Casa Matusita

At a busy corner of Avenida España and Avenida Garcilaso de la Vega in central Lima stands a modest two-storey building that every Peruvian knows. Its date of construction is uncertain; across the avenue stood the Penitenciaría de Lima, opened in 1862, and the area has a long institutional history. The house takes its name not from a ghost but from a shop: from the 1950s until 2005 a hardware and plumbing business run by a family of Japanese descent, Matusita, rented the ground floor – while the upper floor stood dark and unused for decades.

That empty storey is the root of the legend. Over the years Lima residents attached a series of grisly stories to it: a foreign woman accused of witchcraft by the colonial Inquisition who cursed the house before her death; a man who killed his family; servants who drugged their employers at a dinner party, leading to a massacre. Peruvian journalists who checked found no record of any such crime in the newspapers or police reports of the time.

The most famous episode is the dare. According to the legend, in the 1960s the television presenter Humberto Vílchez Vera bet that he could spend a week alone upstairs, fled within hours, lost his mind and vanished from public life. In a book published in 1990 he said the stunt never happened as told – it had been a publicity idea to boost his ratings. Another theory, popular in Lima, holds that the stories were spread deliberately to keep people away from a building near the US embassy of the 1940s.

The owner’s family has its own, much simpler explanation. After the death of the family patriarch in 1947, they left the house around 1950; a caretaker who came home drunk on weekend nights would climb the stairs dragging a chain and carrying a lantern, and neighbours took the noises and lights for ghosts. The owner has told reporters it is an urban legend and that he spent many nights there without incident; a parapsychologist invited by the press also declared it a myth.

In 2016 Lima’s municipality declared the old structure unsafe, and the upper floor was taken down and rebuilt in lightweight materials while a bank kept its branch below. Whatever happens to the building, the Casa Matusita lives on as Lima’s great ghost story – and as a fine example of how a dark window can generate a legend.

Screams, voices and the sound of chains from the upper floor; lights moving behind the windows; people said to have gone mad after entering. None of these is documented first-hand; they are urban legend, passed on by word of mouth and the media.

The second floor, unused for decades, and its windows over the street corner. Stories are set at night.

The house inspired the film Secreto Matusita (2014) and countless Peruvian TV reports and documentaries. It is a fixture of Lima’s urban folklore and is usually the first answer when Peruvians are asked about haunted places.