Castillo de Chapultepec

Chapultepec – “grasshopper hill” in Nahuatl – rises from the great park in the west of Mexico City. Long before any castle, it was a place of springs and ceremony for the Mexica, whose rulers, from Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina in the mid-15th century to Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, had their portraits carved into its rock, according to the 16th-century chroniclers Diego Durán and Alvarado Tezozomoc; damaged fragments of these reliefs survive. In 1785 the Spanish viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez began a summer palace on the summit; he died the following year, and the building passed through several hands before becoming Mexico’s military academy.

On 13 September 1847, during the US invasion, American troops stormed the hill. The young cadets who died defending it – remembered as the Niños Héroes – became national martyrs, and their story is told in the castle and in the monument at the foot of the hill. Seventeen years later the castle became the palace of Maximilian of Habsburg and his wife Charlotte of Belgium, installed by Napoleon III as Emperor and Empress of Mexico. They remodelled it in European style and laid out the avenue now called Paseo de la Reforma to link it to the city.

The empire was short and ended in tragedy. In July 1866, as French support collapsed, Carlota sailed for Europe to beg for help; refused by Napoleon III and the Pope, she suffered a mental breakdown. Maximilian was executed by a republican firing squad at Querétaro on 19 June 1867. Carlota never returned to Mexico, living in seclusion in Belgium until her death at Bouchout Castle on 19 January 1927, aged 86. Later Mexican presidents used the castle as their residence until the 1930s, and in 1939 it was designated the National Museum of History, which opened in 1944.

Her absence is what haunts the castle. Popular legend holds that Carlota returned in spirit to the place where she was happiest: staff and visitors describe a woman in 19th-century dress walking the imperial apartments and terraces, footsteps on the upper floors after closing, doors opening and closing, cold draughts – and, above all, a piano playing in the empty rooms at night. Some tellings say Maximilian walks there too.

None of these stories has been documented beyond word of mouth, and the museum presents the castle as history. That history – Mexica sacred ground, a viceroy’s folly, a battle, a doomed empire and a republic’s triumph – is, in its way, a ghost story of its own.

A woman in period dress identified as Empress Carlota; a piano heard playing at night with no one at it; footsteps, doors closing by themselves and cold draughts in the imperial apartments. Reports are attributed to museum staff, guards and visitors and spread through Mexican media and legend collections.

The Alcázar – the imperial apartments, Carlota’s rooms and the music room – and the terrace gardens. Stories are set after closing, at night.

Carlota’s ghost is one of Mexico City’s best-known legends, listed in media round-ups of the capital’s ghosts. Her life inspired Fernando del Paso’s celebrated novel Noticias del Imperio (1987), and the castle has appeared in many films and television productions.