Cultural history Aquidauana and Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
The Guanandy Werewolf: Aquidauana’s Family Folklore in Print
A 2016 Mato Grosso do Sul collection gathered a family's horror tales — including a Guanandy werewolf — to keep Aquidauana's oral lore from fading.
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Some stories survive only as long as there is someone left to tell them at the right hour. Cesar Christian Ferreira dos Santos set out in 2016 to give a few of his a longer life, printing the ones he had grown up with before they thinned into nothing. The result, Histórias ou Estórias de Terror? Contos de uma Família Aquidauanense — “Stories or Tales of Horror? Tales from a Family of Aquidauana” — was scheduled for a launch on Friday, 12 August, at Fran's Café in Campo Grande, admission free, each copy twenty reais.
The book divides cleanly. Its first part gathers accounts the author's own relatives claimed to have lived through. Its second turns to the legends well known in Aquidauana itself — among them a lobisomem, a werewolf said to appear in the Guanandy neighborhood, alongside a curse involving pigs and a plague of snakes.
Keeping a town's ghosts in print
The author's motive was preservation more than fright. He noted how little was written about Aquidauana, framing the collection as a way to move oral memory onto the page where it might be handed down. He was candid about the standing of the tales, too, and content to leave them exactly where belief leaves them: some readers believed the accounts and others did not.
The neighborhood name is what gives the story its hold. A werewolf somewhere in the world is easy to leave on a shelf. The werewolf of Guanandy belongs to streets someone’s relatives knew. In Christian’s collection, the monster travels with the family memory that kept its name alive.
Sources
Original illustration of the article’s setting.
