We might have a habit of being curious and seeing things and patterns that aren’t really there.

It’s called pareidolia. The mind is constantly doing statistically-based pattern-matching (implicitly, not explicitly), and like any statistical process, it can throw false positives and false negatives. Fr some plausible evolutionary reasons, the bias seems to be towards false positives. “Oops, that wasn’t a predator” is less costly than “Oh, shit, it was a predator after all.”