Teresa Fidalgo’s story — The origin and myth surrounding the ghost
The ghost of Teresa Fidalgo has been haunting the internet for quite some time now. Back when online chain messages were a thing, a text message from Fidalgo urged people to share her story with 20 contacts. If not, she threatened to sleep by their sides forever and bring grim fates into their lives, just like she did to the one girl whose mother died after ignoring the message.
However, as is the case with most horror stories beginning on the internet, the legend of Teresa Fidalogo is not real. Rather it has its origin in the 2004 horror video made by the Portuguese filmmaker David Rebordão. The video is less than four minutes long.
Teresa Fidalgo is a fictional ghost character in the short Portuguese horror video A Curva
Teresa Fidalgo is a character in the short horror video known as A Curva or The Curve. David Rebordão – who has made seven horror short films in his career – wrote, directed, and produced the video in 2004 in his first directorial debut.
In the following years, Fidalgo became an urban legend of sorts on the internet. As a result, Rebordão uploaded the video on his YouTube channel in February 2014, ten years after its original release. It quickly became viral for being Fidalgo’s origin story.
According to the video, Rebordão and his two friends, Tiago and Tania, encounter Fidalgo on the night of July 12, 2003. While scouting a location for Rebordão’s upcoming movie titled VIRUS, they find a stranded Fidalgo on the highway.
She hitchhikes with them and asks to be dropped till Sintra. Things go wrong when Fidalgo shows them the spot where she died in a car accident. This revelation scares the group and the car crashes, causing the deaths of Tiago and Tania.
Rebordão, on the other hand, survives to tell the tale and share the footage of Fidalgo and the car crash he captured on his camera. Police investigation finds that an actual woman named Teresa Fidalgo died in the very spot in 1983, concluding that it was her ghost the friends gave a ride to that day.
Despite using his real name and identity in the video, Rebordão admitted that the story was fictional. He was also pleasantly surprised that his creative exercise gave rise to the longstanding myth of the ghost of Teresa Fidalgo on social media.
In March 2014, Rebordão uploaded a second video of Fidalgo haunting another group of friends on his channel. The incident in the video is dated April 15, 2008, and footage shows a man named Paulo Rodrigues being scared to death by Fidalgo.