More than 80 years uninhabited and hundreds of dark stories that make it famous. Clarín visited the iconic building of the Palacio de los Bichos, located in Campana at 3220, Villa del Parque. Those who pass by, prefer to do it on the odd sidewalk. Perhaps because they once heard that ghosts live in this place and strange things happen.
The mansion was built in the early twentieth century by the architect Muñoz González at the request of the Italian aristocrat Rafael Giordano. Don Rafael wanted to give a house to his daughter Lucia and his son-in-law Angel Lemos as a wedding gift.
Giordano didn't look at expenses when planning for her daughter's well-being. The building has five floors and an eclectic style that includes a keep, a dome and animal figures as ornaments. For these details, the people of the neighborhood baptized it as the Palace of the Bugs.
It was inaugurated on April 1, 1911, for the great wedding party of Lucia and Angel. On that day, the wedding guests would witness a tragedy that would mark the fate of the palace.
The party went normally. The tragic thing came later, when the bride and groom left for their honeymoon. The guests gathered on the balconies of the mansion to bid farewell to Lucia and her new husband. From there they saw his tragic death. The couple was accidentally hit by the train. Don Rafael could never overcome that loss and ordered the palace to close forever.
The building was uninhabited for more than eighty years. During that time, the neighbors of the place assured that strange things happened inside. Episodes that had no rational explanation. Everyday events that were feeding rumors about the presence of ghosts.
In 2005, a person decided to check if those rumors had any truth. Antonio Las Heras is a parapsychologist and dreamed of cleaning the energies of the place to inhabit the dome. As he did almost twenty years ago, he reopened the doors of the Palacio de los Bichos for the visit of Clarín.
"One Saturday morning one of the owners of the place calls me telling me that he could not sell any apartment because of those paranormal experiences. She told me that the night staff ran away because she was having a hard time. The condition I put was that it bewitched the place, but I wanted a reasonable price to buy the apartment in the dome, "recalls Antonio. The owners did not hesitate to accept.
It took about a month to make that harmonization and, as he says, there were never strange things lived in there again.
Since its reopening, the place was remodeled. Today it includes 7 apartments: 6 function as housing and one as an office. The ground floor is uninhabited and in the rest of the spaces live approximately 20 people.