READ: “It’s Like Staring at Demons” - Tennessee Man Lives with Prosopometamorphopsia AKA ‘Demonic Face Syndrome’

Victor Sharrah, a 59-year-old resident of Nashville, experienced a chilling episode one winter day that altered his perception of the world around him. After waking up and switching on the television, Sharrah experienced the ordinary faces of his roommate and roommate's girlfriend change into grotesquely distorted visages with elongated eyes, etched scars, and unusually pointy ears.

Sharrah described to his roommate what he was seeing, but his roommate “thought he was nuts.” Upon leaving house to clear his head and erase the unsettling image of his roommate’s demon face, Sharrah realized that the faces of everyone he saw were also bizarrely disfigured.

“It’s like staring at demons,” Sharrah said. “Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly everybody in the world looks like a creature in a horror movie.”

Sharrah has been diagnosed with a rare neurological condition known as prosopometamorphopsia (PMO), where individuals see the faces of other people as bizarrely distorted. Although other objects and human bodies usually appear as normal, PMO sufferers see faces — sometimes including their very own — manifested as if in "funhouse mirror,” with disturbing and often horrific qualities that leave the afflicted parties questioning their sanity. According to CNN Health:

…One patient described the right side of his doctor’s face in which the “eye became a ghastly staring hole, cheek bone a cavity; he had teeth on the upper lip, often had two ears.” Others with PMO have eloquently described faces as “like clocks in a Dalí painting” or “kaleidoscopically changing.”

Still others have seen faces morph into dragons or fish heads, or ears pop out of the top of people’s heads. Some patients report seeing shortened arms attached to faces, people’s eyes leaving the skull and rotating in front of it, or third eyes in the middle of people’s foreheads.

“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,” said Brad Duchaine, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

To date, PMO appears to be a rare condition, with only 81 documented cases since June 2021, but the lack of knowledge and awareness surrounding PMO means there may be many more cases that go unreported. Misdiagnoses such as schizophrenia and inappropriate treatments are common.

Sharrah's journey through mental illness and his struggle with the visual distortions of PMO led him to Catherine Morris, a volunteer with a suicide support group. Together, they discovered that specific colors of light could mitigate his symptoms, a breakthrough that allowed Sharrah to see faces without distortion for the first time in years. This discovery prompted further research and testing, offering hope for others with PMO through potential treatments and education.

Sharrah was also able to create a computer-generated image to help others better understand the condition, which reveals just how unsettling life can be when viewed through the lens of PMO.

The mysterious and terrifying nature of prosopometamorphopsia, with its visually distorted perceptions, raises questions about the boundaries between neurological conditions and the potential for supernatural explanations. While science offers insights into the brain's intricate workings and its impact on our sensory experiences, the otherworldly manifestations in PMO could lead one to ponder if there's more to the disturbing visions than meets the eye. Could some cases of PMO go beyond misfirings of the brain into glimpses of realms beyond our own, or even encounters with the supernatural? While medical research continues to demystify PMO, the extraordinary experiences of those like Victor Sharrah remind us of the vast, unexplored connections between the mind, reality, and the paranormal.

For additional study of PMO, check out the source material from Science News and CNN Health.