Unexplained

00:00 This is an iHeart Podcast. 00:02 Guaranteed human. 00:04 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. 00:25 With the Edinburgh Festival out of the way, next up I'll be appearing at London's CrimeCon on the 3rd and 4th of October. If you haven't been, 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 Houndsditch, again from October the 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. Lastly, I just want to say thank you very much to the listener who recommended this story. 00:57 I stupidly didn't record the name when I first saw your message, and now, of course, I can't find it. But hopefully you know who you are. Now, with all that out of the way, this is Unexplained, Season 9, Episode 35, A Land of Darkness, Part 1 of 2. 01:26 In 1973, a strange case was brought to the attention of Anani Guimarães Andrade, founder and president of the Brazilian Institute of Psychobiophysical Research, or the IBPP. 01:39 Over the following 11 years, across seven separate visits, he and his colleagues collected sworn interviews, tape-recorded testimony, and photographic evidence from those involved. 01:51 A family who claimed to be under sustained attack from something not of this world, in their home not far from Sao Paulo. 01:59 The case was thought to be so extraordinary that it ended up in the files of the CIA's Stargate project, which was initiated in 1977 for the purpose of trying to harness psychical powers for military application. 02:13 The files were eventually declassified in 2003. 02:18 No natural explanation was ever confirmed. 02:21 No fraud was ever proven. 02:23 This is that story, as told to Anani Andraji and his team. 02:30 You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. 02:41 It is sometime in the late 1960s, late one night in a small modest home in the suburbs of Sao Paulo in Brazil. 02:50 A 17-year-old girl gets ready for bed. 02:53 She sits at a dressing table and brushes her hair in front of the mirror under the dim glow emanating from her bedside light. 03:01 Like many 17-year-olds, she wonders what her friends might be up to that evening, what she might be missing out on. 03:08 Then she looks down to the Bible on her table, still open at the page she left it at. 03:14 Finishing up, she grabs the book and takes it to her bed, then climbs in, pulls up the covers and begins to read. 03:22 Before long, her eyes feel heavy and eventually she gives up, puts down the book and turns out the light. 03:31 As she lays back on her pillow, closing her eyes, she suddenly has the undeniable feeling that she is not alone in the room. 03:40 Opening her eyes again, she gasps at the sight of a dark shape sitting next to her bed. 03:46 A large black dog that's staring right at her. 03:50 The girl is frozen in terror, unable to look away from its eyes. 03:55 It can't be real, she thinks, as she slowly reaches out to touch it, her hand inching closer and closer until she feels something solid and warm. 04:06 The girl recoils and screams in horror, pulling the covers tightly over her head. 04:12 Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, she mutters urgently under her breath. 04:18 The door swings open and the light snaps on, and suddenly her mother is rushing to her side, Whatever's the matter, she asks. 04:27 The dog, says the girl, finally revealing herself from under the covers. 04:32 It was just there, she says, confused. 04:38 There is no dog. 04:41 It must have been a dream, says her mother, with a look of great concern. 04:46 But the girl isn't sure. 04:48 In the end, the mother agrees to stay until the girl feels settled enough to try for sleep once again. 04:55 After a short time, the mother kisses the girl on the head and leaves the room, turning the light off as she goes. 05:03 And the girl lies back on her pillow. 05:06 her eyelids heavy and slowly closing, when once again she gets that unmistakable feeling. 05:13 Too afraid to at first, for fear of what she might see, eventually she feels brave enough to open her eyes. 05:21 She stares out into the darkness of her room, relieved to find it's completely empty. 05:26 Then she catches something out of the corner of her eye and freezes in fear. 05:32 Something is sitting on top of her wardrobe, staring out at her from the shadows. 05:38 It's hard to make out at first, so dark is the room and so dark is the shape. 05:44 But the dog was back. 05:51 It was a balmy afternoon in April of 1973 in Guarulhos, an industrial city just over 10 miles east of Sao Paulo, a place of brickworks, poultry farms and manufacturing. 06:05 The warm air held the faint smell of dust and cooking smoke, and children called out to each other as they rode their bikes home from school. 06:13 That 17-year-old girl, Noemia, is older now, 21 in fact, and married to Marcos, a plumber. 06:22 Their 18-month-old daughter, Ruth, is the love of their lives. 06:26 The pair lived in a small house on a modest plot shared with Marcos' parents, Pedro and Judici, who lived just behind them in a narrow shared yard, in a bustling home, along with their two other sons and three daughters, aged 11 to 20. 06:43 But inside the front house, things were blissfully quiet in comparison. 06:48 There was little in the way of ornaments, a bible kept within easy reach on a shelf, a calendar from the church tacked to the kitchen wall, the plain unfussy trappings of a devout Pentecostal household. 07:01 Like many stay-at-home parents, Noemia's life was an endless, exhausting cycle of wrangling her 18-month-old daughter, playing, feeding, wiping, washing, cooking and cleaning without a moment's peace, save for the few blessed hours when her daughter finally settled down for a brief nap. 07:23 She caught sleep whenever she could, but rarely was there something that didn't need cleaning, making or picking up whenever the opportunity for rest presented itself. It was a miracle she could stand, let alone get through the day, but hearing her daughter laugh and the way her eyes lit up whenever she caught sight of a bird or one of the neighbourhood's many stray dogs made it all worth it. 07:48 But today she was struggling. 07:51 After almost an hour of trying, she'd finally managed to get Ruth down for a nap. 07:57 After taking a moment to revel in the silence, she turned her attention to the bedrooms and kitchen that hadn't been properly cleaned in days. 08:06 When she finished, Ruth was still fast asleep. 08:10 Noemia stretched out and rubbed at the small of her back, then took a seat on the living room sofa. 08:16 She looked about with satisfaction at the newly tidied room, until something caught her attention on one of the sofa's cushions. 08:25 As she would later describe it, several cuts running parallel to one another appeared to have been made in the fabric of the sofa, as if someone had taken a knife to it. 08:36 But the more she looked, the less those slashes, so close together, resembled single knife cuts, and looked instead more like claw marks. 08:54 Noemia felt a sudden hot dizziness wash over her. 08:58 She closed her eyes and opened them again, but the slashes were still there. 09:04 As a Pentecostal Christian, Noemia's faith wasn't something she kept separate from the ordinary business of life. 09:11 She prayed when she was scared. She prayed when she was grateful. And now, sitting alone on that sofa, she felt a powerful urge to pray once more. 09:21 but something about praying in this particular moment felt wrong. 09:26 So instead, she leapt up and made a conscious decision not to go back into that room until her husband Marcos came home. 09:35 For the rest of that afternoon, she kept Ruth as far away from it as possible and had almost forgotten about it all when she heard the front door open and Marcos appeared in the hallway. 09:47 Then it all came back to her with a jolt. 09:50 He could tell immediately that something was wrong and had to almost force Noemia into the living room to show him what it was. 09:59 He didn't quite know what to make of it as he crouched down at the end of the sofa and ran his fingers along the cuts. 10:06 It was certainly the first time that he'd seen them. 10:09 Even still, he couldn't quite understand what had spooked Noemia so much about them. 10:15 It had been a busy week, with lots of relatives coming and going. 10:19 Their three-year-old nephew was known to be a bit of a handful. Maybe it was just him, he suggested, messing about with scissors or something. 10:27 And it wasn't anything that couldn't be easily repaired. 10:31 But Noemia wasn't so sure, though she tried not to dwell on it, since there was every chance that Marcos was right. 10:38 She couldn't stop thinking how much like claw marks it looked. 10:43 The following day, the house felt different. 10:46 Perhaps it was all in her head, but now every piece of furniture seemed suspect to her. 10:52 Every sound from outside, wrong. 10:56 She moved from room to room, checking for any other signs of violent damage. 11:02 She checked all the bedding and the laundry strung up outside, even the good embroidered tablecloth that they kept folded away for when people from church came to visit. 11:12 But all of it was fine. 11:20 Marcos' father, Pedro, was at home when he heard Noemia's screams. 11:25 He rushed over as quickly as he could to find a shaking and terrified Noemia huddled together with Ruth in the kitchen. 11:34 As she explained through half-caught breaths, she'd been in the bedroom when she heard the faint sound of fabric being torn behind her. 11:42 Then she turned to see her curtains being ripped apart right in front of her, as though being slashed by an invisible knife. 11:49 Pedro took a moment to calm her down, then asked her to show him the curtains. 11:55 Pedro was a bricklayer by trade and a respected figure in the local Pentecostal Assembly of God congregation, the most popular Pentecostal denomination in Brazil. 12:06 And as he fingered the cuts in the fabric, he couldn't help feeling deeply concerned. 12:12 After all, this was the mother of his granddaughter, and clearly she must have been responsible for the cuts. 12:19 But why would she do that, he wondered. 12:22 Perhaps she'd been finding life harder since Ruth was born than she'd been letting on. 12:28 It was the following day, he later said, when he saw it for himself, too. 12:33 He was back in the house again, and standing in Noemia and Marcos' bedroom, watching out for any unusual activity. 12:41 The room was small and cramped, a bed on either side, a narrow gap between them, and a wardrobe pressed against the wall. 12:50 Suddenly, as he stood at the end of one of the beds, he heard the sound of material ripping and apparently looked down to see one slash after another suddenly appear in the mattress. 13:03 Pedro stood completely stunned until a dark blur in his peripheral vision forced him to turn away. 13:10 Pedro spun around just in time to see what he later described as a figure appearing to retreat back into the wall. 13:19 Before it could vanish completely, he claimed to see a single powerful limb, covered in reddish fur like the coat of a jaguar, at the end of which was a huge set of black curved claws, all at least 15 centimetres in length. 13:36 When Pedro later told Noemia what he'd seen, she went deathly pale. 13:41 She didn't think anyone would believe her, but she had seen it too, she said. 13:52 The following day, Zanaiji Da Silva, a neighbour of the families, was sitting in her living room with her husband when they heard a knock at the door. 14:01 Zina, as she was known to her friends, was surprised to find a worried-looking Pedro standing on her front doorstep. 14:08 Though she knew the man, it wasn't like him to call on them out of the blue. It was even stranger to hear what he had to say. 14:16 Something bizarre was happening at Noemia and Marcos' home, he said, and he asked if they'd come over to see it for themselves. 14:25 Pedro, it seemed, couldn't yet quite believe it was real and was desperate for a second opinion. 14:32 A little unnerved, Zina and her husband agreed, and before long, were both standing in Noemia and Marcos' home, staring at the strange slash marks in the curtains. 14:43 When Pedro said that some kind of beastly creature had made them, Zina's husband couldn't help but smile. 14:50 Clearly whatever was going on, Pedro was just messing with them. 14:55 Then he showed them the scratch marks on the mattress too, but Zina's husband remained unmoved. 15:02 Lifting up the mattress, he saw that the other side was completely unharmed, and so, with some amusement, he turned it over and shouted to whoever the creature was to reveal itself and tear the other side. 15:16 Nothing happened. 15:18 Zina and her husband followed Pedro into the kitchen, leaving Noemia in the bedroom, when moments later, they heard the young woman scream out, The blood of Jesus has power. 15:30 The others rushed back into the bedroom to find Noemia, shaking and staring down at the mattress that had now been slashed three more times. 15:40 When Zina asked her what happened, she claimed that a hairy clawed hand had appeared right in front of her and tore at the mattress. 15:49 An incredulous Zina was just getting her to explain that again when she suddenly let out a scream and fainted on the spot. 15:57 She awoke to find her eyes wet with tears and a deeply concerned husband, along with Noemia and Pedro, standing over her praying. 16:07 When they asked her what happened, Zina took a moment to collect herself. 16:12 It was the hairy clawed hand, she said. 16:14 It had just appeared out of nowhere right in front of her, and the moment she saw it, she must have collapsed with terror. 16:28 It wasn't just Zina from outside of the family who claimed to see something too. 16:33 A 16-year-old student named Adari, who lived on the same street, was also invited inside to witness the bizarre phenomenon. He later claimed also to witness the mattress tearing in front of him. 16:48 Either way, having seen what had happened to Zina, Pedro had no doubt now that what was happening in his son and stepdaughter's home was real. 16:58 That night, both families gathered together in Noemia and Marcos' home to pray. 17:04 Meanwhile, outside on the street, concerned neighbours, who'd heard rumours that something strange was happening in the house, stopped by to try and get a glimpse of it themselves. 17:15 But all left disappointed. 17:18 When Noemia woke the next morning, on May 1st, 1973, she felt sure that something was different. 17:27 The cloud that had been gathering seemed to have evaporated completely. 17:32 After four days of terror, whatever had been stalking them had gone. 17:38 Sometime later that summer, Anani Andraji was at home in São Paulo when a letter arrived from a colleague and tucked in alongside it was a newspaper clipping, a short, slightly sensational article about strange goings-on in a house in Guarulhos. 17:56 Andraji was not a man given to sensationalism. 18:00 An engineer by training, he founded the Brazilian Institute of Psychobiophysical Research as a serious attempt to bring some measure of scientific rigor to phenomena that colleagues in more conventional fields wouldn't touch. 18:15 But the truth was, to Andraji, apparent poltergeist cases, hauntings, and claims of psychokinesis, these weren't matters of faith or superstition, but simply a question of data. 18:29 And so, eventually he and some of his colleagues from the IBPP made contact with the family, who agreed to meet with them. 18:38 Andraji listened and rapped over the course of six hours as Noemi, Marcos and Pedro recounted the apparent goings-on from earlier in the year. 18:49 He found all three of them to be perfectly credible and had evidently been traumatised by whatever had taken place. 18:56 The same could also be said for their neighbour Zina, who he also spoke to. 19:01 Much of the damage was still visible and had been kept by the family, enabling Andraji and his team to take pictures of it all. 19:10 It was during her time with Andraji that Noemia also told him about that strange recurring vision of the black dog she saw in her bedroom back when she was only 17. 19:22 Andraji didn't quite know what to do with it all, but thanked the family for their time and promised to keep an eye out for them in case anything else unusual happened again. 19:33 About a month later, Noemia and Marcos were overjoyed to discover that Noemia was pregnant again, and soon, those strange days back in the spring felt like a long-forgotten dream. 19:53 It was almost a year later, in April 1974, when Noemia, now six months pregnant, was at home alone with Ruth when she heard what sounded like hail raining down on the roof of the house. 20:07 Only outside it was nothing but bright blue skies. 20:11 Noemia was suddenly paralysed by fear. 20:15 Had the thing come back, she wondered. 20:18 Too scared to go outside to see what it might be, she spent a fraught day, not taking her eyes off the now two-year-old Ruth for a second, until her husband Marcos came home. 20:29 When he finally came back, he immediately climbed up to the roof to investigate. 20:34 There, much to his surprise, he found a huge scattering of rubble and stone all over the tiles. 20:41 Some of the pieces were as large as half a brick. 20:45 Marcos couldn't help but feel angry. Clearly someone, who'd no doubt heard all the rumours from the year before, was playing a joke on the family. He suggested they keep an eye out for any potential culprits, but Noemia wasn't convinced. 21:00 It didn't sound like someone was throwing something from the street, she said. It seemed to come from directly above the house. 21:07 And there were 20 kilos of it, far more than someone could throw on their own without being seen. 21:14 Only when Marcos heard it for himself a few days later did he finally agree that something else was going on. 21:21 Then it happened again and again. 21:25 It was always in the middle of the day and came hard and constant in sudden flashes, he later said. 21:32 Every time they ran outside to try and catch a potential culprit, they found nobody there. 21:39 Then it began happening to Pedro and Giudici's home too. 21:43 One afternoon, as soon as it began again, Pedro later claimed he rushed outside to try and witness it, arriving just in time to see the last stone appear in mid-air, no more than a metre above the tiles, before it dropped, rolled a short distance and stopped. 22:02 That stone wasn't thrown, he said. 22:05 It was simply released from the air. 22:08 In the early hours of May 2nd, Marcos awoke with a start. Feeling a sharp pain in his arm, he touched the area with his hand and felt something wet and viscous. 22:20 Turning on the bedside lamp, he was shocked to see that he was bleeding from a deep cut, right along his tricep that was still welling at the edges. 22:29 Noemia and Ruth were fast asleep beside him. 22:39 The bleeding on Marcos' arm stopped quickly once he applied pressure. 22:44 He figured maybe he'd just cut himself earlier in the day and hadn't noticed until it opened up again in his sleep. 22:51 It certainly wasn't something worth worrying Noemia about. 22:55 It had taken her weeks to stop having nightmares after the eerie events of last spring. 23:01 Later that day, a friend of the couple's brought her 18-month-old daughter over for a playdate. 23:08 Marcos and the girl's mother talked in the yard as Noemia fixed some drinks in the kitchen while the toddlers potted about in the living room. 23:17 Noemia smiled to herself at the sound of them babbling together and the occasional peal of laughter as they went about their business. 23:25 Then one of the girls screamed. 23:28 The parents rushed in to find both girls standing completely still with looks of utter terror in their eyes. 23:36 Then the girls began to wail unconsolably. 23:40 marcos and the friend rushed to pick up their daughters and it was only then that the friend noticed the blood on her daughter's leg she smeared it away with her hand and saw to her alarm a single deep cut underneath about three centimeters long had she caught it on something or had ruth somehow done it to her they wondered Noemia and Marcos looked guiltily toward each other, seemingly unwilling to let the little girl's mother in on the truth about all the strange things that had apparently been happening in their home. 24:16 Was it really back, and putting others, children no less, in danger? 24:23 That night, Marcos finally told Noemia about the inexplicable cut he'd woken up with, and when it came time to put Ruth down, the little girl refused to sleep alone. 24:35 The next morning, Ruth was still lying on Noemia's chest when she woke up to a strange burning sensation on her face. 24:44 Slowly, she maneuvered herself from under Ruth, taking great care not to wake her. 24:49 Finally, unpeeled, she stumbled groggily into the bathroom, turned on the light, and then gasped. 24:56 Looking at her face in the mirror, she later claimed to see three thin cuts in her cheek. 25:02 Each was no wider than a sewing needle, and though they weren't bleeding, the stinging pain of them was unbearable. 25:09 Just then, as she stood there trying to make sense of it all, she felt something shift behind her. 25:16 Staring up into the mirror, beyond her reflection, she saw it. 25:22 It was some kind of animal, but not like any she'd ever seen before. 25:27 It was covered in dark brown hair, its face feral, but almost human. 25:33 It had large, terrifyingly sharp teeth and appeared to be glowing as though it were being lit up from somewhere inside. 25:42 Then the creature turned and began moving toward the bedroom to where her husband and daughter were sleeping. 25:49 Noemia opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. 25:55 next thing she knew she was waking up on the bathroom floor trying to avert her eyes from the harsh daylight now streaming in through the window looking up she was relieved to see a concerned looking marcos standing over her only when he finally helped her to her feet did she realize with some comfort that it had all just been a terrible nightmare one so vivid it had driven her to sleepwalk then she turned and caught sight of her face in the mirror And there on her cheek were those three long cuts, even redder and more prominent than they were before. 26:36 You've been listening to Unexplained, Season 9, Episode 35, A Land of Darkness, Part 1. 26:44 The second and final episode will be released next Friday, September 25th. 26:50 This episode was written by Richard McLean-Smith and Emma Dibden. 26:55 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. 27:26 Until next time, stay strange and dissonant. 27:59 you 30:16 This is an iHeart Podcast. 30:19 Guaranteed human.