Abstract
The intellectual and spiritual climate of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was torn between adherence to positivist certainties and an enduring interest in the mystery of the unmapped and the unsolved. In Brazil, endeavouring to get in step with the modern world, one particular zone of unexplored shadows was provided by rural communities and their archaic thought.
This chapter follows the metamorphosis of the supposedly supernatural from the marvellous, represented by the short -story "Dance of the Skeleton" by Bernardo Guimarães, to the uncanny and fantastic proper, as represented by "The Haunted House" by Afonso Arinos.