Faces of Belmez

On August 23, 1971, María Gómez Cámara noticed that a dark spot in the shape of a face had appeared on the cement floor of her house.  After showing her husband Juan Pereira and their son, Miguel, the two men decided that the face on the floor should be removed.  The two set about the floor with a pickaxe and destroyed the face.
After they relaid the floor with cement nothing appeared for a few months.  In December of 1971 several dark spots began to appear on the floor and by February of 1972 they had all turned into faces, with new ones appearing and some seeming to move across the floor.  In the picture above is the original face that the family had destroyed and it reappeared after the floor was relaid.  
Maria contacted the local government who immediately thought that it was the source of fakery and had portions of the floor removed and sent to a lab.  After samples returned from a lab showing up negative, the city helped Maria and her family tear the floor up and relay the concrete in the room to see if the faces were going to show up again.

A chunk of the floor during demolition

one of the faces becoming more clear over the course of a few weeks

The room was sealed off from the rest of the house and Maria's family had agreed to the experiment as they had not used the room since the faces started to appear.  The doors and windows to the room were bricked up and the floor was covered in a clear coating so if someone were to tamper with the floor the faces would have only appeared on the top layer and not the concrete.  

After six months of nobody entering the room the mayor, the Pereira family, and a chemist entered the room for the first time.  All of the faces had reappeared on the floor and every square inch of the room was covered in figures and faces.  The chemist immediately took samples of the top coating for analysis and sent them off to a lab to check for any pigments or dyes on the coating that was put on the floor.  
The tests that were sent to the lab came back negative for any kinds of dyes or pigments.  The ICV in Spain had tested the samples and all of the materials found in the sampling were found to be within acceptable limits in concrete manufacture at the time.  

After the faces were confirmed to be a mystery people started to flock to the town and the city of Belmez.  Many people would visit yearly and would take photos to keep track of where figures and faces had moved along the floor.  
Many psychics have said that there are spirits who are drawn to the area and are projecting themselves upon the floor thoughtographically.   There have been numerous seances held within the house most people come into contact with a spirit of a woman name Anne Cordoza and a male spirit named Pedro Ortiz.  They both have purported to have been murdered in a massacre that had taken place in the 1700's.  
After Maria passed away in 2004 the faces started to slowly disappear and today only one face remains on the floor.  Many have said it was because she was perpetrating a hoax and keeping the faces fresh, but the faces would not have disappeared completely like they have.  Continued chemical analysis of the floor has show that there has been no change in the chemical composition from the time they appeared to the time they disappeared.