Joelma Building fire

Start with the number of dead, because it is the clearest measure of how this story travels. The count published by the newspapers in the days after the fire, taken from the Instituto Médico Legal, was 187; that is the figure Folha de S.Paulo reported on 3 February 1974 and the one the Estadão archive still uses. English-language fire-safety manuals give 179 — it appears, for example, in William Dailey's A Guide to Fire Safety Management. Rede Globo's Linha Direta case file gives 189 dead and 345 injured. A Folha photo caption in 2005 said 188. By 2008 G1 was writing 'almost 200', and by 2018 Folha used the same round phrase. No reconciled official total appears in any of the sources consulted here, and every figure above is offered as what a named source says, not as a fact. Where our earlier entry printed a single confident number, the honest answer is a range with names attached to it. The curse story has two ingredients, and they are not of equal quality. The first is a pillory: the claim that the ground held a pelourinho where enslaved and condemned people were punished. Folha de S.Paulo reported this in 2005, but reported it precisely as something that 'urban legend websites' say, and no historical source consulted here places a pillory on this block. It stays in this entry as an attributed claim and nothing more. The second ingredient is real, and it deserves better than its use as a curse. On 4 November 1948 Paulo Ferreira de Camargo, a 26-year-old chemistry teacher and assistant at the University of São Paulo, killed his mother, Benedita Ferreira de Camargo, 56, and his sisters Maria Antonieta, 23, and Cordélia, 19, and hid their bodies in a well in the yard of the family house on Rua Santo Antônio. Police uncovered the well on 23 November; he took his own life while they were digging. It became known as the Crime do Poço. Three named women were murdered by a relative, which is a crime, not an omen — and turning them into the first act of a haunting is the point at which this kind of storytelling stops being harmless. Whether that house stood on the ground the Joelma later occupied is genuinely disputed, and the dispute is instructive. Rede Globo's Linha Direta states flatly that 'in 1948 there was a house where the Edifício Joelma stands today', and adds that the street numbering was later changed — a claim that conveniently disposes of any address that fails to match. The same Linha Direta page also says the Joelma was a twenty-storey building put up in 1972; it had twenty-five floors and was finished in 1971. Accounts of the case place the house at Rua Santo Antônio 104, citing the São Paulo papers of November 1948; the digitised originals are held by the National Library and could not be opened for this entry, so that address is reported here at second hand. Folha de S.Paulo, describing the burning building on 1 February 1974, placed the Joelma's rear façade at Rua Santo Antônio 184. Those are different numbers on the same street, which is consistent with the account that the house stood a block away; it is not proof, and this entry does not claim it as proof. On the ghosts themselves there is something better than a debunking: a named man on the record explaining where some of the fear came from. José Roberto Viestel managed the Joelma's car park and was one of the people who fought the fire with the garage hoses when the brigade's failed. Interviewed by Carolina Iskandarian for G1 in 2008, at the age of 71, he said he thought the hauntings were nonsense and then admitted his own hand in them: after the fire, sightseers kept coming to look at the building, and because the firefighters had left some coffins behind, he used to drop them from an upper floor to watch the crowd scatter. He found it funny. It is also possible to date the supernatural reading of the Joelma, and it does not start in 1974. The earliest fixed point traced here is Somos seis, a book of letters attributed by the medium Chico Xavier to the dead, published by the Grupo Espírita Emmanuel in the mid-1970s, two of whose correspondents are presented as young people killed in the fire. From it came the film Joelma 23º Andar, produced in 1980 and released on 12 April of that year — by the Cinemateca Brasileira's record the first Brazilian feature with a spiritist theme, with Chico Xavier himself appearing in it. The Cinemateca's transcription of the film's own opening titles is the most useful sceptical document in the whole file: 'Starting from a real event (the fire), this film presents a story based on a book. The film's characters are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is mere coincidence.' The founding work of the Joelma's ghost story says on screen that its people are invented. The rest arrives later and commercially. A paid ghost route through São Paulo, 'São Paulo de Outro Mundo', has run monthly since 1999 and passes the building; its organiser, the guide Carlos Roberto Silvério, told G1 he had noticed the city 'had this attraction of legends and myths'. In 2005 the owner of a nightclub that had opened on the ground floor told Folha that the mystery was good for business — 'I have never had so much free publicity' — while saying he did not believe in wandering souls himself. One strand is different, and this entry treats it differently. Thirteen people died in a lift and were never identified; they were buried side by side at the Cemitério São Pedro in Vila Alpina, and a popular devotion grew around the graves, with water poured to ease burns and milk to ease the smoke. Folha de S.Paulo reported in 2018 on Rosemere Alencar, a gardener at the cemetery who has tended the graves every Sunday since a vow made when her daughter was not expected to live. The researcher Fábio Mariano Borges, of the ESPM, explained the mechanism to the same newspaper: most such shrines hold 'simple, unknown people whose death was for some reason wrapped in mystery', and where the historical record is silent 'popular faith takes on the job of creating its own narratives'. That is as good an account of how the Joelma became haunted as any this entry could offer, and it comes from someone who studies it.