The Morbid Discovery That Led to Rio’s Only Slavery Museum

“Whoever must have lived in your house previously, must have loved cats and dogs,” the worker told Guimarães. “It seems like whenever their cats and dogs died, they buried them in the backyard.”

Guimarães joined the worker in the backyard to see the bones. She dug through the dirt with her hands and unearthed teeth.

“I looked at the teeth and immediately knew that they weren’t from a cat or dog. They were from humans,” Guimarães, a 61-year-old Brazilian woman of Spanish and Portuguese heritage, told me.

She then found another much smaller one, probably the teeth of a child. “I was thinking that the previous owner killed his entire family,” she said. She called a lawyer and the police telling them that she had purchased a house where someone in the family murdered the entire family. But then she backtracked.

“Wait a minute. This isn’t just one, two, or three people. There’s tons of bones. I stopped to look at the six boxes of bones, and I knew this couldn’t just be one family.” She then called the neighborhood’s resident historian, Antônio Carlos Machado. Through him she learned that her street had once been named “Caminho do Cemitério,” Cemetery Path.