Posted by - Where: at the corner of Avenida Garcilaso de la Vega and Avenida España, in central Lima, Peru.
- Fame: considered the most haunted house in South America.
- The name: comes from a hardware company, Matusita S.A., which used the ground floor as a warehouse from the 1950s to 2005.
- Today: in 2016 the second floor was demolished and rebuilt; there is a bank on the ground floor.
Casa Matusita is in Lima, Peru, and many legends surround it. It is said to be one of the most haunted houses in the world and the most haunted in South America. The odd thing is that only the second floor of the house is supposedly haunted, while the first is rented out. Today there is a bank there.
The story of Casa Matusita
It all supposedly began in colonial times, when a woman arrived in Lima from the Old World. According to one version of the legend she was a Persian woman, Parvaneh Dervaspa, who landed at the port of Callao on 25 August 1753. Nobody knows who she is, she has no acquaintances and people begin to gossip. She is accused of witchcraft, tried by the Inquisition and, after a confession extracted under duress, burned at the stake.
According to the legend she was executed right where Casa Matusita now stands, and as she died she cast a curse that caused all the events I am about to tell you.
The first victims of the curse were the members of a family who built the house many years later. The family was well known and liked by everyone, but one day something changed.
All of them began to behave strangely, more violently, especially the head of the family.
Shortly after they moved in, the servants could no longer bear their master’s abuse and wiped out the whole family. The servants were then taken to a psychiatric hospital, where they remained until they died.
Another version says that a family living in the house accidentally consumed a hallucinogenic substance and died amid terrible screams.
The house then stood empty for a long time until a man of Japanese origin, Mr Matsushida, from whose mangled name the house supposedly takes its name, decided to move in.
He opened a shop on the ground floor and went to live with his wife and children on the floor above.
It is said that one day he found his wife in bed with another man and, mad with jealousy, killed them both. Then he waited for his children to come home from school, killed them and took his own life.
And once again the house stood empty.
A priest then offered to exorcise it, but once inside he had to leave soon after. He said he had heard screams and been attacked by several spirits. He died shortly after telling his story, from sheer fright.
Another victim was supposedly an Argentine TV host, Humberto Vílchez Vera, presenter of the show Los fantasmas se divierten, who bet he could stay on the second floor of the house for 7 days.
It is said he lasted only two hours before running out in a panic, and that he was committed to an asylum for a year, after which he vanished.
Years later, however, in his book El cazador de fantasmas, Vílchez Vera himself denied everything: nothing had ever happened, he only wanted to boost his show’s ratings.
Theories
There are many theories. Some say the witch’s curse started everything, others that Casa Matusita is haunted by the spirits of everyone who died there.
Opposite the house, from 1862, stood the Lima Penitentiary, and it is said that the prison and its surroundings were used to interrogate common and military prisoners, especially during the War of the Pacific against Chile.
But there are also those who say these are all legends, invented to keep the curious away. But away from what?
From the late 1940s to the early 1990s, right across the street from Casa Matusita stood the embassy of the United States of America.
According to a conspiracy theory, it was the CIA that spread the ghost stories, to prevent anyone from using the house to spy on the embassy. It is also strange that, with all those deaths, there is not a single newspaper article about them.
And the name? Mr Matsushida probably never existed: the house is named after Matusita S.A., a hardware company that rented the ground floor as a warehouse from the 1950s until 2005.
Online I found an interview with the current owner of Casa Matusita, Ladislao Thierry Tiry Andrade, who flatly denies the presence of spirits.
He says the house was built in the 19th century and that his grandfather bought it at the beginning of the 20th. His grandmother settled there permanently in 1947, when her husband died. According to other sources the house was built in 1909 and its first owner was Dr Carlos Ramírez, before it passed to the Andrade family.
In July 2016 the second floor, the “haunted” one, was demolished because the Municipality of Lima had declared it unsafe. The owner reached an agreement with the bank renting the ground floor to renovate it and rebuild the second floor with lightweight materials. The legend has also inspired a film, Secreto Matusita.
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