The ceiling had collapsed in places, becoming little bat caves. Old vanities remained in place, like make-up mirrors and armoires. Upstairs, more bats circle over head with some hanging upside down in a hole in the ceiling. Elias Ribeiro, the Indian groundskeeper whose bloodline is buried on this land, begrudgingly opened the padlocked door, as if in slow motion.īats circle frantically around a spiral staircase, first brought to the building from England by the Belgians. We went upstairs to look at the second floor where ghosts supposedly ransacked the place. A couple of horses graze about 300 yards away. But for now, only a day laborer named Cesar Macete is there carving out benches and western style swing doors during the day with his wife, his daughter, a groundskeeper and the manager. There’s shiny new kitchen equipment inside. The 12 room inn is now known as Lenda Pantanal. “I’ve heard about the ghosts destroying the main building,” he says of the tallest structure on the site, a newly painted yellow building only opened on the first floor. Screaming in the old barn? An anaconda had wrapped itself around a dog and the dog’s squeals were echoing throughout the building. He claims to have investigated them as they happened. I lived there for 18 years and I never saw a ghost,” he says.Ĭardoso has heard of close encounters with the supernatural kind, however. “All this talk about the property being haunted is nonsense. When Luiz rented it to Antanor Alves Jr., Pedro left. Pedro Cardoso, 53, ran the inn between 19 under the ownership of Luiz Antonio Lacerda. Much of the gold here was stolen and shipped to Europe. Inside, the patron saints of gold miners. It’s a very strange place.”Ī church built the Belgian owners at the turn of the 20th Century on the site of Descalvados. I asked people if there was a little girl staying at the inn and everyone there said no. I ran down the stairs and when I looked back she was nowhere to be seen. I turned to where the voice was coming from and there was this little girl with pigtails and ribbons in her hair. “I thought it was strange because there were no children at the inn at the time. “I was taking pictures of the river at 10 in the morning when I heard the voice of a young girl calling to me,” she says in a phone interview. 2, 2009 and this is what she claims happened. Soely Figueiredo is the 42 year old owner of a travel agency named Estação Paraiso Viagens e Turismo in the tiny riverside city of Caceres, about a two hour go-fast boat trip from Descalvados. They all lived on a land steeped in the sad history of African slaves, Indian burials, and – as many people say – a ten year old ghost who asks guests if they want to play with her. The Lacerda family lived there until the 1980s before abandoning it and leaving it to the care of a trusted farm hand. Brazil’s government took it over and it was divided up and sold to a well-known political family in the state of Mato Grosso, where Descalvados sits not far from the Bolivian border and just south of the Amazon rainforest. An American Wild West investor named Percival Farquhar bought the property in 1912 and went bankrupt five years later. At the turn of the century, it belonged to a Belgian firm that did everything from making beef jerky to selling illegal rubber tapped from Brazilian forests and making off that it was Bolivian in order to avoid taxes. Teddy Roosevelt famously made his four-month scientific expedition through the Amazon over 100 years ago and camped out here. It’s located on the edge of the Paraguay River, deep in the heart of the Brazilian Pantanal, a mega wet land that makes the Florida Everglades look small.ĭescalvados’ history dates back to the 1860s, used for farming, contraband, and as prison barracks. On any given day, the population is around five. Vila dos Descalvados is a ghost town in every imaginable way.
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