Previously: The Myths And Legends Of Himuro Mansion.
If you’re interested in stories and legends about towns that allegedly just… disappeared, or vanished, or something of the sort: Have I got a tale for you. It’s about a place in Brazil — a town called Hoer Verde. It’s about what supposedly happened to the population of 600-plus people, adults and children both, who lived there. And it’s about how this story evolved over time, and about the oddities of language and translation that transformed it into the version of the tale you’ll find scattered across the internet today.
The story usually goes a little something like this:
On February 5, 1923, a handful of visitors arrived in the small town of Hoer Verde in Brazil. Sometimes, these visitors are said to have been neighbors from a nearby town who, after failing to receive some sort of regular delivery routinely brought to them by the people of Hoer Verde, traveled to the town in an attempt to figure out where their delivery was; other times, they’re simply travelers passing through the area who stumble upon the town.
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Regardless as to their reason for being in Hoer Verde that day, however, the visitors are always said to have met with the same thing: An eerie, empty village. There was no sign of a struggle; there was no damage to any of the roads or buildings, although curiously, many of the windows and doors had been left hanging open.
But there were also no people.
The visitors found, as they made their way through the town, that not a single soul of the 600-someodd residents of Hoer Verde were present. And there was no indication of where they might have gone, or whether they ever planned on coming back — assuming, of course, that they were able to come back.
When the visitors reached the village’s small school, things got even weirder. They found two things: One, a gun, which appeared to have been recently fired; and two, a message written in chalk on one of the blackboards.
The message read simply, “There is no salvation.”
The mystery of what happened to the people of Hoer Verde, Brazil was never solved. The town was there… and then, one day, it wasn’t.
And that’s all we know.
…Or is it?
What’s In A Name? Or, The Tell-Tale Signs Of Fiction Over Fact
Of course, that’s actually not all we know — and it’s when we consider what we do know that some holes begin to appear in the story of Hoer Verde, the disappearing town of Brazil. There are more than a few things aspects of the legend and the way it’s presented that just… don’t quite add up.
For one thing — as a number of people who are actually from Brazil have pointed out various places online — “Hoer Verde” doesn’t at all resemble an actual Brazilian place name; Brazil’s official language is Portuguese, and while “verde” is a Portuguese word (it means “green”), “hoer” certainly isn’t.
It might be Dutch, which at first might make a certain amount of sense; Brazil did fall under Dutch colonial control for a space of time in the 17th century, and the repercussions of this period still reverberate today.
Place names do often reflect the history of an area, even if the periods these place names hearken back to have long since passed. But cities and towns in Brazil with names rooted in the Dutch colonial era were typically named for people — for instance, Fredrikstad was named for Prince Frederick of Orange. They were not usually derived from derogatory slang terms… which is what the Dutch word “hoer” is.
(It’s also worth noting that most locations in Brazil with formerly Dutch-influenced place names have since been renamed and no longer carry those monikers. The aforementioned Fredrikstad is now João Pessoa, for example.)
For another thing, there’s no record of any place named Hoer Verde ever having existed in Brazil. And, although there are a handful of arguments floating around that would have us think that the lack of documentation about the town doesn’t necessarily mean that the town never existed, these arguments all fall more than a little flat.
True, some of the theories regarding what could have happened to the supposedly-vanished town are more believable than others… but even the more believable ones don’t hold up to scrutiny. The inhabitants of Hoer Verde getting sucked into a black hole or abducted by aliens? Unlikely. The population being either relocated somewhere else or just straight-up decimated in a revolt or revolution due to political strife or civil war? Possible, but 1923 wasn’t exactly a key year for Brazilian politics: Notable revolts occurred in 1922 and 1924, but not in 1923, and the revolution that ended the Old Republic didn’t occur until 1930.
All of these arguments stem from a logical fallacy, anyway, undercutting each and every one: They assume that the absence of evidence indicates evidence of absence — a classic example of the argument from ignorance trap.
So: The question about the Hoer Verde story isn’t really about whether it’s true or not; it’s pretty clear that it’s not.
And yet, the legend has proven to be surprisingly enduring, which brings up some other questions about it. Questions like, for instance, where it came from, and how it’s fared as it has traveled the globe — and the internet — over the years.
Spoiler alert: “Hoer Verde” may not always have been called Hoer Verde. In fact, it’s highly likely that it wasn’t — and how it may have gotten from its original name to the one by which it’s most commonly known now is a weird and winding road.
Phantom Roots: An Early Version Of The Legend
Although stories about Hoer Verde and its supposed disappearance have been circulating the internet since the early 2000s, the legend is actually somewhat older: As of this writing, the earliest known mention of the legend in print dates back to the early 1980s. As Hector Navarro of the podcast and YouTube channel Myths, Mysteries, And Monsters discovered in January of 2023, the Dean Koontz novel Phantoms, which was first published in March of 1983, contains an anecdote that is unmistakably about Hoer Verde — despite a handful of key differences in the tale.
Phantoms (which is available to read for free as part of the Kindle Unlimited service, by the way) concerns the small town of Snowfield, California, located in the Sierra-Nevada Mountains, whose entire population winds up mysteriously dead, and the efforts of a pair of sisters to unravel the mystery of what precisely happened. The character Timothy Flyte believes the fate of Snowfield’s inhabitants to be the work of some kind of cosmically horrifying entity he refers to as “the ancient enemy.”
Flyte, an academic who studies strange disappearances and other phenomena he believes to be connected to this entity, describes in chapter 36 — titled “Face To Face” and positioned roughly 80 percent of the way through the novel — a number of other instances throughout history that appear to mirror the events occurring in Snowfield. It’s worth noting at this point that the language used in the passage I’m about to quote, as well as some of the ideas it contains, are… let’s call it indicative of the period in which the novel was written, and come across as, uh, not great. So, consider yourselves warned before continuing.
Ready?
Okay. Here’s what Flyte tells our erstwhile heroes:
“[Flyte] told them about vanishing armies in Spain and China, about abandoned Mayan cities, the Roanoke Island colony.
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, some time 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 to the disappearances. Flyte believed otherwise, and after listening to him, so did Jenny.”
This little anecdote is almost, beat for beat, an exact match to the story usually hung on the name “Hoer Verde.” The blackboard message is obviously different, although I’d argue that’s not the most important point of divergence. The thing that I think really matters is the town’s name: Here, it’s “Joya Verde.”
It’s debatable whether the story of Joya Verde is something Koontz heard elsewhere and incorporated into Phantoms or whether it’s an invention of his own (we’ll talk about that in a bit) — but regardless, the difference in the village’s name puts us on an interesting path. If Koontz knew it as Joya Verde in 1983, how did it become Hoer Verde later on?
And this, my friends, is where the plot thickens in some truly surprising ways.
Lost In Translation, Part 1: From Joia Verde To Joya Verde
The oldest version of this disappearing town legend with the village’s name specifically rendered as “Hoer Verde” that I’ve been able to dig up appears to have been published on April 26, 2004 in the English language version of the Russian online tabloid Pravda.ru, formerly Pravda Online. (Pravda.ru, by the way, is just one of numerous publications that have used the name Pravda over the past century. The history of Russian publications using the title Pravda is outside our scope here, but for the curious, you can check out a brief explanation of it courtesy of Britannica.)
A caveat: I haven’t been able to locate a corresponding version of the article in the original Russian. The author page for the associated byline on the standard Pravda.ru website has a huge gap where a Russian version of the article would have appeared (assuming it, too, would have been published sometime around April of 2004); after a huge batch of articles published with that byline on Jan. 26, 2004, there’s nothing else until March 31, 2005. And that’s assuming that this byline even belongs to a real person, which it… might not. (Again, though, that’s outside our scope here, so forgive me if I just leave that thread where it is.)
What that caveat means is that I can’t point to a one-for-one match of what appeared as “Hoer Verde” in the English language Pravda.ru article and what it appeared as in a hypothetical Russian version of the same article.
BUT: If we’re willing to work a little harder, we can find the town’s name written in Russian elsewhere. And examining the English Pravda.ru article in conjunction with several other pieces of Russian writing about the legend, combined with taking into account the global and linguistic contexts of the story? That’s led me to develop a theory about how we may have started at Joia/Joya Verde and ended up at Hoer Verde:
From where I’m sitting, it seems possible that the current form of the Hoer Verde story, including the use of the specific town name “Hoer Verde,” may have been the result of a number of translation choices made over the years as the story circulated from audience to audience and language to language.
Let’s return for a moment to the story of “Joya Verde” as described in the novel Phantoms. In the passage we looked at earlier, Flyte translates “Joya Verde” as “Green Jewel.” However, “joya” is, like “hoer,” not actually a Portuguese word. The word Koontz’s character was reaching for may have been “joia,” which is a Portuguese word, and which does translate into English as “jewel” — that is, the town’s name should perhaps not have been “Joya Verde,” but “Joia Verde.”
The letter “J” in Portuguese has a soft sound, as heard in this pronunciation video posted by the About Brazil YouTube channel. However, there is no equivalent sound to this soft “J” in Russian, making the translation and written rendering of a phrase like “Joia Verde” or “Joya Verda” using Cyrillic characters difficult.
So: How do you choose to handle that in translation? Let’s take a closer look.
Lost In Translation, Part 2: From Joya Verde To Hoer Verde
Absent the original Russian language version of the Pravda.ru article, we’ve got to look to other articles about Hoer Verde written in Russian to see how the town name is typically written. Here’s a prime example: In a Russian language article about disappearing town legends published in the online magazine Horizon in 2020, the name of the vanished town in Brazil is rendered as “Хоер-Верде.”
In Russian, the “X” character has a sound that is usually describe as resembling — although not matching entirely — the “H” sound in English when the letter is used at the beginning of a word, as in “hello” and “Halloween.” So, with the phrase “Хоер-Верде,” we can see that the soft “J” sound from “Joia” in the original Portuguese has been swapped out for a character that makes something closer to an “H” sound.
With me so far? Good. Let’s continue.
Now, the reasoning behind making a swap is clear: Since the soft “J” sound doesn’t exist in Russian, a change must necessarily be made when translating between Portuguese and Russian. Why this particular swap was made — that is, why specifically the “H” sound was brought in to replace the “J” sound — is less clear.
But I’ve got an idea about that — and it has to do with the relative closeness of Portuguese and another language, Spanish, and how Brazilian Portuguese in particular relates to both of them.
First things first: Portuguese is not Spanish. I would be remiss if I didn’t underline that fact, and fiercely. They are two different languages, with different pronunciations, grammatical rules, punctuation and modifiers, and so on.
However, the two languages are pretty closely related. They’re both West Iberian Romance languages, for one thing, so they share similar DNA, so to speak. They’ve also both evolved as they’ve made their way across the globe, with both of them becoming the two most commonly spoken languages in South America.
Both languages also tend to vary quite a bit depending on where they’re being spoken. European Spanish doesn’t necessarily have the same vocabulary or pronunciation as Spanish spoken in Latin American countries; similarly, European Portuguese also has vocabulary and pronunciation differences from Brazilian Portuguese. Interestingly, as Britannica notes, people who speak Brazilian Portuguese can sometimes find it easier to understand Latin American Spanish than European Portuguese.
This brings us back to Russian, and how one might go about phonetically rendering sounds from Portuguese in it when those sounds may not have an exact Russian analog.
While the Portuguese “J” sound doesn’t exist in Russian, something similar to the sound the letter J makes in Spanish — specifically when it’s used at the start of a word — does: It’s an “H” sound, as in “jalapeño” or “jardín.” As such, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that, when “Joia Verde” or “Joya Verde” was first translated into Russian, the choice was made to treat the “J” as a letter with more of an “H”-like sound, as it is in Spanish, a language that’s somewhat related to Portuguese — hence, the village name’s being presented as “Хоер-Верде.”
Here’s where things get even wackier, though: When “Хоер-Верде” is then translated back into Portuguese — or into English, for that matter — using tools like Google Translate, it renders the phrase not as “Joia Verde,” or even “Joya Verde,” but as something… else.
True, in some contexts, the “J” returns; if you translate the phrase “Хоер-Верде в Бразилии” from Russian to English, the town name becomes “Joer Verde”:
In others, though? Well… take a look for yourselves:
There it is: “Hoer Verde.”
In fact, it translates from Russian this way whether you’re translating into Portuguese or English:
There it is again.
So, that’s my theory: Although the Joia Verde/Joya Verde story existed before the Pravda.ru article did, the rendering of the actual place name as Hoer Verde may have arisen as a result of the quirks of translation — first in translating the story into Russian for the Pravda.ru article, and then again in translating the Russian version of the story into English.
And, ever since then, the town in Brazil that allegedly disappeared has been known as Hoer Verde — hence, why most, if not all, explorations of the legend in the Net 2.0 age have referred to the town as Hoer Verde.
The Questions That Remain
Of course, this does still leave us with a number of questions about the Hoer Verde/Joya Verde/Joia Verde story — namely, where and when its actual genesis was. What was its actual source? Did it begin in 1983 in Phantoms, or did the legend exist prior to the novel?
Phantoms is, of course, a work of fiction — but Koontz does state in a note to the reader placed at the end of the book that “many of the mass disappearances to which [Flyte] refers are not merely figments of the author’s imagination.” He continues:
“They really happened. The disappearance of the Roanoke Island colony, the mysteriously deserted [Inuit] village of Anjikuni, the vanished Mayan populations, the unexplained loss of thousands of Spanish soldiers in 1711, the equally mystifying loss of the Chinese battalions in 1939, and certain other cases mentioned in Phantoms are actually well-documented, historical events.”
For what it’s worth, this is not entirely true; the disappearance of the village of Anjikuni, for instance — also sometimes written as Angikuni — has since been identified as a tall tale, albeit one that dates back pretty far: Its original source was published in the 1930s (not, as was believed for many years, the late 1950s).
But the other events called out here? At least a couple of them are probably familiar to you, because they are true. The disappearance of the Roanoke colony, for example — that’s one of the most enduring unsolved mysteries in history, even if these days, we do have a pretty good idea of what could conceivably have happened.
My point is this: The reader’s note raises the possibility that Koontz may have heard the story of “Joya Verde,” as he calls it in Phantoms, elsewhere — that it might not be an invention of his own. He may even have heard it repeated as a “true” story, even if we now know it to be a legend only, as seems to have been the case with Anjikuni.
But then again, he might not have heard it somewhere else; it could still be his own creation. Yes, he states that “many of the mass disappearances” are true (emphasis mine) — but that particular phrasing also suggests that not all of them are necessarily true, or at the very least that it’s not entirely clear whether some of them are true or not. He doesn’t identify Joya Verde within the group of cases known (or at least, thought at the time) to be true, either.
It’s also worth noting, I think, that the shape of the Joya Verde story resembles that of the Roanoke colony disappearance extremely closely: We’ve got a group of visitors finding a mysteriously empty village; those visitors determining that the entire population went missing; no sign of a struggle offering an easily identifiable solution to the mystery; and no other clues but a cryptic written message left behind. The story beats are so similar that it’s not outside the realm of possibility to think that the Joya Verde story could have been directly inspired by the real-life Roanoke mystery.
From there… well, it’s not hard to think up a course of events that could have gotten us to where we are now: A tabloid publication could have taken the story out of its original context, used it as fodder for some clickbait, made certain translation choices in doing so, and then unexpectedly had all of those choices, from the specific translation choices to the decision to use the story for clickbait in the first place, end up having a lasting impact in the way that only weird internet tales can.
Still, though: As I remarked earlier, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so there’s only so much we can really take from the reader’s note and the fact that Joya Verde is not specifically mentioned in it. Absent anything specific from Koontz himself, we can’t at this point determine the veracity of the Joya Verde story contained within Phantoms one way or the other.
The jury’s ultimately still out on this one — but what a wild journey it has the potential to be.
And sometimes, it’s less about the destination than it is about the journey, anyway.
After all, there’s no guaranteeing that your intended destination will be there when you finally arrive, anyway.
Just ask the folks of Hoer Verde — or Хоер-Верде — or Joya Verde — or Joia Verde.
Assuming you can find them, that is.
***
Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Bluesky @GhostMachine13.bsky.social, Twitter @GhostMachine13, and Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!
[Photos via Diego3336, rvcroffi/Flickr, available under a CC BY 2.0 DEED Creative Commons license; pedroddf, FabricioMacedoPhotos, aliceferraro, Reidner/Pixabay; screenshot/Google Translate (3)]
