Haunted House Put Up for Sale

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.