The Killer Doctor, the Swirling Fire, and the World’s Most Haunted Building

This block in Brazil has been home to one of the deadliest skyscraper disasters in history, a doctor with a murderous secret, and—some say—a curse that goes back centuries.

Illustrations by Ivo Puiupo | Edited by Farah Mohammed

In 1990, visitors to Brazil’s São Pedro Cemetery began noticing something eerie.

The cemetery in São Paulo was relatively new, inaugurated in 1972, right in the middle of one of this bustling city’s busiest areas, so noise and activity were par for the course. But what visitors to the graveyard heard wasn’t the hustle of daily city life or burials. Instead, multiple people reported hearing screaming, moaning and cries for help. It seemed the dead were restless.

The reported cries for help came from a very specific site: a mass grave of 13 bodies, buried there only two years after the cemetery had opened. Desperate to stop the noises, one day, the cemetery caretaker, Luiz Nunez, did the only thing he could think of: He grabbed a watering can and dumped its contents on the 13 graves.

“We started thanking god then, because it quieted them,” Nunez said in a 2005 television interview, standing over the graves while he spoke, shaking his head as if still in disbelief.  

From then on, many visitors who claimed to hear their cries would leave a glass of water on their graves, rather than the flowers that dotted the rest of the cemetery.