Standing prominently at the busy intersection of Garcilaso de la Vega and España avenues in downtown Lima, the seemingly mundane, two-story Casa Matusita holds a dark reputation as Peru’s most terrifying urban haunting. While the ground floor has historically been leased to commercial businesses, the second floor has remained locked, abandoned, and intensely feared for over half a century. The property’s reputation stems from two violent, foundational legends. The earliest dates back to the 18th century, when a Persian-ancestry woman named Daza Choes was burned at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition after being accused of witchcraft, allegedly laying a death-curse upon the soil. The more modern, prominent tragedy occurred in the mid-20th century, involving an abusive Japanese-Peruvian businessman who returned home early to find his wife in bed with another man; in a fit of rage, he brutally butchered his family and committed hara-kiri in the master bedroom.

The building’s psychological dread is defined by an aggressive, poltergeist-level phenomenon that attacks the senses of anyone who dares cross the threshold of the upper level. The most famous modern casualty was Humberto Vílchez Vera, a prominent television host who, in the 1960s, made a televised wager that he could survive seven consecutive nights alone on the second floor; Vílchez Vera fled screaming into the street within hours, was institutionalized, and later wrote of hearing disembodied pacing, smelling sulfurous rot, and seeing spectral shadows clawing at the walls. Paranormal vloggers and investigative teams visiting the exterior report intense electromagnetic field (EMF) spikes and sudden audio distortion on microphones, catching the faint, frantic sounds of weeping and furniture dragging from the empty rooms above. Despite being structurally remodeled and reinforced in recent years, local security guards and night-shift workers in adjacent offices refuse to look at the second-floor windows after dark, claiming that a heavy, suffocating aura constantly radiates from the glassless upper frames.