Casa Matusita

Casa Matusita is a building in Lima, Peru, around which ghost stories and tales of strange night noises have gathered for decades. A historian told Infobae there is no record supporting any of them.

The Casa Matusita is a building in Lima. El Comercio reported in 2016 that for decades people had told ghost stories and spoken of strange noises at night on its second floor. That year workers began taking the second floor apart, and the paper described what was left as an old, creaking wooden shell with no roof and its walls knocked down.

One tale involves a television host. Wikipedia says that in the late 1970s Humberto Vílchez Vera, an Argentine who presented the programme Los fantasmas se divierten, bet that he could last a week upstairs in the house. The story goes that he fled after two hours and spent a year in a psychiatric hospital before dropping out of sight. Wikipedia adds that Vílchez later denied the story in a book he wrote, El cazador de fantasmas, saying none of it had happened and that he had only wanted to raise his ratings.

Two later sources dismiss the stories. The historian and YouTuber Merlín Chambi told Infobae in 2022 that all the stories come from popular myth and that no real information backs up any of them. In a 2016 El Comercio column, Jaime Bedoya wrote that nothing had ever happened in the house.

The legend reached the cinema in 2014. The Peruvian horror film Secreto Matusita was the most-watched film of its week, and Andina reported that 163,000 people had seen it by that Sunday.