Loading this page…
Return homePlease wait while the next page arrives.
Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesMatinta Perera is a night-whistling being of Amazonian lore, often appearing as a woman who returns by daylight to collect promised tobacco.
Also recorded as Matinta Pereira, Matintaperera, Matinta-pere
A voice asks an old man about his molasses. He looks behind the stump and finds no one. [1]
Read the manuscriptThe accounts gathered here belong to Pará, with distinct local settings. Herbert Huntington Smith heard stories from Indigenous interlocutors in Santarém; his 1879 book also describes Pará’s streets and a grove near Ereré. The written name there is Matinta-pere. His informants remain unnamed, though the places and some of their remembered encounters survive. [1]
Rubens da Silva Ferreira and Cleide Furtado Nascimento gathered stories in Curuçambaba, Bujaru, in 2015. Nascimento’s family connections helped bring the conversations together. [3]
Researcher Fernando Alves da Silva Júnior’s 2012–2013 work in Taperaçu Campo records promises of coffee as well as tobacco and fish. [2]
Smith associates the presence with a fondness for sweets. One Santarém interlocutor tells him about an old man passing a small sugar mill. A voice behind a stump asks after his molasses. He turns to look and finds nobody. The request is ordinary enough; the missing speaker makes it strange. [1]
Another interlocutor places a more public encounter in the streets of Pará after the rebellion of 1835. A patrol hears singing and follows it to an orange tree. There sits an older woman. She cannot answer their questions, so they take her to the guardhouse and lock her securely inside. In the morning she has disappeared. Smith supplies no explanation of her departure. [1]
In Egídio Ferreira da Silva’s telling, recorded by Silva Júnior in Taperaçu Campo in July 2013, Maria promises tobacco to the night whistler. An older neighbour collects it. Maria tells others; the news reaches the neighbour. Later Maria asks her to bless a daughter with fever and a headache. She refuses: someone called Matinta Perera does not give blessings. [2]
Orivaldo Pereira da Silva tells of his grandfather Dico, fishing for grouper. He hears a whistle and promises fish. Returning early next morning, he sees a woman crossing the field. She calls him by name and asks for the promised portion. Recognizing a familiar island woman as the whistler, he cuts a piece and gives it to her. [2]
Sebastiana Rodrigues’s Visita noturna, discussed by literary scholars Andressa Ramos and Socorro Simões, gives the morning visitor something to offer. After a household’s night-time promise of tobacco, she arrives bearing flowers for a thirteen-year-old girl. The girl thanks her, delighted: she loves flowers and animals. The Matinta has brought a gift that suits its recipient. [4]
A whistle wakes the narrator of Hosannah de Oliveira’s Matinta-perera. Opening his bedroom window onto the square, he hears the clock strike twelve. Moonlight illuminates the road to the cemetery. The call moves across the square in that direction, repeatedly sounding the creature’s name. The narrator knows the stories from childhood, and for a moment they frighten him. This first-person account was reprinted in José Coutinho de Oliveira’s 1916 Lendas Amazônicas, which credits the magazine Vozes de Petrópolis. [6]
He remembers a friend who tried to settle the matter at a farm. Hearing the whistle close to his bedroom window, the man summoned enslaved people and surrounded the sound. They fired in its direction. It moved rapidly around them, still close, although the open yard was clear in the moonlight. Then the sound suddenly came from far away. The friend concluded that a white bird had escaped their sight. No captured bird ended the search. [6]
Next morning the narrator’s neighbour, Mestre José, asks about the night’s noise. José is an older Black man known for healing blessings and stories of mysterious events. The narrator calls the whistler a nocturnal bird. José protests: such terrifying cries are hardly birdsong. He says a promise of tobacco would have brought the caller back to collect it, and he supplies a name. The Matinta is Catharina, an elderly woman who lives toward the cemetery. [6]
The narrator laughs, then objects that Catharina already suffers from illness and poverty. José replies that she is undergoing a punishment for her past. He offers a story from the previous moon. Estanisláu was firing bricks at a kiln when he heard the whistle and promised tobacco. At seven the next morning, Catharina arrived to ask for it. José says Estanisláu himself told him what happened. To the neighbour, a fulfilled appointment establishes the visitor’s identity.
Smith’s Matinta-pere often has no visible body. Rustling wings or a repeated call announce its presence beside paths and villages. When it does appear, it may look like an old man, a priest or another person or thing. Shouting sends it into the air with the sound of wings. His portrait has movement and voices before it has a dependable face. [1]
Ramos and Simões’s study preserves a sharper disagreement from Santarém: one narrator describes human and animal forms, while another says the being is invisible and cannot be defined. [4]
Literary scholar Josebel Akel Fares places storytelling beside shared work. A friend remembered listening, as a girl in Gurupi in the 1960s, to a woman from Bragança. Asked how she knew so many stories, the woman recalled neighbours gathering after the bean harvest. They spread a large white sheet indoors, piled the pods on it and shelled them together. Stories accompanied the work. Afterwards people walked home in groups, dropping one another off along the way. Their own night encounters could supply the next gathering with something new to tell. The journey between houses became part of the evening’s continuing conversation. [7]
Curuçambaba’s landscape, described by Ferreira and Nascimento, includes cassava plots, regrowing woodland and streams connected with the Guamá River. Stories circulated among agricultural families during their rest, often as evening fell. The figure moves through a worked and inhabited countryside. [3]
In Taperaçu Campo, Silva Júnior records the dobração, the turn in the whistle where listeners hear Matinta Perera’s name. Similar calls without it may announce Curupira or Mãe d’Água. [2]
Smith proposes a connection with the Tau-tau of Ereré, a presence in a miriti-palm grove that appears as a bat, snake or bird. He describes it as harmless, as he does Matinta-pere, but their identity remains his suggestion. Even his short account crosses from an unseen sugar-mill visitor to a woman in a town and then to a grove’s changing animal forms. The bird heard in the dark is only one of the forms Smith was told about. [1]
Silva Júnior reads the promised portions through the obligations of giving, receiving and returning. [2]
Ferreira and Nascimento interpret requests for food and tobacco in relation to poverty and age. In their reading of Curuçambaba accounts, an older person who can no longer support herself through demanding physical work may depend on neighbours’ help. The frightening visitor and the person asking for sustenance belong to the same local relationships. [3]
Ramos and Simões challenge the habit of making the older woman automatically repulsive or malevolent. Their flower-bearing visitor can notice another person’s pleasure and contribute to it. Age does not determine the welcome she receives or the generosity she shows. [4]
The Conto Ribeirinho podcast returns to recordings made in Abaetetuba and Ananindeua in 1994. Rádio Web UFPA’s 2020 programme note describes Matintas who alternate between human and bird forms, with differences among local tellings. The producers deliberately retained noise from the old tapes: removing it could damage the recordings, and the texture also preserves something of their age. The project joins Na Cuia Produtora Cultural with the university’s IFNOPAP oral-narrative archive, coordinated by Socorro Simões. Stories once captured on a tape recorder become available through a new listening medium. [5]
Ferreira and Nascimento describe a bronze Matinta in Belém’s Praça Waldemar Henrique and actress Maria Borges bringing the figure into environmental education at schools and large events. [3]
Smith begins by admitting how little he has learned about Matinta-pere. His own explanation of the sugar-mill noises is mundane: large moths visit the mills, remain invisible in darkness and fly off when disturbed. He offers that explanation beside the stories rather than reporting a captured source of the sounds. His next account, involving a struggle with a lost soul, is even less certain in its identity. The teller cannot name the being; Smith only wonders whether it, too, might be Matinta-pere. [1]
Oliveira’s narrator likewise hears the night call, but the uncertainty that remains is about a neighbour. José’s evidence becomes an accusation against Catharina; the narrator answers with her poverty, injuries and mistreatment. Their disagreement leaves an uncomfortable question within the story: when someone is hurt, does the wound reveal a monster, or the people who have decided to hunt one? [6]
Oliveira’s account is cited from its 1916 reprinting. Smith’s brief Matinta-pere section precedes a separately attributed, unidentified lost-soul narrative. [6][1]
Herbert Huntington Smith · Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1879; Internet Archive
Chapter XVIII, pp. 566–568: complete Matinta-pere section and transition
Checked 2026-10-11
Fernando Alves da Silva Júnior · Amazônica 6(2):484–502, 2014
Printed pp. 488–499, especially pp. 491–493 and 496–498
Checked 2026-10-11
Rubens da Silva Ferreira and Cleide Furtado Nascimento · Boitatá 25, pp. 242–258, 2018
Complete article; especially pp. 243–244 and 249–257
Checked 2026-10-11
Andressa de Jesus Araújo Ramos and Maria do Perpétuo Socorro Galvão Simões · Anuário de Literatura 26, pp. 1–18, 2021
Printed pp. 7–15, especially pp. 7 and 13
Visita noturna follows Ramos and Simões’s discussion of the Abaetetuba collection.
Checked 2026-10-11
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑José then describes a Saint John’s celebration at Desiderio’s house. A group heard the call, ran into the yard and threw stones toward it. The whistle stopped; they heard something like a large bird flying away. The next day Catharina lay in bed with a wounded head and scratches. Asked what had happened, she said people had thrown stones at her. José takes the matching injuries as proof. The narrator sees the mistreatment of an elderly Black woman and warns that José himself might one day suffer it. José falls silent, apparently unconvinced. [6]
Isaac Gomes; Rádio Web UFPA editorial programme note · Rádio Web UFPA, 2020
Complete programme note, recording provenance and noise-editing statement
The recording history follows the programme note.
Checked 2026-10-11
Hosannah de Oliveira; collected by José Coutinho de Oliveira · Livraria Clássica de J. B. dos Santos, Pará; Fundação Cultural do Pará digital collection · 1916 · Portuguese; original English paraphrase
Printed pp. 113–116, complete tale (digital pages 117–120); title and attribution footnote
The 1916 collection credits an earlier telling by Hosannah de Oliveira in Vozes de Petrópolis.
Checked 2026-10-13
Josebel Akel Fares · Boitatá 2(3), pp. 62–77, 2007 · 2007-07-14 · Portuguese
PDF pp. 1–7, especially complete Um lençol de histórias: Uma conversa, pp. 4–5; DOI 10.5433/boitata.2007v2.e30706
Checked 2026-10-13