Palacio de Lecumberri

For three-quarters of a century Lecumberri was the most feared address in Mexico. Planned after the penal reforms of the 1870s and begun in the 1880s on land once owned by a Spaniard named Lecumberri, the penitentiary was a panopticon: a central watchtower about 35 metres high, with long cell galleries radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel, an arrangement inspired by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. President Porfirio Díaz inaugurated it in September 1900. Its 804 cells were meant for men, women and juveniles; within decades it was badly overcrowded.

Its nickname, El Palacio Negro – the Black Palace – is explained in different ways: some say it came from sewage flooding just before the opening, others from the brutality inside. Accounts of the prison record beatings, killings, drug dealing and deaths from malnutrition, and it held many people jailed without fair trial. During the Decena Trágica of February 1913, President Francisco I. Madero and Vice-President José María Pino Suárez were shot dead while being taken to the prison, one of the defining crimes of the Mexican Revolution.

Its inmates read like a cross-section of 20th-century Mexico: the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, the novelist José Revueltas, union leaders Valentín Campa and Demetrio Vallejo, students arrested after the 1968 movement, Ramón Mercader – the Soviet agent who killed Leon Trotsky in 1940 – and, briefly as a young man, the singer Juan Gabriel. After a notorious tunnel escape and a shift in penal policy, Lecumberri closed in 1976. Rather than being demolished, it was restored and reopened on 27 August 1982 as the headquarters of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico’s national archive.

The ghost stories belong to the archive era. Archivists, guards and night cleaners have long traded tales of footsteps in the empty galleries, sobbing and murmurs from former cells, and figures glimpsed in the corridors after dark. The best known, retold by Mexico City media, is the story of Jacinto: a night cleaner hears someone breathing behind him, turns to find a haggard man in a chair who says only, “Amalia didn’t come again,” and vanishes. Weeks later, so the story goes, the cleaner found a file for a prisoner named Jacinto, accused by his wife Amalia, who had promised to visit him and never did. Other tales speak of a man in black, sometimes called a charro negro, walking the galleries.

None of these stories can be traced to a named witness or a specific file, and they work best as an oral memorial: the building now stores the nation’s records, including the files of the political police, but the people once locked inside it left only their names. Visitors today can see the restored rotunda and galleries during archive hours.

Footsteps and voices in empty galleries, weeping from former cells, cold spots, and apparitions – above all a gaunt prisoner who speaks of a wife who never came, and a man dressed in black. Most reports are attributed to night-shift staff and guards and passed on through journalism and word of mouth.

The radiating galleries, now lined with archive stacks; the central rotunda beneath the old watchtower; and corridors patrolled by night staff. Stories cluster in the late-night shift, when the archive is closed.

Lecumberri appears in Mexican literature and cinema, notably José Revueltas’s prison novel El apando (1969), written while he was held there, and Felipe Cazals’s 1976 film of it. Its ghost stories are a staple of Mexico City’s “haunted places” journalism and of local legend collections.