Casa Matusita

In downtown Lima, on the corner of Garcilaso de la Vega Avenue and Plaza Dos de Mayo, stands a blue-facaded building popularly known as Casa Matusita, considered by generations of Limeños to be the most haunted site in the city. Accounts of its origin vary: some say a Japanese merchant went mad and murdered his family inside the house before taking his own life; others speak of a deadly fire, or of failed experiments that left 'presences' trapped within its walls. Locals claim no tenant has ever managed to stay long inside, that lights turn on and off by themselves, that footsteps and screams can be heard at night, and that the Peruvian government keeps the building closed for 'security reasons' to hide what supposedly happens inside. The legend gained particular popularity from the 1990s onward, fueled by television programs and sensationalist news reports that filmed alleged paranormal phenomena on the facade. Journalists and researchers have pointed out that the building has had various commercial uses over the decades without any documented incidents, yet Casa Matusita's reputation as a symbol of Lima's urban horror remains fully intact among generations of schoolchildren and curious visitors alike, cementing its place as one of Peru's best-known ghost stories.

Casa Matusita is, before anything else, an address: Avenida Inca Garcilaso de la Vega 1390 — the avenue every limeño still calls Wilson — on the corner of Avenida España, in central Lima. Everything else about it is contested. The address is not. Less is known about the building than its fame suggests. La República, in 2023, dates construction to the late 1890s and credits it to Francisco de Alvarado Throne; other Peruvian outlets say only "the end of the nineteenth century", and a few repeat an undocumented 1800. What nobody disputes is how it was made: two republican-era storeys of adobe and quincha, the traditional Lima technique of cane and mud packed onto a timber frame. Cheap, forgiving in an earthquake and, a century on, a structural liability. That construction detail ends up explaining almost everything. The date that is documented precisely is the sale. On 2 December 1924 the Andrade Fernández family bought the property, and their descendants still hold it. The present owner's surname is spelled three different ways depending on the outlet — Ladislao Terry Andrade, Tery Andrade, Thierry Tiry — which is a fair measure of the care the press has taken with this subject. The name comes from a tenant, not from the house. In 1950 Emilio Hideo Matsushita — born in Wakayama in 1918, arrived in Lima in 1937 — opened the Matusita hardware store on the ground floor: building materials and fittings for water, drainage and electrical installations, and by the 1960s ceramics, gas water heaters and air conditioning, plus the National brand's Peruvian representation. "Matusita" is simply how Matsushita is said and spelled in Lima. The shop held the corner for half a century and lent the building its sign until nobody could tell the two apart any more. It closed in 2005 for business reasons, and a Mibanco branch took the ground floor afterwards. That leaves the upper floor. The reason it has stood shut for decades is not a state secret or a clause in an exorcism: it is hundred-year-old adobe. The Municipality of Lima declared the property unsafe. Owner and bank agreed to restore the first level and dismantle the second so it could be rebuilt in lighter materials, and in June 2016 workmen began taking it down. Reporter Óscar Paz Campuzano described it in El Comercio at the time as "an old contraption of creaking timber, roofless, its walls knocked in". On 16 June that year the municipality itself halted the work: according to Cristian Rosenthal, head of enforcement, the crew had no safety equipment and were occupying the public highway without authorisation. Peru's most famous haunted house was stopped, quite literally, by a building-code citation. The legend, by contrast, was not born in the house. It was born in a newsroom and a television studio. The Peruvian press archive Arkivperu has gathered the advertisements: by 1964 Lima papers were already carrying notices tying Casa Matusita to "Los fantasmas se divierten", the radio and television show hosted by the announcer Humberto Vílchez Vera. By that same reconstruction the starting point was more prosaic still: the journalist Raúl Villarán, of the evening paper Última Hora, had had a bad night, had nothing to fill his page with, walked past the empty house and filed the headline "GHOSTS IN MATUSITA". The follow-up wrote itself: "THE GHOSTS DROVE HIM MAD". What half of Peru believes it remembers — that Vílchez spent a night on the second floor, came out foaming at the mouth and was committed for thirteen months — did not happen. In 1971 he announced live on the variety show "Domingos Gigantes" that he would go in. The visit never took place. And in 1990, in his book El cazador de fantasmas, Vílchez put it in writing without hedging: "I never went in, but everyone saw me go in; I never spoke to a ghost, but they look at me as though I had become a citizen of the beyond." The retraction has been in print for more than thirty years and the legend has not noticed. The third layer is the founding crime, and the versions are worth listing precisely so their status is clear. The most repeated one names Parvaneh Dervaspa, a foreign woman who supposedly reached Lima in the mid-eighteenth century, was condemned as a witch by the Inquisition and cursed the corner before she died. Another has a cruel master humiliating his two servants until they served a banquet laced with hallucinogens and the guests tore each other apart. A third puts a Japanese family here in 1873, the father killing his wife and children on the second floor. Not one of the three rests on a court file, a parish register, a police report or a single line of contemporary newsprint.

Casa Matusita is seen from the street and not entered. It is private property, the ground floor has always been a commercial unit, and the upper floor has been closed for decades on structural grounds. There are no guided tours, no night visits and no "special permission access": anyone selling a ticket to the interior is lying. Even the crew of Secreto Matusita failed to get inside in 2014. The address is Avenida Inca Garcilaso de la Vega 1390, on the corner of Avenida España, Cercado de Lima. Many maps and every local memory call that avenue Wilson; it is the same street. You will recognise the building by its chamfered corner and by the bank sign on the ground floor: in recent years the Lima press has described it painted white, with black doors and windows and a dead Mibanco sign, after the Municipality of Lima declared the property unsafe. The easiest approach is the Metropolitano bus rapid transit: España station, on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte at Avenida España, is about three blocks' walk east along España itself; Quilca and Dos de Mayo stations on the same corridor also work. The walk takes you past Plaza Bolognesi and its monument to Colonel Francisco Bolognesi, one of the loudest junctions in the city centre. It is worth carrying on south down Garcilaso de la Vega for five or six blocks to the Centro Cívico and the Sheraton hotel. That block, facing the Palace of Justice between Wilson and Bolivia avenues, was occupied until 1961 by the Lima Penitentiary — El Panóptico — opened in 1862 and demolished in a week. If the dark side of central Lima is what brought you, there is more documented history in that vanished block than in the whole Matusita legend. Practical warnings: this is a heavy-traffic corner with narrow pavements, so daylight is better; photograph from the opposite kerb and do not disturb the business downstairs or the neighbours; and in the Cercado, as in any busy historic centre, watch your pockets.