A museum-goer from Norwich has seen his historical visit go viral after using a face swapping app to take selfies with ancient statues.

Jake Marshall, 24, of Aylsham Road, was in London with his girlfriend at the weekend when they decided to visit the British Museum. The support analyst had the idea of using the Snapchat Face Swap filter to trade faces with some of the statues after experimenting with it at work and was surprised at how well it worked with the ancient artefacts.

'Initially we decided to visit for a historical trip and to look at all the artefacts,' he said. 'But we then decided to have a bit of fun with Snapchat and was surprised at how well it worked. It was actually terrifying looking at some of the photos.'

Jake swapped faces with statues dating back hundreds of years including Egyptian Pharaohs and Roman Emperors.

The collection of pictures have now been viewed over 500,000 times on the website Reddit and shared on other social media platforms. The thread on Reddit has received nearly 500 comments with many joking that Jake will now be cursed by ancient gods.

One person said: 'You fight to become king, fight to expand your kingdom and create an everlasting legacy and then someone takes Face Swap selfies with you for a funny website. If the sun god only knew.'

Another added: 'You wanna get cursed by a mummy? Cause that's how you get cursed by a mummy.'

One person even said the photos remind them of Doctor Who. They said: 'I feel like this is an episode of Doctor Who. There's something terrible going on! The statues at the museum are stealing people's faces.'

It was the first time Jake had done anything similar with Face Swap and said he was pleased with the response.

'It was actually quite easy as all I had to do was get the angle right,' he said. 'The reaction has been mostly positive from people and they have found it funny but of course you get some who are not best please.'