the seventh in just over a decade. They found the house, reassuringly still, and Noemia and Marcos settled into the kind of unremarkable domesticity that, ten years earlier, seemed almost impossibly out of reach. In the end, Anani Andrade and his collaborators decided spent 11 years examining the Guarulhos case, gathering testimony from the family and numerous other witnesses, and documenting the reported phenomena in painstaking detail. Years later, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the case found its way into material held by the United States government. That, and just quite what exactly happened to Noemia and Marcos just over 50 years ago, remains to this day unknown. Unexplained. This episode was written by Richard McLean Smith and Emma Dibden. Please remember to like and subscribe if you've enjoyed the show. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by me, Richard McLean Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook at Unexplained Podcast and on X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod. Until next time, stay strange and dissonant.
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Unexplained, where each week we explore another true tale of high strangeness, with me, your host, Richard McLean-Smith. If you're new here and you're a fan of expertly told, atmospheric stories about the strange and unexplained, then you've come to the right place. And please subscribe to the show if you haven't already done so. Next up, I'll be appearing at London's CrimeCon on the 3rd and 4th of October. If you haven't been before, it's a fantastic programme of all things true crime related, with special attention given to survivors of crime. The event will be in East London at 133 Houndstitch, again from October 3rd to the 4th. Go to crimecon.co.uk to get tickets, and use code unexplained for 10% off. Come along and say hi, I'd love to see you there. And lastly, a big shout out and thank you to Sarah Barker, who it was who recommended this story to me. Now, with all that out of the way, this is the second and final part of Unexplained, Season 9, Episode 35. A Land of Darkness. My God, in whom I trust, surely he will save you from the fowler's snare and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge. The whole family were gathered under candlelight in the living room of Noemia and Marcos' home. Their heads bowed as Pedro continued to recite Psalm 91. Marcos let out a sudden cry and then something hit the floor. Everybody opened their eyes to see half a brick lying in the middle of the room. It had seemingly appeared from nowhere, and struck Marcos on the side of the head. They each instinctively scrambled back, making the sign of the cross over their chests, as they braced themselves for more. But nothing came. It was May 1974, and things had well and truly escalated since Noemia's terrifying dream, or vision, whatever it was. Cuts began appearing on soft furnishings again, this time all over the house, on pillows, Blankets, curtains, laundry hung out to dry and even clothes that were folded away in wardrobes. One night, Noemia and Marcos were getting ready for bed when Marcos headed off to the kitchen. Still on edge from everything that had happened, Noemia was too afraid to be alone. As she followed him through to the kitchen, Marcos jumped as she screamed out, Stop! Something is trying to grab you! Marcos spun round to find his wife trembling, rooted to the spot, with an anguished look on her face. It was the claw, she said. It came right out of the air and tried to get you. By June, Marcos' father Pedro had had enough. Out of fear that whatever it was might be spreading, he moved his family to Guayanazis, another district of Sao Paulo, about 15 miles south of Guarulhos, hoping the distance might spare them. He begged his son Marcos and Noemia to do the same, but despite everything, neither felt ready to leave. For a start, Noemia was now eight months pregnant, and the thought of uprooting everything was just too unbearable. A few weeks later, Pedro's daughter Clotilde appeared at his new home one afternoon, in great distress. Things had gotten even worse, she said, back at Marcos's house, and she urged her father to visit as soon as he could. And so, the following day, Pedro and his wife Judici and Clotilde travelled back to the property, where they met with a friend who offered to help too. Letting themselves in through the back door, they entered the kitchen, where a pot of stew was bubbling away on the stove, its contents splashing out all over the kitchen surface. with no one seemingly there to manage it. Hello, they called out, but there was nothing in reply. Judici, seeing the pot boiling over, headed over to turn off the gas, then recoiled suddenly. It took her a moment to realise what she was looking at. A pair of shoes were standing up in the pot, lying partially submerged in the stew. Eventually they found Noemia and Marcos huddled together in the living room with their daughter Ruth. Help us, they said. Pedro quickly gathered them all in a circle and once again began a recitation of Psalm 91. But partway through, Clotilde and the friend began to complain they were feeling unwell, as though something were making them nauseous and draining them of energy. Pedro finally snapped. Whatever was terrorising his family had to be stopped now. Feeling a righteous anger rising up inside of him, he told the others to stay put and left the room, determined to find the true source of it all. He'd always considered himself sensitive to the spirit world, and right then he was in no doubt that whatever this thing was, it was there in the house with them now. Pedro moved methodically through the apartment, room by room. He stepped back into the kitchen and looked again at the pair of shoes sticking out of the pot, but felt nothing. Next he went into the bedroom, but again he felt nothing. Then something caught his eye under one of the beds. Bending down, he fished it out. It was a Bible, completely torn and slashed to ribbons. In disgust, he moved into the bathroom, where Noemia had apparently seen a terrifying creature behind her in the mirror. Then he stood completely still. Here, he thought, feeling the hairs rise up on the back of his neck. Whatever it was, was there with him, right then. Some kind of malignant presence, he believed. But no sooner had he felt it, it disappeared. Just then, He had the strangest urge to go back to his old apartment, as if some higher power were directing him to go there, he said later. It was already dark outside as he stepped into the shared garden space and headed over to his old apartment, which now lay dark and dormant. Slowly, hesitantly, he let himself inside. As he later explained it to Anani and Draji, and his team from the Brazilian Institute of Psycho-Biophysical Research, almost immediately he felt the presence again. Then, sensing it suddenly right in front of him, as though it were taunting him, he shot out his arms, and in the darkness felt something solid yet invisible in his hands. It was the creature's throat, he later said. For it felt like a lifetime, Pedro then claimed to wrestle with it, keeping his hands firmly grasped around its apparent neck. Then, feeling as though someone had suddenly placed a sword in his hand, he thrust it forward into the air before him and felt resistance. Then he felt a weight at the end of the apparent sword that seemed to weaken before finally dropping to the floor. An exhausted Pedro then claimed he stamped down onto the ground and felt something under his foot that was now completely stilled. and bleeding profusely. After Pedro's supposed fight with the demon, all strange activity at Noemia and Marcos' house is said to have stopped immediately. But it wasn't enough for Pedro. It was certain that more entities would come, if there wasn't more than one already. Because for him, none of this was a surprise, and all of it was Marcos' fault. According to Pedro, Marcos had drifted too far from his faith, and this was the consequence of it. It isn't clear if Marcos recognised this too, but in the end, feeling isolated now his parents had left the property, he and Noemia agreed to finally leave too. In the summer of 1974, the couple moved in with Noemia's parents in Artur Alvim. about five miles east of Guaya-Nazis, where Pedro and Giudici had moved to. And for a while, everything seemed fine, until one day, 50 cruzeiros, about 25 US dollars in today's money, went missing from the house. One morning, as Noemia's mother sat in the kitchen with her daughter and Marcos, they heard a slap on the ground and looked down to see a small package made of red and white paper on the floor. Marcos opened it up and found the money inside it. A few days later, Noemia's father was home alone when he smelt burning coming from the kitchen. To his horror, a fire had started behind a kitchen cupboard. Hurriedly, he beat it out with a taser. Not much longer after that, Noemia awoke again to find scratch marks on her face. The thing, it seemed, was back. In July, Noemia and Marcos welcomed a second daughter into the world who they named Hakel. Despite the terror they'd been living through, nothing could dampen their joy over the new arrival. But the relief wasn't to last. One night, just after 7.30pm, Noemia stumbled into her local church, where she'd been hoping to attend an evening service, crying and clutching at her face. When she pulled her hands away, the congregation gasped. Her face was streaming with blood. In near hysterics, she claimed that something invisible attacked her just outside of Guaya-Nazis station. Again, strange subtle cuts were found, as though a razor blade had been sliced through her skin in multiple places. It was some time later, during another service at the family's church, a young woman approached Pedro. She wanted to know, strangely, if Marcos and Noemia had left an old nightstand behind at their old home in Guarulhos, because for some reason she'd become convinced that they had, and she couldn't stop thinking about it. There was something darkly wrong with it, she said. A confused Pedro later asked his son about it. As it happened, Marcos had indeed left a nightstand in a small storage room at the back of the property. along with some of his plumbing tools and equipment that they didn't have space to take. The following day, the house's new tenants are said to have seen smoke coming from that same storage room. Inside, they found a fire had broken out and all of Marcus's possessions, including the nightstand, had been completely destroyed. But weirdly, everything else in the room was said to have been unharmed. Eventually, Noemia and Marcos found another place of their own to rent, back in Guarulhos, not far from where their first home was. For fifteen days, they experienced blissful silence. No stones struck the roof, no objects moved in the darkness, and no inexplicable cuts appeared on Noemia's face as she slept. At last, they glimpsed the possibility of normalcy. Finally, they began to just think about ordinary things again. Feeding the baby, finding work, sleeping through the night. Then one night, at two in the morning, Noemi and Marcos awoke with a jolt to the sound of their two-year-old Ruth screaming in terror. They ran into her bedroom to find her cowering against the wall, staring up into the darkness. What happened, they asked. Ruth, looked toward the top of her wardrobe with abject fear in her tearful eyes. Something was up there, she said. Amidst the commotion, baby Hakel had started to cry, so Noemia went to soothe her while Markov stayed with Ruth. Looking past her as he tried to comfort her, he saw that her bedroom window was wide open. Perhaps a stray animal had just climbed in and spooked her, he wondered. A few days after the young Ruth claimed to have seen something in her room, the family were at home eating when two-year-old Ruth became suddenly quiet and still. Noemia screamed in horror as her daughter's face slowly turned purple and her eyes seemed to sink into their sockets. She was having a seizure. Her terrified parents took her to see a doctor immediately who suspected she was suffering from epilepsy. but after undergoing some tests, the doctor found no abnormalities in her brain. With little else to offer but some sedatives, he simply told the couple to keep an eye on her and come back if anything happened again. And from there, things only intensified. Cuts began appearing again on clothing, clothing and upholstery, often in cross-like patterns. Once, during a Bible session with other members of their church, the couple claimed that a Bible was suddenly hurled violently across the room of its own accord. On another occasion, cups and glasses were said to have thrown themselves from a closed cupboard, shattering on the floor. One night, according to Marcos, he was woken by a great crack coming from somewhere in the room. He claimed that he saw a shoe shooting up from the floor. and smashing into the roof so hard that it cracked the plaster. All the while, Ruth's seizures continued, with no apparent diagnosis in sight. In late October, Noemia's friend Aurinda brought her 17-month-old son Anderson over to play with Ruth. Just after 6pm, the two women went to the bedroom together to say a goodbye prayer before Aurinda headed home, with the little boy lying on the bed between them. Arenda had barely closed her eyes when the boy let out an earth-shattering scream. When she opened her eyes again she saw that her son's leg was cut and bleeding profusely from a single gash. It was about five centimetres long and deep enough that pale flesh could be seen beneath the blood. By now word had spread in the neighbourhood. Two children now had been seriously harmed while playing in the house. Understandably Parents stopped allowing their children over, and whispers spread that the house was either cursed or haunted. For their part, Noemia and Marcos said they felt increasingly isolated, as if they had a deadly infection that their neighbours were afraid to catch. By October 1974, it was clear that Noemia and Marcos needed serious help. Having tried to tackle it in private, they finally asked their Pentecostal church for help. And so, on October 25th, 1974, a group of them came, including Pedro, several missionaries from the congregation, and three preachers named Atilio, Vicente, and a third man known only as Deus Dular, God of the Home. As they had in the past, the family gathered together joined hands and, led by the visiting preachers, prayed fervently to the Lord to cast out the dark forces inside their home. And once again, the deep prayer seemed to do the trick. For the best part of six months, the family lived in relative peace and harmony and Ruth's seizures even stopped. But they knew better than to rest on their laurels. As spring approached in 1975, a 14-year-old girl named Elsa came to stay with the family. In late March, Elsa was taking baby Hakel out of her crib when she was struck hard by something in the back. Spinning round, she saw a purse full of money drop to the floor. She later claimed it had come out of the drawer behind her, which was closed the whole time. That same day, around three in the afternoon, Marcos, Noemia and Mrs Maria the wife of their pastor, sat together to pray in the kitchen. Mid-prayer, a glass shattered on the floor near Mrs Maria's feet, causing her to jump back in shock. The only glasses nearby were said to be in the sink, a good few metres away. No one else was in the room. Most disturbingly for the family, however, Ruth's fits returned. Each time her body would stiffen and her eyes would go blank, as though she'd slipped into another plane of consciousness. It left her parents feeling completely helpless. But Marcos, at least, it was hard not to think that Elsa's arrival had somehow brought it all back again. Not long after Ruth suffered another seizure, Elsa was sitting with the family in the living room when she too began to stiffen up. Then suddenly her body began to vibrate and her face contorted into a hideous grin. Moments later, Elsa seemed to come out of it, but was said to have had no sense at all about what had just happened. Eventually, Marcos asked her to stop coming round to the house, for her own safety as much as anything else. One morning in early April, Marcos is said to have been on the roof of their house, with his daughter Ruth carrying out some repairs, when he felt something hard hit his arm. The next thing he knew, a hail of debris was raining down on them, seemingly from every angle. Instinctively, he leapt over his daughter. to shield her from the blast until it eventually passed. It was a few days after that, as they told it to the researchers from the Institute of Psychobiophysical Research, that Noemia and Marcos were lying in bed when they felt something hot between them. Flames began to rise out of the middle of the bed, that the pair had to fight to snuff out. Over the next few weeks, Marcos estimated that he put out dozens of similar inexplicable fires that occurred all over the house. Sometime later, in a strange twist, Marcos was walking to the bathroom one evening when he spotted a single flickering candle in the corner of the hallway. Noemia claimed not to have put it there. Then more and more lit candles began to appear, seemingly in rooms that neither of the couple had recently been in. By then, Marcos and Noemia had taken to sleeping in shifts in order to protect the children. On occasion, Pedro and Giudice came over so they could both get some rest. On one of those nights, with Marcos already fast asleep, Noemia climbed into bed after saying her bedtime prayers. As she lay back on the pillow, The bedroom settled around her with the familiar sounds of night, the sound of Marcos' breathing next to her, the faint creak of the house, and the soft movement of air through the room. Then she moved her arm across to Marcos' side of the bed, only to find it was empty. Looking out toward the darkness of the room, she could just make out his silhouette, standing eerily still at the foot of the bed. Marcos? she called out, but Marcos said nothing. Then he moved forward into a sliver of moonlight, briefly illuminating his face for a moment, which looked unnervingly blank. I have the thread, he said, holding out his hand stiffly. Then Marcos began slowly to move toward Noemia. As Marcos drew closer and closer, Noemia, seemingly unable to move, could only watch in disturbed confusion as he drew right up beside her, then reached out his hand to touch her face. Marcos's fingers felt around until finally they met her mouth and reached inside it. There was no pain in that moment, only the pressure of Marcos's fingers increased and the feeling that something was being wrapped around one of her incisors. Then Marcos pulled hard all of a sudden, and stepped back. In his fingers was a bloody tooth. He stared down at it with that same strange, vacant look. Then Noemia snapped awake. For several moments, she lay completely still, staring into the darkness. She turned to see Marcos back beside her, fast asleep. It was just another terrible dream, she thought with huge relief, but then her tongue felt around her mouth to where one of her incisors should have been and hit an empty, toothless space. Noemia raced to the bathroom and turned on the light. Her tooth was missing. Noemia later claimed she found it in the apartment the next morning, completely intact, with its healthy roots stained a deep red, as if it had been wrenched right out of her mouth. which, as far as she knew, it had. One afternoon in the summer of 1975, Marcos was in the kitchen with Noemia when he went to pull a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket, only to pull a sprig of something out with it at the same time. When Noemia picked it up from the floor, she saw it was a sprig of rosemary. Marcos had no idea how it got there. The next day, Noemia was cleaning the living room when she looked up with shock to see a large branch of rosemary lying on the windowsill. Both she and Marcos claimed to have no idea how it got there. A few days later, there was a knock at the front door. Noemia opened it to find two women in their mid-thirties who she'd never seen before standing outside. The pair sheepishly asked if they could come inside to get some water. Recounting the story to Anani and Draji later, Noemia said that something had immediately seemed off, aside from the peculiar request. When Noemia refused them the drink, the women apparently revealed that someone had actually sent them specifically to bless the house and rid it of its demonic intruder. But when Noemia asked who it was, they refused to answer. In any case, what they were offering, a pagan ritual, went against Noemia's faith, so she declined their help and sent them away. It was two weeks after those two mysterious women turned up at the house that Noemia was gazing out of the living room window when she caught sight of them again sitting in a Volkswagen a little further down the street. She watched carefully as they stepped out of the vehicle. One was apparently carrying a clear plastic bag with what appeared to be candles and several sprigs of rosemary inside. Later, at another church meeting, Marcos was approached by a woman called Nilsa. She clutched his arm and told him in a stern voice that she had had a vision of a woman he once knew sewing a toad's mouth shut. This woman, she is said to have claimed, had then taken the carcass of the toad to the coast and and thrown it into the sea. According to her, the meaning of the vision was clear. Someone had put a curse on his family. When news of the mysterious women and the found sprigs of rosemary got around, others became adamant that this whole time, the family had been the victims of a targeted spiritual attack. Might that explain the strange candles they apparently kept finding in the house too, they wondered. had someone been breaking in to conduct a ritual in their home, one that had summoned something demonic to terrorise them. But who on earth would have done that, they thought. After a while, Marcos began to wonder if an ex of his called Zorreji had something to do with it all, since her mother was said to be a known practitioner of folk sorcery. Marcos also suggested it might have been another woman from Brasilia that he once dated and left disappointed. Either way, Noemia wasn't convinced this was the answer. On August 30th, 1975, the family moved into their third house in Guarulhos, but this one was different, because Marcos and his father Pedro had built it from the ground up. Surely this move, they thought, would provide them with the best chance of a fresh start, a space with no history. Again, at first it seemed to work, and the family enjoyed a sustained period of peace. But soon enough, Noemia apparently awoke one night, hearing that same horribly familiar sound. Stones clattering down onto the roof of their newly built home. Soon after, walking into the living room, she is said to have found another set of bizarre cuts sliced into the furniture. Then a sudden fire was said to have broken out in the living room, apparently destroying decades of family photographs. For Noemia, it was just final confirmation of something she had supposedly been suspecting for a long time. It wasn't the family or any of the properties that were haunted. It was her, which also meant she was the only person who could stop it. In October of 1976, the family called their church for help again. And once more, missionaries came to the house to pray and read scripture with the family, taking care to do it in every room. One night, while praying, Noemia's mind is said to have been suddenly flooded with the image of something hideous. She described it as having the rough shape of a man, but wrong in certain ways. The face was oddly twisted, and the teeth jutted out disconcertingly from its mouth. She claimed almost immediately to know it was Satan himself. And then he spoke to her. And when he did, flames were said to come out of his mouth, licking at the air with each word. Suddenly, unafraid, Noemia claimed she began to speak back, not in conversation as such, but just words spoken from the Bible. but the supposed entity. And for the next few months, whenever Noemia prayed, she claimed to see the same disturbing vision, and each time, she claimed also to fight back with the words of her faith. And steadily, over time, the haunting stopped. The incident simply became fewer and further between, until eventually a complete quiet returned. The years that followed were, by any reasonable measure, ordinary ones. So much so, that when Marcos's father, Pedro, died on the 20th of July 1979, he is said to have done so safe in the knowledge that his son and stepdaughter's family were no longer in danger from whatever had tormented them for so long. Both Noemia and Marcos were said to have been profoundly changed by the experience. Noemia in particular became far more devoutly religious and developed an interest in faith healing and intense worship gatherings. In April 1984, a small team of researchers from the Brazilian Institute of Psycho-Biophysical Research made a final visit to check on the family, the seventh in just over a decade. They found the house, reassuringly still, and Noemia and Marcos settled into the kind of unremarkable domesticity that, ten years earlier, seemed almost impossibly out of reach. In the end, Anani Andrade and his collaborators decided spent 11 years examining the Guarulhos case, gathering testimony from the family and numerous other witnesses, and documenting the reported phenomena in painstaking detail. Years later, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the case found its way into material held by the United States government. That, and just quite what exactly happened to Noemia and Marcos just over 50 years ago, remains to this day unknown. Unexplained. This episode was written by Richard McLean Smith and Emma Dibden. Please remember to like and subscribe if you've enjoyed the show. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by me, Richard McLean Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook at Unexplained Podcast and on X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod. Until next time, stay strange and dissonant.
