We've all woken up on occasion with gunk in our eyes or experienced other visual issues—but for Tennessee native Victor Sharrah, what he started experiencing more than three years ago was a tad more frightening, and it's landed him in the medical annals. "My first thought was I woke up in a demon world. You can't imagine how scary it was," the 59-year-old from Clarksville tells NBC News of the day in November 2020 when he abruptly started seeing people's faces in a whole different way, and not a pleasant one. To wit, per the case study documenting his experience in the Lancet: To Sharrah, faces of other people suddenly appeared "distorted," with "severely stretched features" and "deep grooves on the forehead, cheeks, and chin."
"My roommate came into the room, and ... I'm like, 'What am I seeing?'" Sharrah tells CNN. "Then his girlfriend walked in and her face was the same." The perplexed man, who has bipolar disorder and PTSD resulting from his stint in the US Marine Corps, confided in the online suicide support group he was in that he was seeing these demon faces, and a volunteer in the group who works with the visually impaired took a shot at what she thought it was: an extremely rare neurological disorder called prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO. For those suffering from it, PMO can alter the faces of others in shape, size, position, texture, and color. Sharrah received an official diagnosis in 2023. Oddly enough, Sharrah doesn't perceive faces to be distorted if he's looking at photos or a computer screen.
Some people with the disorder—and there've been fewer than 100 documented cases in total, though researchers suspect cases are underreported—have noted that they also don't see their own distorted face staring back at them from a mirror. For their report in the Lancet, scientists out of Dartmouth College created a visual representation of the faces Sharrah has been seeing, to better illustrate his experience (check out what they came up with here, using photo-editing software to manipulate photos of people who stood in front of him in person, based on his descriptions of what he was seeing).
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Researchers aren't yet sure what causes this distortion, though they suspect it's tied to a malfunction in the part of the brain that handles facial processing. In Sharrah's case, they also note two possible triggers: He'd banged his head on concrete in his 40s, leading to a brain lesion, and also suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning just months before his PMO symptoms started. As for Sharrah, he's learned to cope with his disorder, which doesn't distort other body parts for him, by wearing green-tinted glasses, which somehow lessen his symptoms. He's also working with the Dartmouth scientists for further research. "I came so close to having myself institutionalized," he tells NBC. More here on how PMO can manifest differently in different people. (More strange stuff stories.)
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