Devil in the Bathroom

Normally people report the face of Jesus showing up in odd places - chicken feathers, drainpipes, and even Google maps - but the latest mysterious image, found in a bathroom in Budapest, proved much more sinister. It appeared to be the face of the Devil!

Husband Laszlo, 52, had renovated the room at great expense, fitting it with a heavenly new bath, shower and tiles – but it’s made life hell.

Forty-seven-year-old Mrs Csrefko spotted the terrifying horned image after her first shower.

She told The Sun: "I was naked coming out of the shower and I could suddenly see his eyes staring into me. I just screamed and ran."

Well, I suppose it is a part of the conventional folklore that the Devil makes women run around naked. Seriously, though, the image strikes me as a classic mosaic situation. Once the brain notices a specific pattern in a random field of shapes and colors it will seem to suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Laszlo added: "We can't clean it off and it wasn't there when we put the tiles up. It just appeared overnight and nothing can move it.

"The room is always ice cold no matter how high we turn the heating up and we've just stopped using it because it's too spooky.

"We wash in the sink downstairs now."

It is possible that if the room wasn't extra cold before the renovation and also if the cold is not due to all the walls being tiled - which does happen even in the absence of paranormal forces - the Csrefko family might have something going on besides hysterical overreaction. In one of the few Goetic evocations that I've done I will say that I saw something kind of similar. The thing is, I highly doubt what I saw could have been photographed because there was clearly some sort of psychological and/or spiritual component involved.

We had the triangle hung on a wall covered in textured plaster, and I swear that when we finished the conjurations a vague image kind of like a face seemed to form inside it. The face lasted throughout the ritual and then disappeared when we closed down the temple. Skeptic that I generally am about such things (believe it or not) I spent awhile afterwards playing around with the triangle and lighting to see if I could get the face to appear again, but was unable to reproduce it no matter what I did.

It looks like getting rid of the image is a job too big for Flash – the Hungarian couple are summoning an exorcist to flush the evil spirits from their lavatory tiling.

What I would find extremely interesting about this case is whether or not the "face" can still be photographed after the exorcism. If it actually disappears I will grant that something paranormal is going on here - though I highly doubt the real Devil would bother haunting some poor couple's bathroom. It's more likely that this is a spirit bothered by the renovation trying to scare them, and even more likely that the image is nothing paranormal at all.

UPDATE: Not only does the Devil also appear in fire, as one might expect, but mysteriously he also looks exactly like Disco Stu from "The Simpsons!" Aren't mosaics fun?