Myths, Mysteries, & Monsters
Myths, Mysteries, & Monsters
The Mystery of Hoer Verde - SOLVED - The Brazilian Town That Disappeared
It's a mystery that has been popping up more recently thanks to the video game Control in 2019 and a BBC Audio Drama from 2020.
Today on Myths, Mysteries, & Monsters we go through the maze for the origins of this legend and try to find if the town ever really existed and if it didn't, who started the legend.
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Sources
https://coolinterestingstuff.com/hoer-verde-the-town-with-600-inhabitants-that-vanished
Ep. 23 The Mysterious Disappearance of Hoer Verde, Brazil in 1923
Every year millions of people disappear throughout the world. In an age of technology many can still disappear without a trace but what about back when we didn’t carry a computer in our pockets, back when whole towns could disappear?
That’s what happened to one town in Brazil in 1923 when it was discovered the town of Hoer Verde and its 600 residents disappeared seemingly overnight, if it was ever really there to begin with.
Welcome to Myths, Mysteries, and Monsters
The world is full of myths passed down from generation to generation, mysteries haunt us, monsters hunt us. Today we’re looking at the mysterious town of Hoer Verde. A small town of 600 in Brazil that without warning, disappeared leaving few eerie clues and many theories. We’ll learn the legend and then go through the theories separating fact from a whole lot of fiction and I’m proud to say we got to the bottom of it.
PART 1 - The Legend of Hoer Verde, Brazil
“Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.”
- Lord Byron
On February 5th, 1923 villagers of a small town near the jungles of Brazil noticed the usual daily shipment of trade from the neighboring town of Hoer Verde hadn’t arrived. It was unusual for the boat to be late and even stranger for it not to come at all but the villagers waited expecting a good reason for the delay.
But the reason and boat never came.
The villagers decided there must be something wrong, possibly with the trade boat at Hoer Verde, so they took it upon themselves to bring their trade items to them instead. They expected a friendly greeting at the small dock as it was customary between the two villages but instead as they approached they could see the small trade boat. It was still tied down, the calmness of its bobbing deceived the visitors of the horrors they would find.
The visitors reached the dock, immediately noting the usually manned dock was empty and the town itself seemed quiet. Where the usual bustling sounds of the villagers, talking and laughing filled the air, all they heard now was the eerie wind passing through a dead town.
They walked further into the silent town, expecting someone, anyone to be around and yet what they found were hanging signs creaking with the wind, homes with their doors and windows open, and tables set as if everyone left in a hurry.
Their tour brought them to the school, where the mystery took a terrifying turn. Just outside the school on the dirt ground was a pistol, the smell of a fresh fire still lingering on its metal. On the chalkboard within the school, they were met with a phrase written on the board that would haunt them to the end of their days. “There is no salvation.”
PART 2 - The Theories
“The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
- Ken Kesey
The mystery of Hoer Verde seems to be shrouded in various theories, some literally out of this world, some out of this dimension, and some rooted in the history of Brazil at the time. But the seemingly actual answer to this mystery is one that most articles and magazines seem to willfully ignore at times.
Let’s start with the most bizarre theory that is floating around. This theory states the 600 residents of Hoer Verde were swallowed by a black hole taking them all to a fourth dimension. We’ll skip past the fourth dimension piece of this theory since as humans we cannot observe a fourth dimension.
But black holes, that we can debunk. Black holes are defined as a place in space where gravity’s pull is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape. If a black hole opened up in Hoer Verde, Brazil, then it wouldn’t have just taken the residents of the town. The entire town and possibly the entire planet would have been pulled by the extreme gravitational pull of the black hole.
When I read this theory I thought, “what if the black holes were small, opening up at strategic points in the village? Is that a possibility?” Turns out no because just a 1 millimeter or one twenty fifth of an inch sized black hole would have the mass equal to 10% of the Earth and its gravitational pull would affect a third of the planet.
The next theory is one that people like to point to when there’s really nothing else to explain a mystery… aliens. The theory states aliens came and abducted all 600 villagers. If, and that’s a big if, the stories of people being abducted by aliens were true. Never has there been a mass abduction of people by aliens. Also that other village would definitely have seen or reported a large alien spacecraft taking 600 people at some point.
The next way more plausible theory people point to is the political landscape in Brazil leading to soldiers or revolutionaries forcing all the villagers to evacuate. Now I say more plausible because it’s rooted in actual history and not because this is the answer.
During the late 19th and early 20th century, Brazil was going through several revolutions. With a new president elected in 1922 named Artur da Silva Bernardes facing challenges from both sides of the political aisle.
The legend of Hoer Verde would have you believe revolutionaries were going from town to town kidnapping, moving, and killing people randomly in Brazil but in reality the steps revolutionaries took are pretty well documented.
The villagers disappeared in 1923 but there are no recorded revolts in that year, there is one in 1922 and one in 1924. Many repeated versions of the legend state there was a civil war going on in Brazil that displaced many people but there was no civil war in 1923.
The Brazilian Revolution didn’t occur until 1930 and the Constitutionalist Revolution or what could be called the Brazilian Civil War happened in 1932. There’s also no reports of an entire village wiped out and if they had been moved, there’s no records of 600 people being relocated anywhere in the surrounding area.
And then there’s the issues of the names of the towns, one town is completely nameless in the legend while Hoer Verde is a rather strange name for a village or town in Brazil, for one Verde translates to green from Portuguese to English but Hoer is not a word in Portuguese. It seems to be a Dutch word for a derogatory word for sex workers.
Second, the legend states the town has been forgotten to time but I was able to find multiple lists of towns and villages dating back to the 16th century for Brazil. No name comes close to Hoer Verde except for Ouro Preto, which translates to black gold and the history for it goes back to 1698.
It’s starting to look like this legend is nothing more than a made up story.
PART 3 - The Long Maze to Prove Occam’s Razor
“The game is afoot.”
- Arthur Conan Doyle
It’s pretty clear this legend of Hoer Verde is made up but in order to prove it's made up, we need to find its origins otherwise there can always be shades of doubt casted.
Unfortunately this story is so obscure it’s hard to find any sources right off the bat, there’s no Wikipedia page, Britannica page, or Snopes page and the story has gained a new life from recently appearing in the hit video game “Control” in 2019 and a BBC Audio Drama in 2020 called “The Lovecraft Investigations”, linking the legend to H.P Lovecraft. Since then there has been an uptick in articles mentioning Hoer Verde in various lists that house other more quote unquote credible towns or mass disappearances.
Like the colony of Roanoke in 1590 which has always been told as a disappearance story where only the word Croatoan was carved into a post. But in reality there are many credible reasons since the only witness we had for the events is John White who left the town for three years.
There has been evidence found that the colonists were most likely killed by native Americans or relocated and died from the harsh weather and even evidence they relocated and mixed in with a small native American tribe nearby. Which I think is the most likely explanation since the name of the tribe was Croatoan, the same word that was carved into the post.
Pretty much all of these sites ended with a source to coolinterestingstuff dot com with an article featuring Hoer Verde but no sources so I hit a dead end.
Luckily after several hours of searching, after finding the story listed in a Japanese book about Brazilian folklore from 2013, I stumbled on a forum on ParadoxPlaza dot com from 2019. That led me to a Portuguese blog from 2016 that after being translated led me to Unexplainable.net which appears to be the earliest instance of the story appearing in English.
It was dated September second, 2010 and written by Chris Capps. I say this because the person writing the Portuguese blog actually interviewed Chris Capps years ago to find the origin of the story, unfortunately Chris Capps didn’t remember and only recalled hearing it come from a Russian newspaper article. But he didn’t cite sources on his website.
At least with this new information I was able to narrow my search and came to a 2008 forum for AR15, which was weird enough but it actually gave me the name to the Russian newspaper, Pravda. Which has a less than stellar honesty record and was the former official paper for the communist party of the Soviet Union.
Next I was able to find a Russian slash English website where the Pravda newspaper’s historical articles had been translated. Here I was able to search for the original article featuring Hoer Verde and I found it.
It was dated April 26th 2004 by Mikhailov Andrei, that’s a google name translation so that may be inaccurate. The article is entitled “Black Holes” Devour People and features such paragraphs talking about meteorites slamming into earth with such force it causes electrostatic levitation. This picks people up and transfers them to other parts of the world. I don’t think I need to stress this but this does not and can not happen.
The same article blames the disappearance in Roanoke to protoplasm coming from deep in the ocean and eating people which according to Andrei happens every few millennia.
So you can see what we’re dealing with here. Turns out every paragraph in the article had multiple lies but there it was, the paragraph of Hoer Verde and it was short. The article states quote:
“The search for six hundred inhabitants of the settlement Hoer-Verde in Brazil, who disappeared on February 5, 1923, was given up a long time ago. The police thoroughly examined the vacated small town. At school, they noticed a gun, which was apparently used the day before, lying on the floor and words "there is no salvation” written on a blackboard.”
End quote. That was it. Since 2004 the legend grew into a game of telephone with everyone adding their own extra details and making the lie take a bigger life to a point where it appears in a video game in 2019 and multiple people on the internet are questioning it, while others have accepted it as truth.
And before you say well maybe he got it from somewhere else. Nope, almost 95% of what’s on that article is made up by Mr. Andrei and spread from there. In one paragraph he mentions a Professor of California University, Jane Lindett who is quoted as saying “I blame the so-called “black holes” for disappearances of people”.
I searched for Jane Lindett, Jane Linsey, University of California, and University of San Francisco. Doesn’t exist, it was made up for that article along with several other paragraphs. But I did find that quote and various other random pieces I took from the article in various blogs all throughout the end of 2004 and 2005 citing Pravda and then spreading from there.
Any other searches for the text in the article including Hoer-Verde with the year prior to 2004 gave me only a handful of results, all fake websites trying to get my credit card info. Proving the legend started in that article from Pravda. It’s possible Andrei heard the story somewhere else and was the first to get it on the internet but chances are like most of the other things in his article, he made it up himself.
The residents of Hoer-Verde never disappeared because they never existed.
Thank you for joining me on today’s episode of Myths, Mysteries, & Monsters!
My name is Hector, script, and research done by E.L Soto. Sources are in the show notes for further reading.
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