Casa Matusita

The story

Casa Matusita stands at a street corner in central Lima, Peru. It is a private, commercial property and is visible from the street; we give no more precise location. An old newspaper clipping, reproduced on ArkivPerú, says it was built in 1909, with Dr. Carlos Ramírez as the first owner, and that it then belonged to the Andrade family; English Wikipedia follows it. Spanish Wikipedia says no exact date is known, and other sources speak of the colonial era or the early twentieth century, so the construction date is uncertain.

The Penitenciaría de Lima, opened in 1862, stood opposite. The name Matusita comes from a hardware business, Matusita S.A., on the ground floor from the 1950s until 2005, according to El Comercio (4 July 2016) and Wikipedia. From the late 1940s to the early 1990s the United States embassy was across the road, a fact that feeds one of the theories below. El Comercio says the municipality had declared the building a danger the year before, and that the owner and the bank renting it agreed to demolish the upper floor and rebuild it in lighter material; the works were halted on 16 June 2016. Spanish Wikipedia dates the demolition to July 2016.

The legend

The central story is of Parvaneh Dervaspa, a Persian woman accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition and burned. The dates conflict: English Wikipedia and Infobae (2022) have her arriving in August 1753 and condemned in 1754; the article cited next gives no date. A Mercosur press article of 19 January 2026 says that “No hay documentación histórica que lo confirme”: it treats the story as oral tradition. The same article says there is no official record of the other tale told about the house, a mass poisoning. Infobae quotes a historian saying no real information supports the stories, and says the Inquisition’s archives were lost in 1813, so her story cannot be confirmed.

A much-repeated modern episode involves a television presenter, Humberto Vílchez Vera, of the program Los fantasmas se divierten. He is said to have taken a bet to spend seven days on the upper floor, to have left after two hours and to have been committed. English Wikipedia places this at the end of the 1970s; Spanish Wikipedia and ArkivPerú in the 1960s. According to Wikipedia, he denied the story in his book El cazador de fantasmas (1990, per Spanish Wikipedia), saying he had wanted to raise the show’s ratings; ArkivPerú calls the book a novel and has him writing that he never entered the house.

For the noises, the owner offered a mundane explanation to El Comercio in 2016: after his family left in 1950, a drunken guard used to climb the stairs dragging a chain, and the stories grew from that. We do not name the owner. A further theory says the CIA, or in the Mercosur article the embassy itself, spread the ghost tales to keep the curious away. Wikipedia calls it a conspiracy theory, and the Mercosur article offers no proof.

The oldest dated trace we found is a newspaper clipping by Ligia López de Castilla, headlined in part “No ha Visto Ninguno en Veinte Años,” reproduced in ArkivPerú’s post “La leyenda de la Casa Matusita (1964)” of 24 October 2014. We read the scan. It shows no paper’s name or date, so the year rests on the post’s title. It says many legends had already grown around the house, that people refused to live there and that even foreigners asked for it. Its guard, 79 years old and there since 1950, had seen nothing and called the story a great lie; he told of hitting two armed thieves with a chain, and they fled believing in ghosts. Whether that chain is related to the owner’s later story is our question, not a finding. The clipping does not mention a Persian woman. ArkivPerú also suggests that the legend began with a headline invented by a journalist, Raúl Villarán, but gives no document for that. In 2014, after the film Secreto Matusita, the owner tried to dispel the legend, and El Comercio names a parapsychologist, Félix Rivera, who found no spirit inside. In 2016, according to the paper, the owner called it an urban legend. The film and the 2014 reports by RPP and América Noticias are known only through Wikipedia.

What remains today

We found no confirmation that the upper floor was ever rebuilt as agreed. La República (29 October 2022) describes the house as white with black doors and windows, with a bank’s sign on the ground floor and no service to customers. The January 2026 article says part of the upper floor was demolished and that people still come to photograph the building. We could not verify its current state in more detail, and we found no organized visit to the interior.

Visiting

It is a private commercial building that can be seen from the street. Look at it from the public pavement and respect anyone who works there; we found no tour of the interior, so do not expect to be admitted, and do not try to enter. Its condition since 2022 is uncertain in our sources, so check local news before you travel.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Casa Matusita — Wikimedia Commons
2. Casa Matusita — Wikipedia (Spanish), 2026-11-06
3. Casa Matusita: ¿el fin de la leyenda más famosa de Lima? (Oscar Paz Campuzano) — El Comercio, 2016-07-04
4. Casa Matusita: ¿por qué se dice que estuvo 'embrujada' y cómo luce ahora tras su demolición? — La República, 2022-10-29
5. Casa Matusita y la eterna historia de misterio en Lima — Prensa Mercosur, 2026-01-19
6. El origen de la leyenda de la Casa Matusita y qué tan real es — Infobae, 2022-07-03
7. Guardián de la "Casa de Fantasmas" No ha Visto Ninguno en Veinte Años (scan of the clipping) — ArkivPerú, 2026-11-06
8. La leyenda de la Casa Matusita (1964) — ArkivPerú, 2014-10-24
9. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.