Alfredo T. Romero was surprised to see the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the wall of his ancestral home in Las Trampas.

Then he saw his father's face.

"That really caught me off guard," he said. "I got a chill."

Romero's family home, right across N.M. 76 from the San José de Gracia Church, was built in the 1800s and had a second floor added sometime after 1925.

Las Trampas (Spanish for "the traps") was founded in the 1700s by families from Santa Fe. The picturesque mountain village is about halfway between Santa Fe and Taos on the so-called "High Road to Taos."

Romero said the adobe building, within the boundary of the National Historic Landmark designated for the adobe church in 1968, has been a residence, a store and a post office.

As he drove by the now-vacant building two weeks ago, Romero noticed that a water stain on an east-facing wall, below where a metal stove pipe emerges, had taken the shape of a shrouded woman with her hands folded as if in prayer — like Our Lady of Guadalupe.

"I kept looking at it because I could see it when I go by," he said. "Then I went to visit the people behind because I wanted to get some apples and they said, 'Have you seen the image on the second level?' I said no, so I looked and I said, 'Oh, my God! It looks like my dad!' "

Romero found a 1942 photograph of his father, Alfredo Romero, the first superintendent of the Peñasco public schools, who died six years ago, and grandfather, José Romero, to compare with the image he shot of stains on the south-facing stucco wall.

"Compare the pictures and look at the eyes, the forehead and the mouth," he said. "I showed them to my kids and they said, 'That's my Grandpa,' and people in the community have said ... 'That's like Tio José.' "

People recognizing religious figures in everyday objects is a recurring phenomenon. The Virgin Mary was spotted in clouds over Lubbock, Texas, in 1988; in the window of a modern building in Clearwater, Fla., in 1997, and in the stain on a wall of an expressway underpass in Chicago in 2005.

New Mexico is not immune. The image of Jesus on the plastered wall of an abandoned building in Holman, near Mora, drew thousands in 1975. In Lake Arthur, near Roswell, Jesus' image appeared in a freshly grilled tortilla in 1977, causing the cook to frame it on her wall. Only last year, Bertha Silva Martinez noticed the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the bark of a crabapple tree in her front yard in El Rito.

Romero, a 62-year-old retired FBI agent who lives in Rodarte, said he recently bought the Las Trampas place from a relative and plans to remodel most of the structure after demolishing the part with the images because it is too close to the highway.

"Now I'm tempted to just cut out the stucco and see if I could preserve it," he said.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.