When the Dead Work for the Living: Poltergeists, Curses, and the Black Magic Trail
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
For centuries, investigators have argued over what a poltergeist actually is. Some call it a restless dead. Others blame a living mind that leaks force in sleep or crisis. A third camp points to something older and colder: bargains struck in the dark, where the living pay spirits to harm. The cases that follow do not settle the argument. They only tighten it. In Toronto, researchers built a ghost from a lie and watched tables dance. In São Paulo, clothing burst into flame after a marriage and a garden filled with offerings. In the Papuan highlands, snakes hunted a priest who dared the sorcerers. On the Gold Coast, judges found groves of children’s skulls and later officers found black powder on car seats. Again and again the same question returns: did the living invent the attack, or did they merely open a door?
POLTERGEISTS
Poltergeist reports stretch back hundreds of years. Researchers still cannot agree whether the force belongs to the dead, to some other intelligence, or to the unconscious mind of a living person—especially a troubled child. Laboratory psychokinesis looks feeble beside what happens in haunted houses. That gap has never closed.
In the early 1970s the Toronto Society for Psychical Research decided to test the idea that a group mind could manufacture a ghost. Members invented Philip Aylesford, an Englishman of Cromwell’s age. He loved a Romani gypsy girl named Margo. His wife Dorothea denounced her as a witch. The girl burned at the stake, and Philip hung himself in 1654.
Strangely, the tale did have one real thread: Oliver Cromwell’s grandmother, Lady Cromwell, was believed to have died as a result of witchcraft. Alice Samuel and her family were hanged for it. England and Scotland executed many others in the same years.
For months the group sat and called Philip. Nothing answered. Then a rap struck the table. Using one knock for yes and two for no, they questioned the presence. It claimed Philip’s name and recited the story they had written for him. Later sittings produced table movements filmed for television. The experimenters called it a success of the unconscious. A darker reading remains possible: a bored or opportunistic spirit simply joined the game and wore the costume they offered.
DARK MAGIC IN BRAZIL
Guy Lyon Playfair (1935-2018) reached Brazil by a different road. After Cambridge, he taught in Rio de Janeiro, then stayed on as a journalist.
Around 1971, a neighbor, the American actor Larry Carr, led him into Spiritist circles and to a healer named Edivaldo Silva working in a poor quarter of the city. Edivaldo probed the painful spot on each patient, scribbled a note, and moved on. Playfair volunteered. Months later he returned and found an old man on a bed with his abdomen open. Edivaldo bent over the wound. Playfair looked away; when he looked back, a bandage already covered the site. Then the healer pressed Playfair’s own stomach. Playfair felt a plop, hands inside the skin, a tickle without pain, and the smell of ether. He went home stiff, a jagged red line across his abdomen. A second session eased the complaint, though it did not cure it for good.
Edivaldo said spirits of dead surgeons rode him: Dr. Calazans, a Frenchman named Pierre, a Londoner named Johnson, and a German called Dr. Fritz.
Playfair watched more operations and began to write. He met Hernani Guimarães Andrade, founder of the Brazilian Institute for Psychobiophysical Research, and moved to São Paulo for unrestricted access to Andrade’s files. Friends thought the move eccentric. Playfair thought the archive worth it. His work widened from healing to poltergeists, reincarnation, and black magic.
In 1973, he joined an IBPP investigation of a haunting that had already lasted six years. The Ipiranga household—a Portuguese mother, divorced from a Lithuanian immigrant, with an adult son and daughter—endured bangs, crashes, and clothes that caught fire. The family had moved three times. The trouble began after the son married a woman named Nora. Playfair sat up with a tape recorder. Hours later, bangs shook the house as he drifted toward sleep, just as they had for the previous night’s investigator. Four dogs slept through it. The next night a footstool bounced down the stairs, and a drawer of clothes flew into the yard. Playfair noted that the outbreaks clustered at the edges of sleep.
Mediums asked their guides to move the presence on. Quiet lasted two weeks, then the house erupted again. A Candomblé priest arrived, named the case black magic, performed rites, and the activity stopped.
Andrade had seen the pattern before: someone in the house had become the target of revenge from possible origins—a lover who died by suicide, a jealous relative, a neighbor, even a family member nursing a grudge. Brazil held many terreiros of quimbanda, centers where people hired spirit forces for harm. A working poltergeist, Andrade said, needed two things: a pack of willing low spirits and a spiritually unguarded victim.
Playfair later described this traffic as a “PSI underworld” bound to magic and malice. He told of Maria José Ferreira, eleven years old in 1965, around whom objects and bricks fell. The force then turned on her: bites, slaps, attempts to smother her in sleep, clothes set alight. At a Spiritist center, a communicator claimed the girl had been a witch in a previous life and that the dead had come to collect. No one could prove the claim. At thirteen, Maria swallowed ant poison and died. Some asked whether she chose the dose or whether the presence poured it.
A CURSE FROM THE SEA
Another case centered on Marcia, twenty-eight, a psychologist. On a beach near São Paulo, she found a six-inch plaster figure of a woman, paint worn by the sea. An aunt warned her not to take a statue of the sea goddess Yemanjá. Marcia ignored the warning. Food poisoning followed, then weight loss and coughing blood. An X-ray showed a lung patch that later vanished. A pressure cooker exploded and burned her arms and face. An oven hurled flame at her; a repairman found no fault. A photograph of Marcia jumped from a wall in her parents’ house at the same moment. Suicidal impulses arrived next—the urge to step in front of cars, to open a fifteenth-floor window while a voice urged her out. Night visitations followed: a presence in the bedroom, then the sensation of a male body covering her.
A Spiritist sent her to an Umbanda center with the statue. The director called it a trabalho, a working aimed at her because she had taken the image. Paint remaining on the figure matched the injured parts of her body. She returned the statue. The run of bad luck ended.
David St. Clair, Playfair’s friend and author of Drum and Candle, met the same world on his first night in Rio. On Copacabana, he reached toward a clay devil standing in a ring of candles. A companion yanked him back: a despacho, an offering. Beggars and dogs left cooked chickens untouched in similar circles.
Years later, St. Clair prepared to leave Brazil and offered his maid Edna six months’ wages. Work stalled. A typist ruined a manuscript and fell ill. A publisher rejected the book. An inheritance froze. Plans for travel to Greece collapsed. A lover withdrew. Malaria struck. A psychic said someone had closed all his paths. Another friend heard a warning at an Umbanda session. A third named Edna. Socks had been vanishing from the line; she blamed the wind. These were the items she stole to bind him.
St. Clair asked her to take him to a session. In a remote hall painted with Exu (devil), drums rose, and women jerked as if seized. A priestess in red spat liquor in his face. A medium named the one who brought him: she wanted marriage, or a house and land. The priestess drove Edna out and worked to lift the curse, warning that it would fall twice as hard on the sender. Within days a rejected story sold, the inheritance arrived, the book found a publisher, and the lover returned. Edna developed a stomach growth. Surgery failed to restore her. An Umbanda priest told her the curse had rebounded and would last while she stayed near St. Clair. She admitted the working and left.
Playfair came to see black magic as an exchange. Incarnate people hire discarnate exus—inferior, amoral spirits who want the sensations of flesh again. Operators catch them with food, drink, and flattery. The spirits prove vain and temperamental, much like the personalities that surface in many poltergeist cases.
At Ipiranga in 1968, bottles, candles, and cigars appeared in the garden—the signature of a trabalho. Suspects multiplied: a former boyfriend of the daughter Iracy who had killed himself; an abandoned aunt; the wife of a married man Iracy had loved; a discarded lover of Nora, whose husband’s photographs often appeared defaced. While Playfair worked that case, Andrade handled another in Osasco. Two families fought over a boundary. One ordered a curse. Raps, fires, stones on the roof, and a large cigar spoiling food in a saucepan followed.
All these cases had the same dark thread running through them. Candomblé grew from African slave religions after the 1830s, kin to Haitian Vodou and Cuban Palo Mayombe.
Playfair later spent two years on the famous Enfield poltergeist case in England.
THE CANNIBALS OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Decades before and far from Brazil, Father André Dupeyrat encountered other dark beliefs. Posted in 1930 among the Fuyugé in the Papuan interior, he worked from the missions at Fané-les-Roses and Cour-des-Anges in the country of Papua New Guinea, then administered as a colony by Australia.
Violence, disease, and sorcery had ruled the valleys for generations. The mission stood on an abandoned village site. The dead once rested in the forks of a gabi tree. One day, in a foreshadowing of certain events, lightning split the trunk and spilled skulls and bones. Father Andre remembered the orchids he had admired had grown from the forgotten graves.
Dupeyrat carried a skull to his room. His catechist Severiano burst in: the Devil had returned. Sorcerers back from the coast claimed stronger magic than the priest and demanded a return to the old ways. Dupeyrat walked four hours to Dilava. The village waited. He told them he would spend a day and a night in every settlement, celebrate Mass, and pronounce the exorcism of St. Michael. If the sorcerers killed him on the road, they were right. If they failed, the people would never listen to them again.
A silver snake came at him on the path. Villagers fled. He killed it. In the next hut, a six-foot gunmetal snake, reddish stripe from flattened head to tail, lowered from a roof beam toward his face. He prayed. The snake dropped and slid away. He killed it with his staff. In five more villages, snakes appeared in spare shirts, blankets, and Mass vessels. From a hammock, a native warned him that two black snakes had climbed the supports. Someone passed him a knife. He killed both. The sorcerers’ prestige broke when they failed to kill him.
Dupeyrat wrote that men called sorcerers in such countries wield powers beyond ordinary human reach, powers he hesitated to name even while he named their source before the villages. Papua, he said, still let the Prince of Darkness work in the open.
One evening, talk turned to Isidoro, a sorcerer said to become a cassowary. They heard the bird’s run. Isidoro entered, spoke, and left to the same sound. Dupeyrat checked the house where Isidoro claimed he would sleep. Empty. The next day, on the far side of the mountain, villagers swore Isidoro had spent the evening in their communal hut.
A year after his arrival, following the curé through the jungle, Dupeyrat felt compelled to take the right-hand fork of a trail. The others called him back. He kept on. They found a leaf hut and an old, filthy Papuan left to die after four days, as custom demanded for the sick and the worn-out. The old man looked at the curé and asked for baptism so he could go to God. He could not have known the missionaries were coming. He died a quarter of an hour later in the priest’s arms, smiling.
Dupeyrat also walked into villages and found what the raids left behind: a child’s head in the dust, crown pierced, brain sucked out like an egg; flesh and fat cooking with vegetables. The butchered body of THE young girl, along with two other victims, was cooking with cassava and other vegetables. Not all Papuans had given up cannibalism.
WEST AFRICA
West Africa supplied a third archive. James Marshall, born in Edinburgh in 1829, lost an arm at sixteen, became an Anglican minister, then a Catholic, and in 1873 became the first Chief Magistrate of the Gold Coast. He later served as a senior judge and Chief Justice. He described local religion as Fetish: groveling fear of spirits, propitiated by incantation and human sacrifice. The dead, people believed, kept their rank. A free man needed slaves in the next world; families sent them. Colonel Brackenbury’s medical officer, quartered in the house of the king’s executioner at Coomassie, heard the man estimate two or three killings a day, a thousand a year, and a week of slaughter so large he could not count the bodies.
At Akassa, Marshall and a colleague learned that head men in red caps had to kill two slaves to earn the cap, and that a dead cap-wearer took at least three more.
At Asaba, they visited the Juju Grove alone, armed as if for sport because no native would go. They found a clearing and two children’s skulls the animals had not yet taken. Weak children were sold for the grove.
Marshall faced forty red-cap chiefs, told them he had seen the evidence, and promised soldiers and the rope. The chiefs asked how the White men had found the place. Young warriors wanted war. Marshall and Kane waited in a fort for a steamer. After skirmishes, the people sued for peace and surrendered the men who had ordered the latest killings.
In May 1888, one chief was hanged. Slaves came to the mission church and thanked Marshall for treating them as humans. They described how they were kept like goats and fowls in a yard, and they, their wives, and their children were taken out to be killed at their master’s whim.
He returned to England and died in March 1889, aged fifty-nine.
What he learned was that despite the best intentions of the missionaries in the area, all of different denominations, the majority of converts held a secret belief in fetishism over Christian teachings.
GHANA
Decades later, James H. Neal arrived in Accra in the 1950s as Chief Investigations Officer for the Gold Coast government. Once retired, he would write Jungle Magic: My Life Among the Witch Doctors of West Africa (1966), detailing his experiences in Africa.
He wrote of when he arrived: “… if anyone had told me then that black magic, or juju, would endanger my life almost continuously, and eventually force me to choose between giving up my high-ranking position and accepting certain death, I would have laughed outright. But, of course, in Accra, at the beginning I had no idea of the terrifying experiences that lay ahead of me.”
Upon starting in his position, a detective warned that suspects would go to juju-men if the case they were working on continued.
Later that night, Neal was at the European Club in Accra, where he met new acquaintances. He was fascinated to hear intelligent, level-headed men lend credence to what he called a lot of mumbo-jumbo. He told them about the threat his detective had expressed.
Kevin Ryan, a road-building engineer from London, described how he worked in the bush country and that ju-ju was practiced extensively around the native villages. He said, “… if you want to know something, if it weren’t for an amulet that a powerful ju-ju man made for £50 I wouldn’t be alive today.”
Neal recalled when a silk scarf was stolen from the back of his car, and later an umbrella. Sometimes he found his tires slashed, his radiator drained of water, and the car doors forced open with a steel bar, among other damages.
Then he found the seat of his auto scattered with black powder. His chauffeur brushed it off, then urinated on it to destroy its power.
Fever and pain followed until Neal seemed to leave his body, race through a wall, and hear that it was not his time. Doctors could not name the illness. An African officer called it juju.
Then he found more black powder in his car. One night he felt invisible creatures with long snouts attacking his solar plexus while he lay in bed. He felt his vitality drain.
A witch doctor described two men from the bribery case. A holy man’s ceremony restored him.
His White doctor agreed he was the victim of a juju attack. Soon after the counter ritual, his servant killed a cobra outside his bungalow. Then he noticed a small grey snake slithering towards them. When the servant saw it, he said it was created artificially by a witch doctor. Anyone bitten by it would have no chance of recovery. The servant chopped off its head, but no blood came out.
Soon after, Neal began to itch all over his body. Two healthy trees outside the wall of protection made by the holy man split down the middle with a loud crash for no apparent reason. It seemed a new juju attack was launched, but they could not go through the perimeter of protection set up by the holy man.
Summoned to a remote camp near the French border, Neal heard the Paramount Chief speak of Leopard Men: a cult that filed teeth, wore leopard pelts, fitted iron claws, and took sleepers for blood rites and flesh. Members bought boys, fattened them, and ate them; they also used the method on political rivals and even kin who stood between them and an inheritance.
While Neal investigated disappearances, nine lions entered the village. His men shot one. The rest dragged off three men and a woman. Pit traps caught another. It climbed out, and the engineer shot it; the mate seized him from behind until a worker with a shotgun forced it off. Villagers blamed juju for lions that hunted with purpose.
Neal’s own end in Ghana came after he left home without the holy man’s amulet. At the Accra races he saw men his officers had arrested. Walking down from the grandstand, with no one within twenty yards, something shoved him. He broke multiple bones and had to resign. The holy man said an astral entity had pushed him. Neal turned and saw empty air.
Back in England, he wrote that genuine witchcraft exists, and that a close study of it reveals a depth of depravity that sickens by its obscenity and its destruction of human dignity.
The records do not prove a single mechanism. They only keep returning to the same scene: a grudge, a payment, a susceptible house, and then knocks, fire, snakes, sickness, or a shove from space. Whether the agent is the unconscious, the dead, or something that answers to both names, the living keep finding ways to hire it.
POSTSCRIPT – Black Magic in the 21st Century
Not every victim of these beliefs belongs to a distant century.
In 2001, in São Luís, Brazil, house painter José Antônio Serra found his thirteen-year-old son, Welson Frazão Serra, near the hut where they lived. The boy was on his knees, his head in the dirt. Parts of his body had been cut away with almost surgical precision. The corpse was shrunken. Then Serra understood: the blood had been taken.
Welson was the twentieth boy killed in Maranhão since 1991. After him, a ten-year-old died in Codó, about 150 miles southwest of São Luís—a city often called the witchcraft capital of Brazil. The victims were poor and, parents said, bright. Most had been castrated. Some had been raped. Some were beheaded. Some were found drained of blood, with eyes, lips, liver, heart, or lungs missing. Not every scene held ritual signs, but some did: circles, crosses, chicken blood, feathers, cassava, candles.
“It is they who practice macumba,” Serra said. “They killed my son. They are the ones doing all these killings.”
The Maranhão cases followed twenty-six slayings in Pará between 1989 and 1991. The crimes held the country. Parents blamed the shadowed edge of African-influenced religions practiced by millions of Brazilians—traditions carried by enslaved Africans in the sixteenth century and later braided with Portuguese Catholicism into houses of worship known as Candomblé, Umbanda, and related rites. Devotees honor orixás with drumming, possession, and animal offerings. Leaders deny human sacrifice. Offerings found beside some of the bodies and the insistence of families in remote villages kept the charge alive. Critics said the press had hung the crimes on witchcraft. The parents who lived nearest the graves did not wait for headlines to name a suspect.
For a decade after the first Maranhão murder in 1991, courts convicted only one man. In 1994 he served less than a year, won parole, and fled the state. Other suspects walked free for lack of evidence. Families accused the police of incompetence. An unspoken fear ran beside that charge: that officers and judges dreaded a curse—or worse. Some thought politics had stalled the hunt. Relatives said they were offered government jobs or baskets of food for silence. Had the dead been sons of the rich, they believed, the manhunt would have been different.
Fifteen of twenty-one Maranhão murders fell between 1995 and 2001. The crimes resembled one another without matching exactly. Investigators concluded more than one killer was at work. Causes of death ranged from bleeding to suffocation and other means. Most parents still blamed witchcraft sects. The killings ran into 2003.
Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito was later convicted for a portion of the crimes. He was arrested in April 2004 after neighbors complained of a stench coming from his ramshackle house in Sao Luis. Officers dug up the dirt floor and found two skeletons, one of a four-year-old boy named Daniel and the other of a child Brito said was called Diego.
He eventually confessed to killing forty-two boys across the region. A court first gave him nineteen years in 2006, then a sentence totaling 580 years. Searchers found bodies, limbs, and fragments of missing children at his home. He claimed a local priestess paid about thirty-five dollars for each boy’s testicles and that he killed at her bidding. Reports later said he recanted. Many still believe he—like the police—feared the reach of those who work such rites.
A second prosecution targeted Valentina de Andrade, leader of Lineamiento Universal Superior (L.U.S.). She believed she was contacted by extraterrestrial beings that warned her about the inevitable doom; however, if she spread their word, they would send a spaceship to collect all her followers. These ‘beings’ assured her that God doesn’t exist and Jesus was an alien messiah who had arrived on Earth to teach humans about enlightenment and love.
She believed that male children born after 1981 were the embodiment of evil, and they had to be exterminated as a payment to these beings who would save them.
From 1989 to 1993, young boys began to go missing, and it is estimated that nineteen boys disappeared. None were older than 15. Only six bodies were found; all had been castrated with medical expertise and then left to die in the jungle. Another five boys managed to escape, some after being castrated, and went to the police.
She stood as the principal defendant in the Altamira child-emasculation trials. In December 2003, a Belém jury acquitted her, 6 to 1. Her lawyers produced police papers placing her outside Altamira when the charged crimes occurred. Four other members who belonged to the cult received sentences of thirty-two to seventy-seven years. The group, witnesses said, pulled followers from their families and prepared them for rescue by beings from the sky.
Among those first convicted in the L.U.S. cases were Anísio Ferreira de Sousa, a local doctor accused in the surgeries and killings; Césio Brandão, a physician accused of performing the castrations; Amaílton Madeira Gomes, a landowner tied to the abductions; and Carlos Alberto Santos Lima, a military policeman who served the group as a guard.
The murders were later linked to Brazilian child killer Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito. After her acquittal, de Andrade fled Brazil and continued her cult in Argentina until her death in 2022.
The dead in Maranhão and Pará did not close the older argument that runs through this story. They only brought it forward: when a child is taken, and the ground around him holds candles and blood, the living still ask whether faith was used as a mask—or whether someone, once again, had hired what waits on the other side.