A man has spoken out about his terrifying condition that leaves him seeing "demons" in the faces of people he passes in the street.
Credit: Facebook/ Victor J. Sharrah
Victor Sharrah, a 59-year-old resident of Nashville, found himself plunged into a surreal nightmare one winter day realized he was seeing something rather disturbing.
"I just woke up and was sitting on the couch watching TV when my roommate came into the room, and (looking at him) I’m like, ‘What am I seeing?’ Then his girlfriend walked in and her face was the same," Sharrah recalled in an interview with CNN.
To his horror, the once-familiar faces of his friends now bore grotesque features — a twisted grimace, elongated eyes, and deeply etched scars. Even their ears seemed to morph into sharp points, reminiscent of Spock from Star Trek. Overall, his friends has suddenly looked like "demons".
"Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly everybody in the world looks like a creature in a horror movie," Sharrah said.
However, when he attemped to convey his distress to his roommate, Sharrah found himself dismissed as delusional. "He thought I was nuts," Sharrah recalled.
The study provided images of how somebody with PMO may see faces. Credit: Antônio Mello
But he wasn't being delusional at all. In fact, Sharrah suffers from a rare condition known as prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO.
Per CNN, this incredibly rare condition causes the sufferer to see portions of people’s faces distorted in shape, texture, position, or color. What's even more fascinating is that other objects around them and even other body parts remain totally unaltered. It just affects how the sufferer sees people's faces.
NBC News reports that Sharrah's distortions only appear when he looks at people in the flesh -- not in photographs or TV screens.
The symptoms of PMO can resolve themselves in a few days, but in some cases, they can last for years. Sharrah first started seeing distorted faces back in 2020 - and he still sees them to this day.
Credit: Antônio Mello
In order to help others understand the day-to-day nightmare that Sharrah is living, he helped create a computer-generated 2D picture to show what he sees when he looks at people. Although, even he admits that this can only go so far.
"There’s so much more to it," Sharrah explained, referring to a case study published in The Lancet’s 'Clinical Pictures' section. "The distorted face is moving, contorting, talking to you, making facial gestures."
Sadly, the condition has left Sharrah distancing himself from other people.
It is important to note that PMO is not "face blindness" - the very real condition that affects stars like Brad Pitt and John Hickenlooper. PMO doesn’t hinder face recognition - it distorts the perceived appearance of faces.
"For me, the basic distortions are the same for each person, with the lines in the face, the stretching of the eyes and the mouth, and the pointy ears," Sharrah explained. "But the size and shape of a person’s face or head and how they move can be different and change just how distorted they might be."
Further upsetting experiences that some PMO patients suffer from were recorded in an April 2023 literature review. The study found that, while looking in the mirror, some saw incredibly unsettling visions, like seeing an eye pop out and roll down the cheek.
Another case study described the condition as akin to viewing a familiar face through a "funhouse mirror".
One PMO patient suddenly saw their doctor’s face as grotesquely distorted following the removal of a brain tumor. In this particular case, they described seeing their doctor has having gaping voids where their eyes and cheekbones should be.
While some PMO cases have been linked to head trauma, stroke, epilepsy, or migraines, others manifest without evident structural brain changes, per NBC News.
For Sharrah, researchers have proposed two potential triggers. Firstly, he experienced carbon monoxide poisoning four months before his PMO symptoms emerged. Secondly, at 43, he sustained a significant head injury while attempting to fix a jammed trailer handle, resulting in a fall backward onto concrete. MRI scans revealed a lesion on the left side of his brain.
Antônio Mello, who is the lead author of The Lancet’s study and Ph.D. student at Dartmouth's Social Perception Lab, noted that individuals reaching out to the lab with PMO symptoms often exhibit variations distinct from Sharrah's case.
One comparison has been that of seeing faces resembling the melting "clocks in a Dalí painting", or like seeing faces undergoing kaleidoscopic transformations.
In other extreme cases, PMO sufferers can see faces morph into fantastical creatures like dragons or fish heads, or witness bizarre phenomena like ears sprouting from the tops of heads. Some describe shortened arms attached to faces or eyes detaching from skulls and hovering in front of them.
Brad Duchaine, the study's co-author and professor at Dartmouth College, recalled one PMO patient to CNN, saying: "The woman who saw dragons began seeing them as a child, so there are development cases of PMO in which people grow up with the condition and don’t know that faces are supposed to look different."
There have been 81 cases of PMO in published literature -- but Duchaine suspects there are many more undiagnosed cases.
Duchaine states that, through a website established to help those with PMO, he and his colleagues have heard from approximately 80 individuals worldwide reporting similar symptoms.
