The Mysterious Disappearance of Hoer Verde, Brazil in 1923

May 6

**Even the Jesus statue lost the town… it’s probably the fog**

Every year millions of people are reported missing 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.

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 suspected there must be something wrong, possibly with the actual 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 undamaged. 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 typically 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.

Black Hole

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 1/25th of an inch-sized black hole would have a mass equal to 10% of the Earth and its gravitational pull would affect a third of the planet.

Aliens?

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.

Evacuation

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 centuries, Brazil was going through several revolutions. A new president was elected in 1922 named Artur da Silva Bernardes who was 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 are also no reports of an entire village being wiped out and if they had been moved, there are no records of 600 people being relocated anywhere in the surrounding area.

And then there are 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 in Brazil. No name comes close to Hoer Verde except for Ouro Preto, which translates to black gold, and its 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”.

For example, the colony of Roanoke in 1590, which has always been told as a disappearance story where 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 listing Hoer Verde ended with a source to coolinterestingstuff.com which features an article for Hoer Verde but, no sources so I hit a dead end.

Real Origins of Hoer Verde?

Luckily after several hours of searching and after finding the story listed in a Japanese book about Brazilian folklore from 2013, I stumbled on a forum on ParadoxPlaza.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 2nd, 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 of the Russian newspaper, Pravda. This newspaper 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/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 Mikhaylov Andrei, that’s a google name translation so that may be inaccurate. The article is entitled “Black Holes Devour People” and features paragraphs talking about meteorites slamming into the 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 of Roanoke on 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:

“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 the words "there is no salvation” written on a blackboard.”

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 the 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.

Search for Truth

Almost all of what’s in 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, the University of California, and the 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. (Andrei definitely heard it from somewhere else - See update below)

The residents of Hoer-Verde never disappeared because they never existed.

Update on the Origins of the Hoer Verde Legend - 1/12/2023:

After posting this article and the corresponding YouTube video (more videos coming soon), a handful of people reached out to me and suggested the origin of Hoer Verde may be a horror book by Dean Koontz called Phantoms from 1983… so I purchased the book.

Phantoms is about the investigation into the disappearance of a small town in California called Snowfield. No spoilers but one character has a theory that whatever caused the disappearance of the town also caused the disappearance of other mass vanishing in history such as Roanoke.

When the character lists the mass disappearances they also include Joya Verde and sum up the legend. The legend, as told in Phantoms is slightly different and is told as such:

"And he told them of Joya Verde, a South American jungle settlement that had met a fate similar to Snowfield's. Joya Verde, which means Green Jewel, was a trading post on the Amazon River, far from civilization. In 1923, six hundred and five people- every man, woman, and child who lived there - vanished from Joya Verde in a single afternoon, sometime between the morning and evening visits of regularly scheduled riverboats. At first it was thought that nearby Indians, who were normally peaceful, had become inexplicably hostile and had launched a surprise attack. However, there were no bodies found, no indications of fighting, and no evidence of looting. A message was discovered on the blackboard at the mission school: It has no shape, yet it has every shape. Many who investigated the Joya Verde mystery were quick to dismiss those nine chalk-scrawled words as having no connection with the disappearance."

There are several clear differences to the legend that is circulated today including the message on the chalkboard, the setting being South America and not specifically Brazil, and the spelling of Hoer Verde (although some websites/articles do call it “Joya Verde”). Interestingly “Joya” in Spanish means jewel or gem but in Portuguese, which is the primary language spoken in Brazil, “Joya” is not a word.

It is possible Dean Koontz made up the legend for this section in the book but all the other examples the character lists allude to real-world events making it likely that Koontz read/heard it somewhere else.

Since the legend as stated in Phantoms connects it to the Amazon River, during my free time over the last few months I’ve researched Peruvian, Bolivian, Venezuelan, Colombian, Ecuadorian, and general South American history/mythology to attempt to find the origins.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find anything conclusive but I will continue searching. To be clear there is no record of an actual town Joya Verde or Hoer Verde existing so it never disappeared but, someone did make up the legend.

Hopefully, the next update I make will include the concrete origins, and solve the mystery of who made up Hoer Verde.