Pareidolia — Wooden chair back with cutout resembling a smiling face

Pareidolia

2005image genreclassic

Published September 20, 2026

Pareidolia, sometimes called Things With Faces, is the psychological trick of seeing faces in inanimate objects, which grew into a photo genre through Flickr groups, subreddits, and dedicated blogs starting in the mid-2000s. Everyday objects like electrical outlets, houses, cheese graters, and clothes hangers got documented as accidental characters, and the format became one of the internet's longest-running photo memes.

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Overview

Pareidolia is what your brain does when it recognizes faces in objects that do not have any, and Things With Faces is the photo genre built around documenting the trick2. Common subjects include electrical outlets, cars with headlight eyes and grille mouths, houses, cheese graters, alarm clocks, and appliances2. Some entries stay pure photo dumps, others anthropomorphize the object with a caption, a personality, or a bit of dialogue, like the 2010 clothes hanger post that named its subject a drunk octopus looking for a fight3.

Human brains come pre-wired for face detection. Carl Sagan wrote about this in his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World, arguing that infants who recognized parental faces earlier bonded more strongly and were more likely to survive1. Facial recognition software carries the same bias, which The Atlantic covered in August 2012 with examples of algorithms flagging faces in rocky hillsides and other random scenes1. That shared quirk between people and machines is why the pareidolia genre feels universal: no one has to explain why the pipe looks angry, everyone sees it.

Origin & Background

Platform
Flickr (photo groups) / Reddit (viral spread)
Date
2005

The earliest known online discussion of the word pareidolia appeared on the Straight Dope Forums on June 1, 2001, when user Irishman posted asking for help investigating the word's origin3. Urban Dictionary followed on July 21, 2004, with an entry from user Fred Ressler defining pareidolia as a misperception of an ambiguous stimulus as something specific7. The visual side moved to Flickr in 2005 with a dedicated pareidolia photo group launched on March 16, and dedicated single-topic blogs like Faces in Places started collecting the images from 2006 onward4.

How It Spread

Websites and communities dedicated to pareidolia photos multiplied through the late 2000s. Rational Wiki added its own page on December 5, 2008, treating the term as a rationalist counter to religious sightings6. The WTFace hub site went online in March 2009, followed by the /r/pareidolia subreddit on August 29, 2009, which grew to over 42,800 subscribers within four years3. The domains ThingsWithFaces.net and ThingsWithFaces.com came online in 2009 and 2011, each hosting photo collections of face-shaped objects.

Individual pareidolia posts also hit big on Reddit's general-audience subreddits. On December 12, 2010, user Kidsturk posted a photo of a clothes hanger to /r/pics with the graffiti caption "Drunk octopus wants to fight you," which pulled in over 12,100 upvotes and 300 comments before being archived3. Reddit compilations followed through 2012 and 2013, and The Mary Sue eventually rounded up 50 face-like object photos sourced from Reddit, Laughing Squid, Marco Folio, and other blogs2.

Mainstream coverage picked up the format too. Geekosystem highlighted notable pareidolia photos on February 9, 2011. The Atlantic ran a longer piece on August 7, 2012, arguing that facial recognition software falls into the same trap as human vision and using a rocky hill in Ebihens, France, as its example1. Internet humor blog Pleated Jeans posted a 26-photo roundup on May 28, 2013, keeping the compilation format alive as a recurring blog staple.

Timeline

1995

Carl Sagan discusses face recognition as an evolutionary survival adaptation in The Demon-Haunted World.

2001-06-01

Straight Dope Forums user Irishman posts asking about the word's origin, the earliest known online discussion of the term.

2004-07-21

Urban Dictionary entry submitted by Fred Ressler defines pareidolia as a misperception of an ambiguous stimulus.

2005-03-16

Flickr pareidolia photo group launched, later drawing over 5,100 submissions and 900 members.

2006

Faces in Places single-topic blog begins collecting pareidolia photos.

2008-12-05

Rational Wiki publishes its pareidolia page.

2009-08-29

The /r/pareidolia subreddit is created, eventually crossing 42,800 subscribers.

2010-12-12

Reddit user Kidsturk posts the "Drunk octopus wants to fight you" clothes hanger photo to /r/pics.

2012-08-07

The Atlantic publishes a feature on computer facial recognition also exhibiting pareidolia.

2013-05-28

Pleated Jeans blog posts a 26-photo pareidolia roundup.

How to Use This Meme

The format typically starts with an accidental spot. Someone notices a face in an outlet, a rock, a water stain, or a piece of hardware, then photographs it head-on so the face reads clearly2. Common conventions include a caption naming what mood the object seems to be in (angry outlet, surprised backpack, sleepy garage door) or writing dialogue for the imagined face. Submissions typically go to /r/pareidolia, dedicated Tumblrs, or theme blogs, and tagged uploads on Flickr collect them into browsable feeds.

Frequently Asked Questions