The House of Faces

[00:00:00] It started like a lot of strange stories do, in a quiet place no one was paying much attention to. The village of Belmes de la Moraleda sits tucked in the mountains of southern Spain. It's small, just a few hundred people then, and not the kind of town that makes headlines. The pace of life is slow, days blend together. Most of the houses look the same, whitewashed stone, small windows, low roofs. People age there, they don't leave unless they have to.

[00:00:30] Maria Gomez Cámara lived in the modest home on Calle Real, the main road that runs through the village. She wasn't famous or eccentric, or particularly interested in anything beyond keeping her home in order. She was practical, people liked her, but she wasn't the type to go looking for attention. And it was in that house, on an ordinary day in August of 1971, that Maria saw something on her kitchen floor that stopped her cold.

[00:00:59] She was sweeping, just sweeping, not in a rush. The windows were open, and the heat was settling in, that dry undilusioned heat that makes everything move slower. She moved the broom across the kitchen like she had done so many times before. But that day, something made her stop. There was a mark on the floor, near the stove. At first glance, she thought it was maybe just a stain. Maybe something spilled. Grease, maybe?

[00:01:28] The kitchen was old. The concrete floor had cracks and scuffs from decades of wear. But this mark was odd. It wasn't smeared like most stains. And it had symmetry. She bent down to look closer. And what she saw was not just a smudge. It had the shape of a face. Two shadowed impressions where the eyes should be. A curve where a nose might be.

[00:01:57] A faint suggestion of lips, closed and pressed together. In this episode, we're going to explore one of the first mysteries I ever read about. And one that still creeps me out to this day. My name is Edwin. And here's a horror story. After seeing this figure on the floor, she called her son. He came into the room and froze when he saw it.

[00:02:27] Her husband followed. And then a neighbor. And one by one, people stared at the floor and came to the same conclusion. It looked like someone's face was emerging from beneath the concrete. They stood over it, pointing, guessing. Was it a man or a woman? Was it young? Was it angry? Or just tired? Word spread fast through the village. People showed up at Maria's doorstep asking to see it.

[00:02:55] Some brought by holy water. Some crossed themselves. Others just stood there, silent. Not quite sure what they were supposed to feel. It didn't feel like a trick. It didn't feel like a joke. And the face didn't speak, obviously. It didn't glow. It didn't move. But it made people uncomfortable. Maria, who had no history of anything unusual, suddenly had a kitchen full of strangers. Some thought she was blessed. Others thought she was cursed.

[00:03:25] Maria herself didn't think either. She just wanted her floor back. So after a few days of awkward glances and whispered conversations, the family tried to remove it. They used soap, then bleach, a steel brush, but nothing worked. They wouldn't scrub away. And finally, they called in someone to break up the concrete completely. So they tore out the section of the floor, the one where the face had formed. And they poured fresh cement over it.

[00:03:56] Maria thought that would be the end of it. Whatever it was, it was gone. The kitchen was quiet again. The neighbors stopped visiting. And for a while, things felt normal. But then, just a week later, another face appeared. Longer. Sadder. It was in a different spot on the floor. And then, a few days later, another face. And then another. No one could explain how they were getting there.

[00:04:25] The cement was still new. The tools were clean. The room was locked at night. But the faces were back. And they weren't going anywhere. That was a moment when people stopped thinking of it as a stain. And started thinking of it as something else. Something trying to show itself. Something trying to get attention. After the second face appeared, the mood in Maria's house changed.

[00:04:52] This other face was closer to the wall. The concrete was still new from when they had replaced it just a week or two earlier. But now, it looked like something was pushing through it again. The family hadn't said much outside their close circle. But the village already knew. People always know when something strange is happening. Especially in a place that small. And the talk was changing. The first time around, people were curious. Maybe even a little amused. But now, they weren't smiling.

[00:05:22] Some said it was spirits. Others said it was a sign from God. Or the opposite. Maria's priest came to the house and blessed the kitchen. But that didn't stop anything. The faces kept coming. And they didn't appear all at once. They came slowly. Over days, even weeks. Some of them looked human. Others barely did. A few were just impressions. Sunken cheeks. Hollowed eyes. But they had presence.

[00:05:51] And they gave people the feeling that someone was watching them. Even when no one was around. Now, what made it worse was how they didn't stay still. Now, that's something people don't always believe at first. But the faces moved. Not like animation or anything obvious. They shifted. Slightly. When no one was looking. The next day, one would be closer to the edge of the room. Or the mouth would be open. When it had been closed before.

[00:06:22] One face, Maria swore, started out as a man's. And slowly changed into something else entirely. She never said what she thought it had turned into. There was one face people still talk about. It had the eyes mostly closed. But the mouth clearly visible. The corners were turned downward. Not in pain. But in something deeper. And just faintly, you can make out what looked like lines across the lips.

[00:06:50] Someone said it looked like the mouth had been sewn shut. By now, the house was turning into a problem. Maria's kitchen, the center of her daily life, didn't feel like hers anymore. The family started avoiding the room unless they had to be in it. They cooked faster. They cleaned in silence. They stopped hosting guests. The faces had changed the entire rhythm of the household. And outside, things weren't much better.

[00:07:19] Some of the villagers began keeping their distance. Others visited the house again, standing in the doorway like they were entering a place that had been marked. A few even warned Maria to leave. One woman told her that she should burn the place to the ground. But Maria didn't want to leave. This was her home. But something had shifted. The presence of the faces wasn't just on the floor anymore. It was in the air.

[00:07:46] There was one night where Maria swore she heard footsteps in the kitchen long after everyone had gone to bed. Slow, deliberate steps across a tile. When she got up to check, the room was empty. But one of the faces, the one near the stove, looked just a little different the next morning. She didn't tell anyone that right away. Eventually, the town council got involved.

[00:08:12] They were worried about the attention the house was bringing and about what it might mean. So at this point, it was just Maria, her family, and a growing line of villagers waiting outside her door to see what had come up through the floor this time. No one in Belmes knew exactly how it happened. Maybe it was a relative telling someone in another town. But whatever the reason, the quiet little home on Calle Real started drawing attention from people who didn't live there.

[00:08:41] The first ones were harmless. Curious folks from nearby villages who had heard about the faces and wanted to see for themselves. They knocked politely. Some brought rosaries. A few stood in the doorway, eyes down, not saying much. Others asked questions that Maria had no answers for. When did the first face appear? How long did it take to form? Did she hear anything before it happened? No, she answered as best as she could.

[00:09:10] But the questions just kept coming. And soon it wasn't just villagers or the faithful showing up. There were reporters now. Men with notepads and cameras and tape recorders. They asked if they could take samples of the floor. One man tried to pry up a corner of the concrete when he thought no one was watching. And that's when Maria started keeping the door locked. She hadn't asked for any of this. And she wasn't trying to make money or tell ghost stories.

[00:09:39] She never invited attention. People speculated. They wrote things in newspapers that she had never said. That she summoned spirits. That she had practiced something. That the faces were warnings. One article claimed that she was connected to the dead. Another said that she had been cursed by a family member. It didn't matter that none of it was true. Even people she'd known her whole life were keeping their distance.

[00:10:08] The neighbors who once stopped by with olive oil or eggs. Now walked a little bit faster when they passed her window. A few still came in. But most were quiet now. Some started crossing themselves when they walked by her house. Others avoided it entirely. Inside the faces kept appearing. It was dozens spread out across the kitchen floor. Some large. Some small.

[00:10:38] Some faint enough that you might miss them at first glance. One looked like it was screaming. Another had deep, empty sockets where the eyes should have been. Some were side by side. Others were spaced out like they were keeping their distance from each other. The family didn't say much anymore. One of the more unnerving things was how the faces seemed to emerge slowly. Layer by layer. A smudge would appear. A smudge would appear. Faint as dust.

[00:11:07] And over a day or two, it would sharpen. First the shape of the head and then the eyes. Then the mouth. And when it finished, it would just stay there. Waiting. People started taking photos. Some of those images ended up in national newspapers. A few researchers showed up and asked to observe the phenomenon firsthand. One of them asked if he could sleep in the kitchen overnight. Maria said no. She didn't like the idea of someone sleeping in that room.

[00:11:37] Kind of understandable. The way she said it made the man leave quietly. After that, more theories started to pile up. Psychics, paranormal investigators, university scientists. Everyone had a different answer. Some said it was moisture and mold reacting with minerals in the cement. Others said it was mass suggestion. But no one could explain why the faces seemed to change and why they grew.

[00:12:07] No one could explain why they kept appearing. Eventually, someone had the idea to dig. It wasn't just speculation anymore at this point. Too many people had come through the house. Too many faces had formed in places where they shouldn't have. Maria had poured fresh cement, sealed the floor, scrubbed it down herself,

[00:12:35] watched it day after day. The faces kept coming. Always from below. Now, the idea didn't start with Maria. It came from one of the local officials who had stopped by to inspect the house. He had seen the faces, spoken to a few of the researchers who had visited the property. He didn't know what to believe, but he asked a simple question that no one else had. What's under the kitchen?

[00:13:04] It was a fair question. The house was old, built long before Maria moved in. Records back then were sketchy, if they existed at all. No one remembered who had lived there before her family, and there had never been any renovations deep enough to reveal what lay beneath the floor. So one day, with Maria's reluctant permission, they began digging. It was slow, careful work.

[00:13:33] The kitchen was cleared out, the cement broken again. This time they went deeper, past the surface layer, past the subfloor, into the dry, packed earth beneath the house. At first, it was just dirt and old stone. But then, a few feet down, they found something strange. Not unusual for a village that old. It was fragments of pottery, bits of ash, and a small piece of iron.

[00:14:02] But then, they found bones. Human bones. First, a rib, and then a jaw fragment. Then, unmistakably, a skull. Partially intact, missing its lower half. It was old, but not ancient. No coffin, no formal burial.

[00:14:30] Just bones in the soil, as if someone had placed them there and walked away. And they weren't alone. Over the next few days, as the digging continued, more bones emerged. Not a full skeleton, but scattered parts. Some belonging to adults, others possibly belonging to children. No one was sure how many people they were looking at. So the work stopped, photos were taken, and the authorities were contacted.

[00:14:59] The bones were examined, but the reports didn't say much. They were aged, likely centuries old. No obvious cause of death. No identifying marks. No names. Just remains. Buried under a kitchen floor in a quiet Spanish village. The faces didn't stop after the bones were removed. In fact, some say they got darker. The expressions changed. Some became distorted. One appeared with its mouth open, stretched wide.

[00:15:29] Another with hollow sockets and no nose. A few of them faded and came back. Others seemed to stare directly at the doorway. One researcher who visited during this time claimed that two faces had moved overnight, swapping places on the floor. He swore he had documented it, but the photos didn't show it clearly. Still, he refused to return to the house again.

[00:15:57] Maria didn't say much about the bones. When people asked, she would nod, but she wouldn't talk about how it felt knowing that. For years, she had been cooking meals and sweeping floors above a shallow grave. That night, she started keeping the kitchen door closed. Her son said she began sleeping with a small lamp on him, just in case. He never said why. The kitchen, once the warmest room in the house, began to feel like something you passed through. Not a place you stayed at.

[00:16:30] People still came. Tourists, skeptics, paranormal investigators with meters and cameras. Some said it was a hoax. That bones were a coincidence. That the faces were faked somehow. But no one ever proved anything. There was no clear motive. No money ever changed hands. Maria never charged anyone to see them. She never tried to sell her story. She didn't want to be famous. She just wanted her house to be quiet again.

[00:17:03] The first wave of experts focused on the material. They scraped samples from the floor, bits of the cement, fragments from the areas where the faces appeared. Some ran chemical analysis. They looked for pigments, paint, burns, carbon scoring, anything that might suggest that the images were man-made. The results were inconclusive. No known paint was found. No signs of manipulation with heat or chemicals. And the concrete was ordinary.

[00:17:33] And yet, the faces kept appearing. Then came the control tests. At one point, a section of the kitchen floor was sealed off under the supervision of local officials. They laid new concrete in the contained, locked room with no access to the public and waited. A few weeks later, a new face appeared inside that sealed section. This was documented, photographed, reviewed.

[00:18:04] Some called it proof. Others said it could have been tampered with, though no one ever explained how. The area had been locked the entire time. Meanwhile, some researchers began focusing on Maria herself. You see, there was a theory making its rounds that she might be unknowingly creating the faces through something called thought-tography.

[00:18:28] A fringe idea that intense mental or emotional energy could somehow leave physical impressions on objects. It wasn't accepted science, but it was being seriously considered by some of the paranormal researchers who visited Belmes. They studied her routines, asked questions about her sleep, her emotions, her dreams. One man claimed that Maria had some kind of psychic influence over the house itself.

[00:18:54] That her mind was projecting the images onto the stone. Another said that the house was absorbing trauma from her life and replaying it through the floor like an emotional echo. But Maria had no history of mental illness. No trauma anyone could trace. She had lived a typical hard, ordinary life. Nothing to suggest she could project faces into stone. Few even accused Maria's family of painting the faces on when no one was looking,

[00:19:24] though no one could explain why they never tried to profit from it. Now there were no time-lapse videos showing faces forming, just the testimonies of dozens of people who had walked into the kitchen day after day and found something new staring back at them. Some investigators claimed to have witnessed a face slowly forming over the course of hours. One described seeing it emerge like moisture rising through stone,

[00:19:53] first a faint shadow, then clearer, then unmistakably human. Another researcher described the kitchen as charged, like the air was too thick, like it held current you could feel if you stood there long enough. The Spanish government got involved at one point, mainly to quiet the noise. Too many reporters, too many outsiders asking questions.

[00:20:21] The official word was that the phenomenon had no scientific basis, that it was likely a case of misinterpretation or fraud. The kind of statement that leaves just enough room for people to believe the opposite. And that's where it sat. Somewhere between belief and disbelief. Science couldn't prove it, and no one else could explain it. The more people tried to understand it, the stranger it became.

[00:20:48] The closer they got to the floor, the more questions they found underneath it. By then, Maria had stopped engaging with most of the outsiders. She would let them run their tests, take their samples, walk through the kitchen with cameras and microphones, but she stopped giving interviews. She stopped answering the doors unless she recognized the voice behind it. She started to look tired.

[00:21:14] Maria Gomez Camara lived the rest of her life in that house. She didn't paint over the faces or try to bury the story. She just kept living there, quietly, while the rest of the world passed in and out of the kitchen, trying to figure out what had happened. Over time, the attention slowed. The investigators left. The reporters found other stories. Tourists still came by, but not as many. Eventually, the house was no longer the center of a national curiosity.

[00:21:44] It was just Maria's house, again. A little worn, a little heavier, but still standing. She never tried to explain the faces. She never wrote a book, never claimed to understand why her floor had become what it had. When people asked, she would shrug. Sometimes she would smile, sometimes not. But she never pretended to have the answers. Some of the faces faded. Some reemerged.

[00:22:14] The few new ones formed. They slowed down in later years, or maybe people just stopped documenting them. Some say the images became less defined. Others say they simply became harder to look at. More subtle, more expressionless. Like the house had said what it needed to say, and was now just watching. Maria passed away in 2004.

[00:22:41] She got a quiet burial in the same village she had lived in her whole life. After her death, the house sat still for a while. Her family kept it. Some of the efforts were made to preserve the kitchen as they had been. A kind of local historical curiosity. There were talks of setting up an exhibit, a guided tour, something more formal. But it never really took off.

[00:23:08] The town of Belmes went back to being what it had always been. A quiet, isolated place at the edge of the mountains. But for the people who remember, or who've seen the photos, or those who've stood in that kitchen and looked down at something impossible, the story never really left. The faces are still there. Still pressed into the stone. Like a memory that refuses to fade completely.

[00:23:36] Some say if you visit the house and stay long enough, you'll feel something watching you. Others say the energy left when Maria died. That the house was tied to her in some way. That it used her. Or maybe worked through her. And then when she was gone, it quieted. But no one's sure. But then there are also those who went in as skeptics and came out quieter.

[00:24:06] They learned about the impossible happening right in front of them. About something that shouldn't have been there. And somehow... was. This episode of Horror Story was written and produced by me, Edwin Covarrubias.

[00:24:30] In the beginning of the story, I mentioned how the Belmes faces was one of the first paranormal mysteries I ever read about. I was a kid, reading about it in a book from a scholastic book fair. And if this made you think of any paranormal mysteries, maybe something you read early on, please let me know what it is. As always, I'll leave my contact information in the description of this episode. If you already tap follow on this show, I will tell you another story next week. Thank you very much for listening.

[00:25:01] Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon. See you soon. See you soon.