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Haunted places · Haunted houses and manors

Casa Matusita – Lima's Most Famous Haunted House

When
since c. 1944 date reconstructed from later accounts · first known record: 1964
Where
Corner of Garcilaso de la Vega and España avenues, Lima, Peru
Verdict
Legend

They say anyone who spends a night upstairs in this house in central Lima goes mad. There are many legends – and one of the most famous turned out to be a TV stunt.

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-12.06°, -77.04° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

Casa Matusita is a two-story building from 1909 at the corner of Garcilaso de la Vega and España avenues in central Lima. Across the road the Lima Penitentiary opened in 1862, and from the 1940s to the 1990s the US embassy stood on the other side of the street. The house takes its name from Matusita, a hardware company that rented the ground floor as a warehouse from the 1950s until 2005. The upper floor stood empty for decades, and legends grew up around it. People speak of a Persian witch, Parvaneh Dervaspa, supposedly burned by the Inquisition in 1754; of a family who ate something hallucinogenic at dinner and died screaming; of family murders. The best-known story concerns the TV host Humberto Vílchez Vera, who in the late 1970s is said to have bet he could last a week upstairs. He supposedly ran out after two hours, spent a year in a psychiatric hospital and vanished from the media. In 2016 the upper floor was demolished because it was unsafe.

Witnesses

Lima residents, passers-by and journalists; as early as 1964 a newspaper wrote about the “ghost house” whose caretaker had not seen a single ghost in twenty years. Later the legend was covered by “El Comercio,” RPP and Infobae.

Explanations and hypotheses

No documents confirm any of the tragedies attributed to the house. The Inquisition in Lima did try people for witchcraft, but the house was not built until 1909. The Vílchez story turned out to be his own invention: in his book “El cazador de fantasmas” he admitted that nothing of the kind had happened and that he was after ratings. There is also a popular conspiracy theory that the CIA spread the ghost stories so that no one would occupy the building opposite the US embassy and set up a listening post – there is no evidence for that either. The legend lives on thanks to the empty upper floor, a busy intersection everyone passes daily, and stories handed down from one generation to the next.

Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.

Sources

  1. El Comercio – Casa Matusita: ¿el fin de la leyenda más famosa de Lima? (2016)
  2. RPP Noticias – ¿Por qué se cree que hay actividad paranormal en la casa Matusita? (2014)
  3. Infobae – El origen de la leyenda de la Casa Matusita y qué tan real es (2022)
  4. ArkivPerú – La leyenda de la Casa Matusita (1964)

More: Wikipedia (en)