Casa Matusita

OVERVIEW

Casa Matusita stands at the corner of Garcilaso de la Vega and España avenues in central Lima, opposite where the Lima Penitentiary opened in 1862. It was built in 1909, first owned by Dr Carlos Ramírez and later by the Andrade family, and takes its name from Matusita S.A., a hardware firm that used the ground floor as a warehouse from the 1950s until 2005. The second floor was demolished as unsafe in 2016 and rebuilt in lightweight material.

HISTORY

The legends attached to it are many. One says a Persian woman, Parvaneh Dervaspa, arrived at Callao in 1753, lived here, and was burned by the Inquisition the next year — in a house not built until 1909. Another tells of a family poisoned by a hallucinogen who died screaming; others of whole families killed inside. The best known says the Argentine TV host Humberto Vílchez Vera bet at the end of the 1970s that he could spend seven days on the second floor, ran out after two hours and spent a year in a mental hospital. In his own book, El cazador de fantasmas, Vílchez denied it: none of it happened, and he had wanted the ratings.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Recorded with vetted = false. What is documented is the reputation and its demolition: a building whose founding legend is 150 years older than the building, and whose most famous witness withdrew his story himself. A further theory holds that the ghost stories were spread by the CIA to keep the building empty, because the United States embassy stood across the street from the late 1940s to the early 1990s. That is recorded here as a theory, not as fact.

VISITING

A private, occupied building on a busy junction. View it from the street; do not trespass.