La Recoleta Cemetery, consecrated in 1822 in the Barrio Norte of Buenos Aires, occupies 54,000 square metres of the city's most prestigious real estate and contains the elaborate mausolea of Argentina's nineteenth- and twentieth-century elite — presidents, poets, generals, cattle barons, and most famously Eva 'Evita' Perón, whose remains were interred here in 1976 after twenty-four years of posthumous wandering. More than 4,600 mausolea crowd the narrow lanes in a compressed city of the dead, and 94 are designated national historical monuments.
Recoleta's ghost tradition is one of the oldest and most culturally embedded in Latin America. The most-reported apparition is Rufina Cambaceres, a nineteen-year-old heiress who died on her birthday in 1902 and was interred in a grand mausoleum on the cemetery's main cross-path. When gravediggers returning the following morning to close the mausoleum found the coffin dislodged from its shelf and the interior scratched bloody, it emerged that Rufina had been buried alive during a cataleptic seizure and had died of suffocation some hours later. Her statue — depicting a young woman reaching out from a doorway — is now one of the most-visited in South America, and her apparition is regularly reported walking the aisles at dusk.
Other frequently-reported manifestations include the figure of David Alleno, a cemetery worker who saved for 30 years to commission a statue of himself before committing suicide in 1915 (his figure, with a broom, can sometimes be seen at the end of the western lane); unexplained piano music from the Dorrego family crypt; and the sudden opening of specific mausoleum gates. Guided night tours operated since 2010 have logged more than 800 anomalous incidents. Multiple Argentine presidents and cultural authorities have visited Evita's crypt and reported feeling her presence. Recoleta remains perhaps the most concentrated haunted-location cluster in the Southern Hemisphere and a centerpiece of Argentine paranormal culture.