 Growing up in the deep south, I am no stranger to ghost. In fact, when I started this channel, a lot of the stories I did were ghost stories. And if ghost stories are something that you like and you've missed those videos, I will place links to those videos down below. Personally, I find most ghost stories to be very fascinating because behind every ghost story, there is an actual story of a person who lived and then eventually died. However, when I was researching for the last Monday's episode on King Henry IV's head, I stumbled across a story from Spain, a paranormal story from Spain that really freaked me out. And so today we're going to talk about this incredible paranormal mystery. But before we go any further, you know what to do. Please hit that subscribe button and give us a like. A very special thank you to all of our patrons. We have picked up a few more patrons and I could not be more grateful. If you would like to join our Patreon program, there is a link in the description box down below. Welcome to Esoteric Atlanta. And today on Mystery Monday, we're going to be talking about the people in the floor, a small town in the south of Spain. It's a very small town. We're talking like 2000 people max. Now I personally have spent a lot of time in the south of Spain in my life. It is a beautiful area of our world. The people there are lovely. However, I have never been to Belmez. If I am ever back in the south of Spain, which I hope I will be able to go back there one day, I will probably be trying to get to this town because this phenomenon is so freaky. But yet it's like a train wreck. You can't look away. It all started in August of 1971 in the Pereira home of Belmez. It seems like the Pereiras were just a normal every day family living in this small town. Human beings across the world, even though we all tend to have different cultures, were all very similar at the end of the day. And it sounds like the Pereira family was just a very typical family. Well, one day Maria Gomez Pereira, the matriarch of this family was in her kitchen mopping up and she noticed a stain on the concrete floor. Typical, right? We always see stains when we're mopping, especially with concrete. And so we try to clean the stain up. However, this stain seemed to move around. And the more it moved around, the more frustrated Maria got. But then it got really creepy because this stain started to form a very detailed picture of a human face. Maria was beside herself and she was terrified. I don't blame her. I would probably be terrified too. And so her husband, Juan and her oldest son Miguel decided that they were just going to pull up the floor, chisel it, and replace it with a new concrete floor. After the new floor was set in the house, the Pereiras went on with their life. Only this time more faces started to appear in the new concrete floor of this home. There were pictures of men, women, and children. And day by day, the expressions on these faces would change, as if the faces were living people and not just pictures as they first seemed to appear to be. The Pereiras at this point were completely freaked out. I would be as well. I would probably try to move. I know that's not possible for a lot of people. I would just be like, I don't care if I have to live on the street. This is really weird and I just don't want to be here anymore. But the Pereiras decided that they would do more digging. And so again, they dug up the floor and they ended up going about 10 feet down from the floor of the kitchen where they found a bunch of bodies or remains of bodies. Now, you could call it a graveyard, but it was not set up as so. It seems these bodies were just dumped there. And most of these bodies were headless. There were no skulls in this pit. At that point, the Pereiras figured that these faces on the floor were the ghosts of the people who were in the pit below the kitchen. And the reason why their faces were showing is because in death, these entities were missing their heads. The Pereiras decided to give these people a proper burial, thinking that that would solve their problem. But of course, nothing in life is that easy. After the remains were buried, even more entities started to show up on the floor of the Pereira Hall. At this point, word had spread all around this area of Spain that there was this crazy phenomenon happening in Belmez. And by the spring of 1972, hundreds of people would flock to this small town just to get a chance to look at the people in the floor. These people became known as the Belmez faces. Now, because of this demand, because all these people wanted to go into the Pereira home to see this phenomenon, the Pereira family decided that they would start charging ticket prices to enter their home. I actually don't blame them. You know, it's like we do ghost stories in Charleston, South Carolina, even here in Atlanta and Roswell, which is an older part of the city. There are ghost tours that people charge reasonable prices to take you around the town and show you where a lot of hauntings occur. In fact, the phenomenon of ghosts down here in the southern part of the United States is so intense that in a lot of old cities like Charleston, possibly Savannah, realtors have to disclose to potential buyers if there is paranormal phenomenon happening in the home that they're interested in buying. So the fact that the Pereira started charging people an entrance fee into their house to see this floor doesn't actually bother me. I mean, you got to make lemonade from lemons, right? You're living in this freaky house with this terrifying phenomenon that keeps happening to you. And now all these people want to see it. So why not charge them a buck here there to come in and see this phenomenon? Well, that's all well and good. But the city officials started to get suspicious of the Pereiras. If this was a legitimate phenomenon, they had no problem with the Pereiras charging people an entrance fee into their home. However, if this was all an elaborate hoax, and they were charging people, then we have an issue. At first, the mayor of Belmez stepped in and just asked to have a little bit piece of the concrete tested to make sure there wasn't any paint creating these faces. And that testing came back proving that there was no paint. There was nothing the mayor's team of scientists could find to prove that this was a hoax, making the story even more freaky, in my opinion. But the government officials were not done yet. Even though the concrete had come back saying like there's no paint, they still weren't buying it. They asked the Pereira family to move out of their house for about three months. Once the Pereiras were out of the house, they covered the concrete in like a tarp. They covered up all the windows, all the doors, so no sunlight could get into the house. We know that sun can change coloring on the floor or wallpaper or any any type of object in the house. And so they wanted to make sure that maybe this wasn't the sun just doing something funky to the floor. So they had that cover too. Within this three month period, nobody entered the home. After the three month period was over, they came back to the home, pulled up the tarp, and to their horror, more faces had appeared in great detail. At this point, there was no way to disprove this phenomenon. In fact, everything that the government did only made it more creepy and really left skeptics of paranormal phenomenon scratching their heads. Over the next 30 years, more and more faces would come and go from the Pereira home. And this home put the town of Belmez definitely on the Spanish map. In February of 2004, the matriarch of this family, Maria Gomez Pereira, who was the first person to notice the faces on the floor passed away. She was 85 years old. Now at this point, the faces continued to show up in the house, but started to change a little bit. In fact, after Maria's death, they did run more testing on the faces and they did find traces of paint in the new faces post the death of Maria. So before Maria died, there was no paint to be found on the floor. It was very much a head scratcher for the scientist, but after Maria died, they did find paint on the floor. So what happened? It seemed that Maria, the matriarch, Gomez Pereira, was a bit of a psychic. I don't know if she was psychic, but she did have some paranormal abilities. A lot of people have paranormal abilities. I tend to have some abilities myself and I'm constantly interacting with the paranormal world, it seems. This is actually not uncommon. I feel like most people can tap into this if they allow themselves to. Well, it seems that a lot of people believe that what was happening in the house when Maria was alive was a phenomenon called thought a graphic projection. Since there were bodies under the Pereira home that obviously had met a very brutal end, they did not have their heads, there were probably some spirits that were not able to rest in peace. Because Maria had the ability to pick up on these entities, it is believed that through her own processing, through her own experience of feeling these entities, she was able to project their faces onto the floor. The human mind is a very powerful force. We know that our thoughts affect our reality. Hell, my other job, my whole career based around yoga is studying the implications of thought and how it changes us. So as strange of a phenomenon as this might be, I take some credence into this theory. Do I believe that Maria was doing this intentionally? No, I think this was a very subconscious reaction coming from her mind because she did have the ability to pick up on these entities. We also know from accounts of this story that this whole thing terrified Maria. She had her floor dug up twice to try to get rid of these horrifying faces. However, after she died, there wasn't another conduit, if you, for lack of a better word, a conduit in the house to channel these entities. And it appears that the Pereira family had made quite good money charging for these tickets. And so her second son, Diego, allegedly started to paint faces on the floor to keep the phenomenon going because it looks like they needed Maria to be alive in order for this carnival show to keep making money for the family. Now there are skeptics out there that believe the whole thing was a hoax. From the very beginning, they believe that the prayers were just trying to make money. However, I don't think so. Only after her death were their paint chips found in the faces. I really do think that the main theory that people have is probably correct that Maria, for some reason, was able to project these faces onto her floor because she was picking up on these people's story. Again, I believe this was all subconscious. I don't think that she was aware that that's what she was doing while she was alive. But that is only my opinion. With most paranormal phenomenon, it will remain a mystery. What are your opinions on this story? Have you heard of the Belmazz faces? What would you do if that happened to you? And if that has happened to you, please let me know because I'm dying to hear your story. In fact, if anybody's had any very strange paranormal phenomenon happened to them, let us know in the comments below. We're all just trying to figure this out together, and I absolutely would love to hear what has happened to you and your experiences. Thank you so much to Josh McKay for doing our music. If you would like to purchase our opening song, you can find a link in the description box below. And thank you so much to Todd Roderick for helping me get this video out to you guys today. I hope you're all having a fantastic Monday, and I will talk to you soon. Bye.