Haunted places in South America

South America’s ghosts live in colonial mansions, mining towns, convents and cemeteries – and in the open country. On the plains of Argentina and Uruguay people warn of the luz mala, an “evil light” that drifts over the grasslands; in Venezuela the wailing Sayona punishes unfaithful men; and off the island of Chiloé in Chile, fishermen tell of the Caleuche, a glowing ghost ship crewed by the drowned. Many of these figures come from Indigenous and mestizo traditions and remain part of everyday culture.

In the cities, the haunted places are often grand and historic: Buenos Aires’s Recoleta Cemetery, with its legend of Rufina Cambaceres, said to have been buried alive in 1902; the old colonial houses (casonas) of Lima and Quito; and the mines of Potosí in Bolivia, where miners still make offerings to El Tío, the lord of the underworld – a living practice rather than a ghost story. Brazil adds its own folklore of headless mules and fiery serpents, the boitatá among them.

As elsewhere, the region’s ghost stories often encode real fear and grief: dangerous work, epidemics, political violence and the dead who were never properly mourned. We tell them with that history in view, and with the skeptical explanations – mirages and distant lights for the luz mala, sound and suggestion in old buildings – alongside.