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The Swings of Firmat

Name: The Swings of Firmat
Address: Santa Fe, AR

The Swings of Firmat is a location reputed to be haunted in Santa Fe, AR. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.

Where is The Swings of Firmat?

Location: Santa Fe, AR
Type: Park
Coordinates: -33.45, -61.483
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

Why is The Swings of Firmat said to be haunted?

On 16 June 2007 a teenager filmed one of three swings in Plaza Manuel Belgrano, in the La Patria neighbourhood of Firmat, Santa Fe, arcing steadily with nobody on it while the seats beside it hung still. The clip travelled from a small-town newspaper to Argentine national television, and the town has been living with it ever since. Locals attached the movement to a real bereavement: a child who died in the early 1980s on what was then a vacant lot, struck by one of the water-main pipes stacked there. Syfy's Fact or Faked filmed in Firmat in 2011, enclosed the swings under an inflatable dome and concluded that wind was the cause; the physicist Rodolfo Pregliasco, of Argentina's atomic energy commission, published a fuller account in 2012 identifying aeroelastic flutter, the same instability that destroyed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge — while conceding that why only one swing moves is still unexplained. Firmat has never quite accepted either verdict. The swings have never stopped, whatever the English-language version of this story says.

The Swings of Firmat, Santa Fe, Argentina — Image: Unknown · Public domain

What is the history of The Swings of Firmat?

Firmat is an agro-industrial town of some 20,000 people in the south of Santa Fe province, on National Route 33 about 110 km from Rosario. The swings that made it famous are not in the main square. They stand on the southern edge of town, in Plaza Manuel Belgrano, in barrio La Patria — a neighbourhood of state-built houses with distinctive yellow roofs handed over at the start of the 1980s. Three rubber seats hang by chains from a single steel bar, one beside the other. The ghost story is older than the phenomenon, and it is a real bereavement rather than folklore. When the first families moved into the new houses, the plaza was still a vacant lot, and lengths of large pipe for the neighbourhood water main had been left lying on it. A child playing there died. The journalist Ivana Romero, who grew up in Firmat and whose father ran a bakery in that same barrio, went looking for the details in her 2014 chronicle Las hamacas de Firmat and found several incompatible versions and no way to settle them. Her father's account, which she prints as he gave it: "Parece que se golpeó con un caño gigante o que el caño se le vino encima cuando estaba jugando por ahí." The family still lives in the neighbourhood and has never spoken publicly; neighbours told Romero that the boy's mother said only that what happened to them was already enough without reporters coming to dig up the past. No published source names the child. Neither does this page. For roughly twenty-five years nothing supernatural was attached to the plaza. Then, on 16 June 2007 — the date Rosario3 fixed in its tenth-anniversary reconstruction — a teenager surnamed Piana, who lived across from the plaza, filmed one of the three swings arcing steadily with nobody on it. He shot it from his grandmother's house. The clip reached Diario Firmat, then Rosario television, then the national networks. By 6 August 2007 Infobae was running it as a national story, quoting the local journalist Gonzalo Ramos: "No sucede todo el día, es por momentos. Varios medios han ido pero no han logrado imágenes. La gente se agolpa frente a la plaza a la espera de que la hamaca se mueva." The rest is what happens to a story once it travels. That August the middle seat was stolen; the municipality replaced it, and the replacement — different materials, different shape — was reported moving within two days. In September 2007 the town authorities allowed parapsychologists and anthropologists to work in the plaza. José Norberto Pellegrini, founder of Diario Firmat, became the case's permanent chronicler and was nicknamed el hamacólogo. Syfy filmed there in April 2011; a five-person Japanese crew arrived in February 2012. In 2013 the municipality fenced the swing frame — not against ghosts, against thieves. And in 2014 Romero's book turned the whole affair into literature.

Timeline: the documented record of The Swings of Firmat

Early 1980s The state-built houses of barrio La Patria, with the yellow roofs that still identify the neighbourhood, are handed over. The future Plaza Manuel Belgrano is still a vacant lot with lengths of water-main pipe stacked on it. A child playing there dies in an accident with one of the pipes. Ivana Romero, researching the episode three decades later, found several irreconcilable versions and a family that had never spoken about it.
16 June 2007 A teenager surnamed Piana, who lives opposite the plaza, films one of the three swings moving steadily with nobody on it, shooting from his grandmother's house. This is the date Rosario3 fixed in its tenth-anniversary reconstruction of the case.
6 August 2007 Infobae carries the story nationally. The only person quoted is the local journalist Gonzalo Ramos, who describes crowds gathering opposite the plaza to wait for the swing to move and notes that visiting media had so far failed to film it. The report is also the earliest we have found that attaches the swing to the death of a boy in the neighbourhood, which it places around 1987.
15 September 2007 MDZ reports that the middle seat has been stolen and replaced, and that the replacement — built of different materials — was seen moving within two days; that a second and then all three swings had been observed in motion; and that parapsychologists and anthropologists were working in the plaza with municipal authorisation.
13 April 2011 Syfy broadcasts episode 2.04 of Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, "Playground Poltergeist / Alien Intruder", filmed in Firmat. The team recreates the motion with monofilament line but rejects a hoax as impractical, then covers the swings with an inflatable dome and runs fan tests, concluding that wind is the cause and that the moving seat is slightly larger and catches more air.
14 September 2011 La Capital reports that the exact replica swing installed by the American crew in April has never moved, and quotes José Pellegrini: "nunca se mueven las tres juntas, eso es algo que hace al fenómeno único en el mundo".
23 February 2012 Venado24 reports the arrival of a five-person Japanese television crew — reporter Imoto Ayako, director Ishizaki, cameraman Kanemitsu, assistant Nakao and translator Aya Hara — who film in Plaza Manuel Belgrano. The article does not name the channel or programme.
2012 The physicist Rodolfo Guillermo Pregliasco, head of the Forensic Physics Group at the Centro Atómico Bariloche, publishes "Una mirada a las hamacas de Firmat" in the CNEA outreach series Hojitas de conocimiento. He proposes aeroelastic flutter, states the four-step mechanism, predicts the lagging windward chain visible in the videos, and concedes that why only one swing moves remains unclear without a model and an experiment.
2013 The municipality of Firmat fences the swing frame after repeated thefts of the seats.
20 July 2014 Ángel Berlanga reviews Ivana Romero's chronicle Las hamacas de Firmat (Editorial Municipal de Rosario) in Página/12's Radar supplement. Romero, born in Firmat in 1976, treats the case as an account of her own town rather than a paranormal report, and deliberately protects the privacy of the dead boy's family.
4 October 2017 The earliest use we have been able to date of the name "El Columpio Fantasma" appears in an English-language occult blog post. Columpio is not the Argentine word for a swing; local and national press call them las hamacas de Firmat.
22 June 2024 La Capital publishes a video filmed by a neighbour during strong wind in which branches and flags are moving while the central swing stays almost still — the observation locals hold up against the wind explanation.
14 December 2024 LT10 revisits the case and quotes José Norberto Pellegrini: "las hamacas nunca dejaron de moverse". Seventeen years on, the swings are still in place and still move intermittently, contradicting the English-language claim that the phenomenon lasted ten days.

Is there a rational explanation for The Swings of Firmat?

The most serious explanation on record did not come from a ghost hunt. It is a two-page article by Rodolfo Guillermo Pregliasco, a physicist who heads the Forensic Physics Group at the Centro Atómico Bariloche (CNEA) and is a CONICET researcher, published in 2012 in the CNEA outreach series Hojitas de conocimiento (no. 9, pp. 83-84). Pregliasco watched the amateur videos and set out a four-step sequence. When a crosswind reaches sufficient strength, the seat's position with one edge perpendicular to the wind becomes unstable; a small rotation makes it twist fully to that side; the tilted seat then acts as a sail and is pushed sideways, perpendicular to the wind; at the end of the arc it rotates again and sails back the other way. A prediction follows that anyone can check: the chain on the windward side always lags behind the other, and he points out that this is plainly visible in the footage. The mechanism has a name — aeroelastic flutter — and it is the same coupling of deformation and aerodynamic load that destroyed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 and tore the wings off Braniff Flight 542 in 1959. Flutter is selective: it needs a balance between wind speed, the pendulum frequency and the seat's rotation frequency, which is why one swing can meet the condition in a moderate wind while its neighbours do not. Pregliasco is explicit about the limits of his own case. "It is not very clear why only one swing moves," he writes, and to settle it "you would have to build a model and run an experiment." He also reviewed the television investigation. Syfy's Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files filmed in Firmat for episode 2.04, "Playground Poltergeist / Alien Intruder", broadcast on 13 April 2011. The team reproduced the motion using monofilament line but ruled a hoax out as impractical; they then enclosed the swings under an inflatable dome and ran fan tests. Their verdict was wind, aided by the moving seat being slightly larger and catching more air — "wider than the other two, it bags the air differently, and at a certain wind speed it moves exactly as in the videos", as Ciudad Magazine summarised it on 16 November 2011. Pregliasco accepts the demonstration and rejects the reasoning: they "showed that it is the wind that moves them", he writes, "although their explanation of why only one moves is poor and unsatisfactory". Firmat has never accepted it either. The exact replica the crew installed in April 2011 had still not moved by that September. Pellegrini's standing objection is that the three seats face the same wind and never swing together — although Pregliasco notes that on very windy days all three do move, so the two observations are not reconciled. On 22 June 2024 La Capital published a neighbour's video shot in strong wind in which the branches and the flags were moving and the central swing was not. Nobody has yet built the model Pregliasco asked for. One further correction, because this page previously carried the error. The English-language version of this story is not the Argentine one. English Wikipedia's account, sourced to British coverage from 2007, states that the swing moved for ten days "before stopping dead" and that it was "reported to the police". No Argentine source supports either claim, and the first is the reverse of the local record: the swings never stopped, and were still moving intermittently when Diario Firmat's founder said so in December 2024. The name "El Columpio Fantasma" is not local either — columpio is not the Argentine word for a swing, hamaca is — and the earliest appearance we can date is an English-language occult blog post of 4 October 2017.

Can you visit The Swings of Firmat?

Plaza Manuel Belgrano sits in barrio La Patria, on the southern edge of Firmat, beside the road out towards Route 93. It is an ordinary neighbourhood square: free, open, unstaffed, no ticket, no visitor centre, no guide and no signage explaining what happened. Since 2013 the swing frame itself has been fenced by the municipality after the seats were repeatedly stolen. Firmat is on National Route 33, roughly 110-115 km southwest of Rosario and about 60 km from Venado Tuerto, on the long-distance coach corridor that links the two; the town is small enough to cross on foot, and the plaza is a short walk from the centre. Passing drivers routinely pull over on the adjacent road to watch, which is how most visitors see it. Manage your expectations. The movement is intermittent and unannounced: days pass with nothing, and Diario Firmat's founder has described it as heavy on some days, slight on others and absent on many. On the physical account, the best odds are windy days with the wind blowing across the line of the three seats rather than along it. There is no guarantee, and there never has been. Two courtesies. This is a residential playground and the swings belong to the children who use them. And the family of the boy whose death anchors the legend still lives in the barrio and has asked, through neighbours, not to be approached about it — do not go knocking on doors. Checked in August 2026 against published reporting; we have not visited in person. Confirm access before travelling.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-12 · How we verify our content

The Swings of Firmat

Where is The Swings of Firmat?

Why is The Swings of Firmat said to be haunted?

What is the history of The Swings of Firmat?

Timeline: the documented record of The Swings of Firmat

Is there a rational explanation for The Swings of Firmat?

Can you visit The Swings of Firmat?

Sources consulted

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The Swings of Firmat

Where is The Swings of Firmat?

Why is The Swings of Firmat said to be haunted?

What is the history of The Swings of Firmat?

Timeline: the documented record of The Swings of Firmat

Is there a rational explanation for The Swings of Firmat?

Can you visit The Swings of Firmat?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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