The Mystery of the Belmez Faces

One of the Belmez Faces
Photo courtesy of Cesar Tort

On August 23, 1971, something strange happened in Belmez de la Moraleda, Spain. A woman named Maria Gomez Pereira says she noticed a marking on her kitchen floor that looked like a human face. She told her husband about the face and he made the decision to dig up the floor and replace it with new concrete. This worked for about a week before the face reappeared. It was then that the family sanctioned the help of the local City Council. More faces appeared of both genders and many sizes.

The City Council of Belmez conducted an investigation, and once again the floor was removed. A pit filled with human bones was found some eight or nine feet below the kitchen. The bones were removed and buried elsewhere, the earth was replaced and another floor was laid. Within a matter of weeks, the faces reappeared. Stories suggest that the images could appear while a person was watching and their expressions would change when someone tried to wash them away. Some of them would stay for a short time. Others stayed longer.

There are claims that audio recordings captured whispering voices and people crying out in the kitchen. However, these sounds were never heard in the room without a recording device. It has also been reported that the faces changed according to Maria Gomez Pereira’s mood. This is suggestive of a psychokinetic phenomenon, rather than a haunting as the pit of bones suggest. Either explanation requires belief in the paranormal, so it's either that or assume the faces are a hoax or hysteria.

The faces that appeared (there are plenty of photos of them available on the internet) do look suspiciously like drawings. In other words, they do not look like images of human faces; they look like an artist’s facsimile. If a haunting or other paranormal phenomenon were to reveal itself in this way, why would the Belmez faces look so fake? Wouldn’t it be more likely that the faces would look real? There have supposedly been studies on the faces that show they weren’t painted on and are “in” the concrete. I can't vouch for the veracity of that study.

The Belmez Faces continued to appear, however they formed, for about a year. There is no evidence of paranormal activity and no one has admitted to a hoax, so the truth is anyone's guess.

Sources

The Belmez Faces, retrieved 11/12/09, discoverychannel.co.usk/paranormal/most-haunted/belmes_faces/index.shtml

The Faces of Belmez, retrieved 11/12/09, thecobrasnose.com/xxghost/belmez.html