A man has died after falling down a 130ft hole he dug in his kitchen because he dreamed there was gold buried underneath it.
Joao Pimenta da Silva tragically tumbled down the huge pit he had excavated on Friday (5 January) after losing his balance while reportedly removing water and mud from the shaft.
According to his neighbours, the 71-year-old had become obsessed with the idea that there was gold buried under his property and he spent over a year trying to unearth the buried treasure.
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The pensioner is said to have roped in people to give him a hand with the digging, paying them up to £80 to help tunnel through his kitchen at his home in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.
One resident, Arnaldo da Silva, told local media: "João had spent more than a year digging the hole and hired many people to do the excavating work.
“He began by paying 70 Brazilian Reais (£11.30) a day when the hole was still shallow but the deeper he went the more the costs went up.
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"He ended up paying around £80 to anyone who entered the hole and helped to remove earth.
"He had hit a large stone that appeared which was difficult to remove and there were rumours he had been talking about trying to get hold of dynamite."
Silva claimed that João said he was visited by a 'spirit' in a dream, who informed him there was a bounty of buried treasure hidden underneath a rock situated beneath his kitchen floor.
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Silva said he had tried to warn his neighbour about the dangers of his haphazard project, but that he ignored his concerns.
João sadly fell down the 130ft hole - which is equivalent to the height of a 12-storey building - on Friday.
Firefighters were alerted to the incident at around 1.30pm and rushed to the scene, but were unable to save him.
Local media reported that the elderly man is believed to have slipped on a wooden platform near the top of the shaft as he tried to climb out of it after hauling out water and mud, plunging to his death.
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João is said to have been working alongside a friend, Antonio Wilson Costa, who witnessed the tragedy but was unable to help him.
Emergency services removed his body from the shaft - which was around 35 inches in diameter - and found that he had suffered head injuries, broken legs and other bone fractures.
Chilling pictures of the hole which were taken by the fire department have been published by Brazilian press.
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The fire department said in a statement: "After (the) dream, the elderly man started digging a hole about 90 centimeters in diameter and at least 40 meters deep.
"There was no information on how long the whole process took or how the complex excavation was organised."
Luís Filipe de Miranda, the 2nd sergeant of the Minas Gerais Fire Brigade, told the Estado newspaper that João is likely to have had experience with excavations and probably had professional help, despite his equipment being 'archaic' and 'homemade'.
He said: "This tunnel looks like something alien, with the perfection with which he dug it: very small diameter, very perfect cylinder, 40m deep. We found compressors, specific jackhammers used for tunnel digging.
"It's a science to get down. Very complicated, but he had experience. We don't know what he did in this regard.
"In the images you can see that it's all very archaic, homemade, contrived. There's no fixed support structure. His struts for climbing up don't have screws in the ground.
"He was descending on a kind of child's seesaw, without a belt, without safety," Miranda added.
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Olivia Burke