Torre del Fantasma — The Ghost Tower of La Boca
A 1910 modernist tower house in La Boca whose haunting is told by the city government itself — a widow's tower where servants fled, a painter tenant fell to her death after photographing three duendes in her own canvas, and ghostly apparitions that the official Buenos Aires tourism pages list among the neighbourhood's sights.
Case File No. 300
FILE 01 The Legend
The tower at the corner of Wenceslao Villafañe and Benito Pérez Galdós was built in 1910 for María Luisa Auvert Arnaud, a wealthy widowed estanciera, by a Catalan architect — a modernist tower of the type La Boca never otherwise received, and the widow moved in at the top. The story that follows is the one the Government of the City of Buenos Aires tells on its own official history pages ('Historia de mi Comuna: La Torre del Fantasma', 2013): the servants fled the tower one after another; the top floor was rented to a painter named Clementina; a journalist, Eleonora, photographed the painter's canvases; Clementina fell to her death from the tower; and when the photographs were developed, three duendes — Catalan goblins — were arranged around the painted figure. From the official telling the tower entered the formal tourist canon: the city's tourism materials describe it as a tower 'said to be inhabited by ghostly apparitions' and include it in La Boca's guided circuits, and the national press — La Nación, Clarín — has retold it as one of Buenos Aires' canonical haunted houses. The duendes, in the La Boca version, remained the tower's tenants: the folklore of Galician and Catalan immigrants supplied the creatures, the corner supplied the address, and the government supplied the imprimatur.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The sightings are the story's institutional carrier rather than fresh witnesses: the tower's apparitions are 'said' — the official verb — to include shadowed figures at the tower windows and the small presences of the Clementina episode; the guided tours of La Boca report unexplained cold at the base. No named witness, date-stamped encounter or investigation file exists; what exists is rarer — a municipal government narrating a ghost story about one of its own buildings, in print, as heritage interpretation, which has kept the tower's reputation continuous for over a century of neighbourhood retelling.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The city's own telling opens with '¿Querés una historia de terror?' — want a horror story? — framing itself as legend from the first line, which is the honest label. No death record for a painter named Clementina at the tower has been located by the journalists who looked; Clarín's own tracing points to literary folklore woven from the Auvert family's oral tradition. The duendes are immigrant folklore, not local history — Catalan goblins in a Genoese port quarter is itself the tell. The building is real and protected heritage; the haunting layer is a story the city tells about its own architecture, with no evidentiary layer at all beneath the official voice. As a case study in how ghosts acquire authority, though, the Torre del Fantasma is unmatched in this collection: it is haunted by government website.
BEYOND THE CASE FILE / PLAN A VISIT