Edifício Joelma

On the morning of Friday 1 February 1974, an overloaded air-conditioning unit short-circuited on the 12th floor of the Edifício Joelma, a new 25-storey office tower on Avenida Nove de Julho in central São Paulo. The building had been finished only in 1971 and was occupied mainly by the staff of the Crefisul bank. It had a single central staircase, no emergency stairs, no sprinklers or alarms and no evacuation plan, and its carpets, wooden partitions and synthetic furnishings burned fiercely. Fire crews arrived within about a quarter of an hour, but their ladders could not reach the upper floors and helicopters could not land on the roof.

Between about 180 and 190 people died and more than 300 were injured, most of them young office workers. The disaster came exactly two years after a fire at the nearby Andraus building and led to sweeping changes in Brazil’s fire-safety rules. In 1975 a court convicted Crefisul’s administrative manager, a contractor and several electricians. The building was rebuilt and reopened in 1978, and later renamed Edifício Praça da Bandeira.

Thirteen of the dead could never be identified, and they were buried without names in a cemetery in Vila Alpina, on the city’s east side. Popular tradition says they were found together in a lift, though researchers point out that this was never officially confirmed. According to the legend, cemetery workers heard cries coming from the thirteen graves that stopped only when water was poured on them; people began to pray there, ask for favours and leave offerings of thanks, and as treze almas – the thirteen souls – became the focus of a popular devotion that the religious-studies scholar Michael Amoruso traces in his 2025 book Moved by the Dead. The souls are also the heart of the building’s ghost lore: voices and cries said to come from the lift shafts, lifts moving by themselves, and figures glimpsed on the upper floors – stories told second-hand and never documented.

The haunting is often “explained” by a curse: the tower is said to stand on the site of the Crime do Poço (the Well Murder) of 1948, when a young chemist, Paulo Ferreira de Camargo, killed his mother and two sisters and hid their bodies in a well he had dug in the garden; he died when police uncovered the crime. Researchers note, however, that his house stood about a block away, not on the Joelma site, and that the press exaggerated the connection.

The Joelma fire was a real tragedy with real victims and survivors, many of whom are still living. The building remains in daily use as offices; it is not open for ghost hunting, and the ghost stories are best understood as a city’s way of remembering the people it lost.

Voices, cries and banging attributed to the upper floors and the lift shafts; lifts moving between floors on their own; shadowy figures and a smell of smoke. In one story repeated by CNN Brasil, a delivery man said he saw a woman float across the garage and pass into a wall. All such accounts are anecdotal and second-hand, attributed to security guards, cleaners, office workers and visitors and repeated in Brazilian media and legend collections; none has been documented.

The upper floors where the fire was worst, the garage and the lift shafts, especially the lift where, in the legend, thirteen victims were found. Stories are usually set at night, when the offices are empty.

The fire is one of the defining tragedies of modern São Paulo, remembered in documentaries, books and anniversary coverage, and it changed fire codes across Brazil. The thirteen souls are part of the city’s popular religion, and the building appears in virtually every list of haunted places in Brazil.