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The Bélmez Faces

rynner2

rynner2

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Spanish Eyes

This article in FT157 is about the enigmatic faces of Belmez, in Spain.

For those who haven't read Jack Romano's article, it's about faces that appear in the concrete floors and walls of a house. The faces can't be erased, they seem to change expression, or even grow older, over time. Rigorous scientific analysis has failed to explain how they are created, or how they reappear when the floor is dug up and relaid.

As if this wasn't enough, there are also reports of EVP phenomena and poltergeist effects in the house. And all this has been going on for THIRTY years! This must be the best researched paranormal happening anywhere, yet there is still no scientific explanation.

Popular opinion has it that the events are due to disturbance of old burials in an adjacent church during renovations...

Perhaps for once we should apply Occam's Razor in defence of the spiritualist view! It's a simple answer that has been found satisfactory for millenia, and intensive scientific research has come up with no alternative, just a whole raft of could be's and maybe's. Perhaps science would make more progress by seeking to understand the nature of 'spirits' rather than just dismissing them a priori...?

Anyway, a good article. I'd heard of these images before, but not in such depth. More please!
 
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Occam's Razor. one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.

Seems to me the number of entities involved here was increased to ludicrous proportions!:)

And none of the bastards explained anything, they just came out of the floor and hung around.
 
Yeah, that's what's always intrigued me about that case. They never tried to sell us anything. No 'Pray for us' or even 'Ship is real, people'. Just a bit of random babbling on tape in the '70s and that's yer lot.

They did, however, contrive to scare the living shit out of me at the age of nine. I assume it was nothing personal.
 
Ghost Faces of Belmez - theories

I've always been facinated by this phenomenon. It just is so singularly weird, and pix so creepy that you wonder what was going on.

But, apparently there were sound recordings made with ultasensitive microphones that picked up people speaking in another unknown language? It seems to me that would be something that could either be proven as a hoax or authenticated - has anybody ever heard these recordings?

Here is a link:
dreamwater.com/eaglesfire/unexp2.html
Link is dead. See later post for the MIA webpage's contents.
 
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These scared the crap outta me, too - especially when those sound effects kicked in on that link, yiieeekes. Totally unexpected, I just about fell out of my chair.
A gravestone in the Maine, US town that my parents live in displays a similar phenomenon - no matter how many times that it has been replaced, the silouhette of a boot keeps appearing on it, incriminating the murderer of the deceased it belongs too. Or something like that, I don't clearly remember the details; I'll look them up and post them when I find 'em. :hmm:
 
I believe the "footprint" one is on the grave of a witch, condemning the judge who executed her. Can't remember the details either but I know I've got them lying around somewhere.
 
Are these the ones in Spain, read about these a while ago and they reckoned when the old woman who lived in the house died they'd stop and it'd be proven a hoax.
How an old woman could do all them in a night and they change as you watch don't they.
Am I talking about something completely different : (
 
Well, did the FT ever do an expose on just the recordings? it seems like that kind of hard evidence would be shocking to just have disappear... maybe Judge Crater has 'em!:D
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,2763,1259702,00.html

Haunted house put up for sale

Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Tuesday July 13, 2004
The Guardian

Spain's most famous haunted house has gone up for sale, with potential buyers offered the chance of sharing their home with a cast of ghosts whose faces allegedly appear on floors and walls.
The unique selling point of the whitewashed house, 5 Real Street, in the village of Bélmez de la Moraleda, in the southern province of Jaén - is its kitchen.
It was here, 33 years ago, that María Gómez first found the outline of a human face which appeared in the concrete floor. She chipped away at the cement to get rid of it, but soon a cast of a dozen other faces and outlines of whole bodies began to appear.
The phenomenon became so famous in Spain that queues of visitors formed every weekend. Scientists set about proving that Gómez must have painted the figures.
The state-run centre for scientific investigation became involved and the kitchen was closed off under the supervision of a notary. But when it was reopened three months later, the faces were still there.
A two-metre trench was dug, revealing bones from a 13th-century graveyard. "The strange thing was that they found bones but no skulls," said Lorenzo Fernandez, the author of a book on the "faces of Bélmez".
A more recent theory is that the faces belong to members of Gómez's family who were massacred during Spain's civil war.
 
I wish Iknew what kind of conclusions that the scientists had come to concerning the faces... I've alway been fascinated by this story, the pictures of which haunted me as published in Reader Digest's Strange Stories, Amazing Facts.
 
Yes!!
"Strange Stories, Amazing Facts" , circa 1980: the pictures of the faces put the wind up me. In fact that book, along with the partwork "The Unexplained" started my interest in things Fortean, along, I expect, with many others.
 
Just checked out the website mentioned above by Zede.
Still find the images disturbing after all these years, fraud or not. :eek!!!!:
 
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Belmez is back!

... and it looks like its spreading. From the Times:

Ghostly faces in the floor spark Spanish mystery cast in concrete
Link is dead. No archived version found.

It looked as if the Faces of Belmez were going to remain an unsolved mystery — until María died this year. Then, suddenly, a week ago, the faces spread across the village to the house where she was born. Now there are two houses sharing floor space with the apparitions.
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1) Another cool site that has examples of EVP from Belmez:

leftfield-psi.net/ghosts/belmez.html
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040408054622/http://www.leftfield-psi.net:80/ghosts/belmez.html

German de Argumosa had also taken electronic voice phenomenon (evp) samples at the Pereira home with startling results. Human cries and moans could be heard on the recordings and include messages stating:
"She goes with all the men"
"Hell begins here"
"German, scratches, patio, raises cement"
"I continue buried"

Further recordings revealed the faces actually taking part in conversations within the room, although not heard at the time; their voices were played back in the audio recording. One disturbing sample that was heard was "Maria, I want to leave".

Professor de Argumosa wasn't the only investigator to have obtained electronic voice phenomenon samples from the Pereira home. Pedro Amoros, President and Founder of SEIP (Spanish Society of Parapsychological Investigations - Sociedad Española de Investigaciones Parapsicológicas) captured evp, some of which stated the following:
"To kill him"
"It is an abuse"
"Mamaaaaaaaa"
"One suffers"
Click to expand...

2) Did you know there was a similar thing going on in Wales?

moldweb.co.uk/monk.htm
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20041026160538/http://www.moldweb.co.uk/monk.htm

David, my husband, Down’s Syndrome son John-Paul and I moved into Penyffordd Farm, circa 1610, just outside Treuddyn, in February 1997. We had only been in residence a couple of weeks when a reporter from The Chronicle turned up. He told us that an Irish couple, on a walking tour of North Wales, said they had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in our field. They claimed to have been cured of their ailments, namely a frozen shoulder and a cataract! We were sceptical about this, but the national media got hold of the story and by June 1997 we were like a mini-Lourdes.

Just after we moved into Penyffordd Farm, I took some photographs to send to our relatives to see what our new home was like. I photographed the house, garden, field – and a small tin barn near the hedge. I had a shock when this was developed because the photograph shows a face looking through the far window of the barn which was certainly not there when it was taken. [Fig.1 Face] It has eyes that are out of alignment, long hair and the figure is wearing a white shirt. There is an unearthly quality about it, as if the subject has lain under the sod for a while!

While all this was going on in the field, I became aware of a "presence" in the house. I seemed to hear footsteps on the landing and staircase and unexplained banging and crashing upstairs! Our youngest daughter, Adrienne, was staying with us for a few days and sleeping in the smallest room. She woke up to discover a young monk sitting on the end of the bed. At first, she found it a pleasant experience until her brain kicked in and she realised that he shouldn’t be there! We assumed that she had had a dream, but Adrienne was convinced that she was awake.

Three days later I was looking out of our kitchen window towards the river, which is obscured by a high hedge. Suddenly out of the blue, a monk appeared walking past the far side of the hedge. It was a second or two before I realised that I had not seen a flesh and blood person, as the hedge was about fourteen feet high! To date, I have seen what my brain tells me is a monk, four times. The apparition looks like a normal person, not a spectre. While I do have to consider the possibility that I am seeing what I want to see, for that split second the image seems very real indeed!

At the beginning of January 1999 our "haunting" entered a new phase. We noticed a stain in the shape of a word, TANGNEFEDD, on the white-painted wall of our lounge. It looked just as if someone had dipped a finger in a coffee-coloured pigment and marked the wall. We did not recognise the word, but assumed it to be Welsh as it ended in "dd". We do not speak Welsh so consulted a friend who is fluent in the language. At first he, too, was flummoxed.

Then he remembered that he has come across TANGNEFEDD as a boy in the church choir. The word means ‘peace’ used in the religious sense, like "Peace be with you". While we were glad that the word had no unpleasant connotations, we were naturally puzzled as to how it had got there. My husband, who has a degree in chemistry, suspected a practical joke. However, I knew I had not written it and children and their partners swore blind that they had not, and nobody else had been in the house. I took a photograph [Fig.2]
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Mr. R.I.N.G. said:
2) Did you know there was a similar thing going on in Wales?
Click to expand...
The owner of the Welsh house is a one-time member of this forum and has posted about her alledged experiences here. Personally, I find her claims a bit suspect, but that's just me.
 
The Welsh lady, she has noted before the fact that a huge, heavy wood owl statuette of hers has been moved multiple times. I actually had seen a picture of that somewhere else before and found it intriguing but never did see her site. I'm glad I looked at this thread then. :)
 
Some different pix and a few different details from this Singapore site:

sfogs.com/belmez.htm
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051026131242/http://www.sfogs.com:80/belmez.htm

All attempts the banish the faces failed - the floor was ripped up several times. Detergent and scrubbing seemed to do nothing but change the expressions and widen the eyes. Eventually, each face would disappear in its own time and apparently subject to its own laws of physics. Whilst the faces appeared like expressionist paintings, and were indeed hailed as masterpieces of paranormal art by eminent painters, it is unclear as to what actual pigments, paint or dyes were used. Chemists were unable to detect any elements in the faces that were not present in concrete and were at a loss to explain the existence of the faces at all.
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And another article:

ikerjimenez.com/cronica/prensaextranjera_thetimes.htm
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/2005110....com:80/cronica/prensaextranjera_thetimes.htm

Ghostly faces in the floor spark Spanish mystery cast in concrete

October 23, 2004

From David Sharrock in Belmez de la Moraleda

FOR more than 30 years Spain’s most celebrated haunted house has perplexed not just the inhabitants of this remote village, lost in the hills of the Sierra de la Magina in the country’s principal olive oil region, but the thousands of scientists and sceptics who have come to witness the strange phenomenon of the “Faces of Belmez”.

Now Andalucia’s very own X-Files has been reopened, with the arrival of new ghostly apparitions in the house where the old woman who prompted the original inquiry was born. In 1971 María Gómez Cámara walked into her kitchen one morning and found a face staring back at her from the concrete floor. Alarmed by what it might mean, she set her son, Miguel, the task of getting rid of it by digging it out with a pickaxe.

Miguel told The Times yesterday: “I re-cemented the floor and it looked like new. But I got the fright of my life when the very next morning the face was back in the floor, in exactly the same place.” Soon a tableau of faces had taken up residence in No 5 Calle Real, evolving and moving around the room over the weeks, months and years. “It was as if a host of souls was holding a conference in our house,” Miguel said.

Word soon spread and the faces became an attraction, dismaying the local Roman Catholic authorities, which tried to dismiss the phenomenon by accusing unknown people of perpetrating a hoax to make fun of the gullible villagers. Investigators of the paranormal came from abroad and, with the consent of the family, replaced the floor and sealed the room for three months. When they returned, so had the faces.

Recordings made in the house also captured strange voices, apparently of the faces talking to one another. Some interpreted them as cries for help from the other world. The family became accustomed to sharing their house not just with the strange faces — sometimes resembling formal portraits but occasionally portraying more menacing images of staring eyes and outstretched clawing hands — but also with a stream of visitors.

It looked as if the Faces of Belmez were going to remain an unsolved mystery — until María died this year. Then, suddenly, a week ago, the faces spread across the village to the house where she was born. Now there are two houses sharing floor space with the apparitions. Pedro Amorós, the president of the Spanish Parapsychology Society, confirmed that the faces have reappeared. “We are now going to begin a new investigation, more thorough than previous ones,” he said.

He added that shortly before María’s death, the society left concrete slabs around her house, with others placed in a laboratory in controlled conditions during the same period. More faces appeared in the slabs in the house; the others remained blank.

Several theories have been developed. A dig in the foundations of the house unearthed a number of skeletons, and further research established that the house was built on the site of an ancient burial ground, first belonging to the Romans, then the Muslims during the Moorish occupation. It was finally a Christian cemetery. But an elderly neighbour said: “It was María herself who was somehow calling up those souls. It can’t be mere coincidence that they are now appearing after her death in the room where she was born.”

Juan, a local labourer drinking beer in the village bar, said that nobody was surprised by the latest development. “Strange things have always happened in this village. When I was 14 there were ghosts that wouldn’t let me sleep at night. They used to pinch me and even lift me up. People thought I was levitating. It didn’t stop until a Mass was said for me.”

A request to spend the night in the haunted house of Belmez was politely turned down. “You would be wasting your time. They don’t come out of the floor and tickle you,” Miguel said.
Copyright 2004 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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What is the latest?

What is the latest on the Belmez faces story? Any news since 2004, when the house was put up for sale?
 
Many (if not quite all) of the Belmez faces have a raw artistic power somewhat in the tradition of Roualt and Munch.

If the faces are indeed forgeries the artist responsible would most likely have done better by painting them onto stretched canvas or art board and displaying them for sale in art galleries, cutting out the paranormal nonsense altogether.

Once again, that's *"IF"* they *"ARE"* fakes.
 
I've been reading a book on Belmez recently, called Las Caras de la Discordia (The Faces of Discord) by two Spanish journalists, and the more I read the less I believe that it was genuine. As an example, investigators covered the kitchen floor in plastic and marked a grid over it, to see if any faces would appear without people being able to touch the floor. Maria, the housewife, was caught lifting up the plastic to do some "cleaning", shortly afterwards some new faces miraculously appeared...it's a pity really, because those photos of the faces that appeared in a Readers Digest book on the unknown in the 70s absolutely terrified me as a kid.

The book came with a CD which included some supposed EVP, where in true EVP tradition you're told what you're about to hear before you actually hear an indistinct, garbled noise which your mind then interprets according to the explanation you're just been given...

Still, I'm glad I read the book so I could make my mind up!
 
The shifting floor faces in Maria Gomez Pereaira's kitchen floor in Belmez, Spain was a fun source of Forteana for me growing up in the 70's so I wondered if the phenomena or fakes were still happening .. the last anyone heard was that it still is. I'm looking forward to finding images of the more recent images. Maria reportedly died in 2004 so I'm hoping to find a youtube video from more recent researchers of these paranormal faces if anyone fancies giving me a hand .. As Fort-O's, we need to re-investigate this case and bring us up to date on this notorious haunted kitchen floor. For me, this has about as much credibility as Jef the talking mongoose and that's not an insult or a compliment.

http://www.mysterious-planet.com/the-belmez-faces/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bélmez_Faces

 
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We had a thread about the case which was active from 2004, when the house went on the market, until 2006.

It is still here but most of the links are dead.
The other forum threads on the Belmez Faces have now been consolidated into this one dedicated thread.

It may well be time to give the case another airing but there was never much detailed work on it in English. The bulk of material just goes around in circles. I may give that Spanish documentary a go later on. Thanks for posting it. :)
 
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My personal opinion was that it was usually hoaxes or paradeolia. While it adds great detail to someone's spooky story 'that the face of the victim' or 'the face of Virgin Mary', etc., can still be seen on the wall, I find it hard to believe. It's too easily hoaxed or like seeing Jesus in your tortilla. I'm more likely to believe spirits can manipulate energy like sound and light waves than affect painted walls, make walls bleed and stuff like that. I think as energy, 'fluid' energy is easier for them to manipulate. I've had more visual and auditory experiences than I've had physical.
 
The problem I have with those floor images is that they aren't life like enough .. they do look like bad finger paintings. I wonder if the hundreds of people who testified they were real were just being blinded by religious faith ?.

I'd be interested to learn more about the German TV crew who covered the floor to test for trickery ..

I've just tried to find the house on Google street view but with no luck so far.
 
MrRING said:
... But, apparently there were sound recordings made with ultasensitive microphones that picked up people speaking in another unknown language? It seems to me that would be something that could either be proven as a hoax or authenticated - has anybody ever heard these recordings?

Here is a link:
dreamwater.com/eaglesfire/unexp2.html
Click to expand...

Here's the text (pics are lost) from this MIA webpage.

In the early morning of an August day in 1971, in the village of Belmez Spain a woman and her grandchild were sitting in their Kitchen when the child suddenly cried out in excitment. What the child saw was a human face that had spontaneously on the pink floor tiles...a face with very troubled features, horridly sad. No recognizable pigment of any kind had formed the image, and when the family tried to rub it out, they were horrified to find that the eyes opened wider and the expression become more and more sorrowful.
Alarmed, the owner of the house had the floor ripped out and replaced the tiles with concrete. But three weeks later a second face emerged, this time with its features more clear.
As local authorities became involved they ordered the section where the faces had appeared, to be cut away. Workers digging up the floor uncovered the remains of a medieval cemetary.
During this time, a third...fourth..and more faces started appearing in the kitchen, and so the kitchen was sealed off and locked. Four more faces appeared in other parts of the house, but they ended up being the last, for soon after the phenomenon ended quickly as it had begun.
During the investations, experts in finding frauds had investigated the house and ended up more baffeled then before. Their ultrasenitive microphones picked up voices speaking in strange languages..along with agonized moans matching the features of horrifying looking faces on the floor.
All attempts to banish the faces failed - the floor was ripped up several times. Detergent and scrubbing seemed to do nothing but change the expressions and widen the eyes. Eventually, each face would disappear in its own time. Chemists were unable to detect any elements in the faces that were not present in concrete and were at a loss to explain the existence of the faces at all. ...

Since it began no one has come forward with a reasonable explanation for the Faces of Belmez. Though all the experts agreed that the house was once the scene of some tragic happenings..maybe even connected with some form of medieval witchcraft.
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SALVAGED FROM: https://web.archive.org/web/20030903111024/http://www.dreamwater.com/eaglesfire/unexp2.html
 
The Belmez faces?

faces-of-belmez.jpg
 
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