Photographer captures eerie face of a girl in the raging California wildfires as flames gut a home

A photograph taken of a burning home in wildfire-ravaged Northern California revealed something spooky just in time for Halloween.

Photojournalist Josh Edelson, 41, was on assignment taking pictures of the fire as it devoured the skeleton of a home in Healdsburg.

As he does every year, Edelson and other photographers risk their lives to cover wildfires in California.

After snapping his pictures, he went back to his outtakes and noticed something unusual.

‘I shoot a lot of fires and I’ve been trying to look for weird shapes and things because I’ve noticed flames do some really strange things,’ he told DailyMail.com.

‘I didn’t notice it until I was going through my photos.’

The image he shot shows the flames and the remnant structure of the burning house combining to create what appears to be the face of a young girl.

‘This was weird because it was pieces of the house and smoke that kinda made that shape,’ Edelson said.

‘Often when a home is burning I’ll shoot in rapid fire mode.

‘Sometimes there’ll be like one frame where the flames make the shape of an animal or ghost or weird thing.’

When he saw the photograph, he hesitated before publishing it, thinking that it could all be in his head.

‘I wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination,’ he said.

‘I see this but I don’t know if other people will see it.’

Edelson said that after news agencies decided to publish his other pictures, he would post the spooky girl photo on his social media.

The Mill Valley, California, native said that this is the ‘third or fourth time’ that strange and unusual shapes showed up in pictures he has taken of wildfires.