A TENNESSEE man is one of 75 people in the world recorded with the bizarre “demon face syndrome.”
Victor Sharrah has dealt with an extremely rare condition where every person has seemed to have a warped and disturbing-looking face.
Sharrah said his nightmare began when he woke up one morning, three years ago, and he saw a devil-looking person in his home.
This person turned out to be his roommate and the confusion continued when he stepped outside and each person looked the same.
Sharrah was 56 years old at the time and revealed he has still experienced the effects of his condition three years on.
This condition is called prosopometamorphopsia (PMO) and it affects the way people see the shape, size, color, and position of facial features.
The outcome varies from person to person but some common aspects are drooped, stretched, or larger and smaller features.
Sharrah said he saw stretched mouths, pointed ears, slanted eyes, and flared nostrils.
“I thought, ‘What the hell did I just see?,” he told The Times.
“It was like something out of a movie, like a demon face.”
He explained that he considered taking himself to a psychiatric ward after he continued to see people who appeared the same in his town of Clarkesville, around 50 miles north of Nashville.
“I was really freaking out at that point. I was going to go have myself committed,” he said.
It is not known what exactly caused this for him but experts and Sharrah have their theories.
Experts think it could have developed following an injury where Sharrah hit his head after his truck trailer door jammed in 2007.
Sharrah also theorized that it could have developed from a suspected case of carbon monoxide poisoning four months prior.
Experts did discover that the former truck driver had a one-centimeter cyst on a section of his brain.
Face processing depends on a complex network of brain regions, and dysfunction within this network can produce a wide variety of face processing impairments.
When faces or parts of faces are perceived as distorted, the condition is known as prosopometamorphopsia (PMO).
Around 75 cases reports on people with PMO have been published.
There isn’t much understanding about why people experience different types of PMO.
Full-face PMO and hemi-prosopometamorphopsia PMO are two most prominent subtypes of PMO.
In full face PMO, features on both sides of the face are distorted.
For hemi-PMO, features on one side of the face are distorted while features on the other side of the face look normal.
Source: Understanding PMO
Tests also showed that color could affect his diagnosis as the demon faces looked worse through a red filter when compared to a green filter.
PMO interestingly does not distort faces and images seen through a screen like a TV.
Therefore, researchers were able to visualize the effects of the disease by showing Sharrah a face through a screen and in real life.
Sharrah said his condition is “much more traumatic than the pictures can convey.”
He added that he has mostly gotten used to his reality but has hoped it will pass.
PMO isn’t permanent, according to the Dartmouth-based website about the condition, in most cases lasting a few days or weeks.
Some people, like Sharrah, could have the diagnosis for years.
