Casa Matusita
A mid-town Lima corner house whose name comes from a hardware firm — and whose room, by nationwide legend, drives everyone who enters it mad.
Case File No. 116
FILE 01 The Legend
Peru's most famous haunted building collects legends the way a magnet collects filings: a Persian healer burned by the Inquisition cursing the ground; servants who poisoned a cruel master's dinner with hallucinogens and left the diners torn to pieces; a Japanese patriarch named Matsushita who murdered his family over an affair and killed himself. The common thread is an upstairs room no one may enter, from which — in the best-known 1970s episode — the comedian Humberto Vilchez Vera was carried out on the fourth day of a publicity bet, screaming and frothing, after which he spent thirteen months in an asylum and never spoke of it again.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Passers-by report lights and voices from the upper floor, and the house's windows are permanently shuttered. The stories are known to essentially everyone in Lima — folklorists collecting them note dozens of mutually contradictory versions told with total confidence.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
No document supports any of the deaths; the Inquisition-era variant is unverifiable by construction, since the relevant archives burned in 1813. USC's folklore archive records the most deflating version: the US embassy stood directly across the street, and stories about the house are said to have been encouraged — 'Hollywood at its politically finest' — during the late-1980s unrest, to keep people from gathering at a spot overlooking the mission. The tales spread widely only in the early 1990s, which fits that timeline better than a 1753 curse.