Halloween Post 4: Faces of Bélmez
I’m a skeptic, but I love a good ghost story, and if that story purports to be true, I love it even more.
The face in the upper left corner haunted me as a child. I must have seen it on the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! television show or That’s Incredible, but wherever I encountered it, it stuck with me.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the topic:
The appearances in Bélmez began on August 23, 1971, when María Gómez Cámara claimed that a human face formed spontaneously on her cement kitchen floor. María’s husband, Juan Pereira and their son, Miguel, destroyed the image with a pick axe and new cement was laid down. However, the Pereira story goes, a new face formed on the floor. The mayor of Bélmez was informed and forbade the destruction of the new face. Instead, the floor cement was cut out and taken for study.María’s home, advertised to the tourists as La Casa de las Caras (The House of the Faces), was built in the 19th century. An excavation, conducted under the location of the house, revealed human remains, which were removed. However, this did not stop the purported phenomenon. By Easter of 1972 hundreds of people were flocking to the house to see the faces. For the next 30 years the Pereira family claimed that faces continued to appear. They were both male and female, of different shapes, sizes and expressions.
