Joelma Building – Brazil
Nearest city: São Paulo, São Paulo State
On February 1, 1974, the Joelma Building caught fire after an electrical short on the 12th floor, engulfing the 25-story office tower in smoke and flame. Within 20 minutes, 179 people were dead and more than 300 injured—one of Brazil’s worst urban disasters. In the aftermath, firefighters found a group of 13 bodies fused together in an elevator shaft, the “Thirteen Souls” (As Treze Almas), said to still cry out for prayers and offerings of water. Workers in the rebuilt tower—renamed Edifício Praça da Bandeira—have reported screams, phantom alarms, and shadowy figures in the stairwells where victims once fled the flames. Even before the fire, the site carried dark lore: it was built on land where a man murdered his family in the 1940s and hid their bodies in a well, later dubbed the “Well of the Damned.” Today, visitors and office tenants still claim to hear pounding from empty elevators and smell smoke that never existed, making the Joelma one of Latin America’s most haunted modern structures.
Pin: Ghost
Spookiness Rating: 2.0
Featured on the Youtube Channel: Nerd Show (2020)- HELL IN THE JOELMA BUILDING: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MOST HAUNTED BUILDING IN BRAZIL! | NERD DOC #03
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Article: moonmausoleum.com/the-joelma-building-and-the-ghosts-of-the-13-souls/
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