Seeing Faces Everywhere!


(Are you seeing Jesus? No, you're actually looking at a photo of a couple holding their new baby who is wearing a bonnet)

Grant calls it matrixing, but honestly the technical term is:
Pareidolia

(Wikipedia) It is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.

How does this apply to ghost hunting? You ever listen to the weird shit Zak comes up with on his EVP replays??? He is so out there in left field with hearing all kinds of language on his garbled recording flubs that he's kind of starting to worry me. How about the tons of orbs with faces people send in?

It is in human nature to either relate things to faces--a reflection of our own reference as humans and the importance of human faces in recognizing our people, but also in words. We often hear our own name spoken when it isn't. We identify with our name and anything sounding like a voice, we assume is calling us. Humans are rather egocentric that way. Let's look at some cool examples...



Some people see faces in orbs.
...



See a face in this wall?



See a screaming mouth?



I see this old photo of my knees and I see cherub faces with full cheeks, button noses, eyes, and a swath of cherub `fro above...

Now, y'all, tomorrow Julie and I are on a road trip for an overnighter at a haunted locale. We're going by Vulture Mine, tons of cemeteries, a ghost town called Congress and staying in a haunted inn and trying some new experiments. I like to adapt hunting style depending on the place and the legends and come up with new ways to try things out and see what we can instigate. I will be doing lots of videos and pics and you can expect the weird and goofy mixed in with the informative. I do not believe the sharing of information has to be dull. Expect us to go online tomorrow night more than likely and to have loads of interesting posts when we get back on Monday. BTW, we are shooting for putting up our "Abandoned Places: Abandoned Memories (Desert Edition)" about our photographs of abandoned sites and my psychic reads on them on Kindle and Nook Monday--fingers crossed I don't hose it up. My "Was That a Ghost?" book, I'm shooting for early March for it's release. "Abandoned Places: Abandoned Memories (Vanished Cities Edition)" will likely be released the end of March/early April. My book, "From Fledgling to Full-Fledged Psychic" will likely be released in May/June. And, Julie and I's groundbreaking book "Spirit Vessels: Why Some Buildings Are Haunted" will be released October 1st after even more extensive research into the commonalities of haunted locations. Yeah, it's an insane year for writing, but it's my calling and I'm finally answering it.

Comments

  1. I see a demon with horns...
    wait !
    That's me !
    ;-)

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  2. that is the coolest start to the morning that first one with jesus baby played with my eyes.

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  3. Seeing your own face, huh, Max?

    Jeremy, yes, it took me a while of staring to not see the Jesus.

    LG, That bell pepper--I wouldn't be able to eat it. I hate to eat anything that's screaming.

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  4. the first picture took me awhile to see the baby. Wow.. it's amazing what our mind sees!

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  5. It can make being a witness to ghostly activity a very difficult thing, especially in the dark when our eyes want to put dark shapes together into a form. Sometimes, if you stare enough at something in your dark bedroom long enough, it goes from being a robe hanging on a hook to a man leaning over and staring at you. The more you see it, the more you believe it. Soon you get shivers.

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  6. Had trouble seeing the baby in the first picture. I had to adjust my thinking. I have also see faces in orbs, but now know not to get excited about it. WOW, when I read all the books coming out and knowing which ones I am involved with, it is very exciting. I am doing alittle at a time on my own book as well. That one is fun.

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  7. Sis;
    I can't wait for your book! It's a book I've always wanted to have!

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  8. I am viewing this on my mobile which doesnt help so I can't say for sure if I would have seen jesus's face in the first picture as I was primed to look for it.

    I can see how this tendancy to see patterns where there are none could make hunting more challenging but in my case what I saw was in daylight and lit a building.

    I have often imagined my name called several times but have put it down to my imagination and low background noise.

    I look forward to your next posts.

    Bob.X

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  9. Bob;
    Yes, I have to admit that I even discussed that in my book I'm writing about ghosts. People's first point of reference is looking for a face. It was necessary as a baby to know the humans from the not important/not caregiver objects. We looked to expressions to mirror our needs for us. So far as names, it is the same thing. When you think someone is speaking, you assume they are addressing you and your first point of reference is your own name. Definitely seeing something in the daylight is quite different. I think all of us have experienced as children (and as adults) seeing a shape in your bedroom and the longer you look at it, the more it seems to be something other than what it really is until it begins to freak you out. When I was a kid, it was the godawful arbor with flowers wallpaper in my bedroom. The vines wove together on the lattice and it looked like a group of dancing pagans around a fire pit and I imagined being some kind of sacrifice.

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  10. Great examples of Pareidolia, as an illustrator, I am fascinated by optical illusions. These also remind me of one of my favorite pareidolia examples, The Mother Teresa in a cinnamon roll (A.K.A. The nun bun) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4562170.stm

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  11. Guy--oh yes, a classic! Jesus toast, Mother Mary in a pool of oil on top of a mud puddle; they are all so fascinating. As a kid, I always named the clouds, but then they would morph from Dumbo to an ostrich to a parakeet. We need to discern the living from the dead when we look at shapes to decide what is important and what is not, and yet we do the same thing in ghost hunting; trying to discern the living from the dead. It is in our DNA.

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  12. I think we are all pieces of one big whole , and seeing faces is the way our mind reflects the reality, relating everything to itself.

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  13. Echo;
    As always, you are terribly insightful. I have always carried a theory that our inability to perceive the size of the universe is like this: The Earth and other planets and stars are all like cells in a body. The cells see each other and go "hey buddy, it's just the bunch of us here hanging out together, we make up our world." But, what the cells have no ability to perceive is that they are just cells within a human body, part of something greater. I suspect that is what our universe is like. We have no perspective to realize that this is a much bigger "thing" than we see and we see it as only clotted regions of solar systems spread out, but it's really just cellular parts of a larger organism. What is that organism? Some would say God. I would love to write a SyFy screenplay based on humanity discovering this truth and freaking out.

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  14. Excellent one, Sucio! Yes, Anal Jesus somehow never made an auction on ebay? I wonder why?

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  15. I would really like to leave an intelligent insightful comment...
    but I can't.
    I'm laughing at You for seeing cherubs in your knees and I'm laughing at ME for squinting and staring at them until I saw the noses and cheeks!
    ROTFL! You are So funny.

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  16. Cindi; Sweetie, I am the first one to make fun of myself.

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  17. LMAO!!! Maybe that explains why the men in my life saw a butterfly in the birthmark I have flying out of the crack of my ass! Nice! Yeah, I hate it! I know..TMI!

    Zak does come up with some shit! There are some EVP's that are very clear, then there are some where me and the beau look at each other and say.."huh?" I didn't get THAT out of it!

    By the way...it took me forever to see the baby in the bonnet. I finally did though.

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  18. Sis,

    Maybe I'm "bass-ackwards" but I tend to see that man in my door way and then I have to pull my heart out of my throat and realize that it's just the towel hanging on the top of the door! LOL

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  19. Sis;
    We have all done that. I have this one that drove me nuts in my last house. I would lie on the bed on my side and out of the corner of my eye, I'd see something black moving on the ceiling. I'd turn and it would be gone. I'd chase that damn shadow over and over again. It ended up being the way the lighting was in the room and my peripheral vision. Still, if I got to thinking it was something forming, it got kind of creepy. Once you feed the mind an image or a word, it can't stop ruminating on it.

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  20. i know this post is very old, however the galveston face on the wall, has been sand blasted off, and the face "Moved" many times around the back of the building.
    News media covered this. I lived in galveston many years ago as a teenager and i was told about this face on the wall, and at the time i saw it, it was on the front of the building, and now its on the back by their back door.

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