Three years ago, everything changed for Victor Sharrah when demon faces appeared everywhere and his life became a ‘horror movie’.
Victor Sharrah was 56 years old when he saw a grotesque and disturbing looking man walking through his apartment who turned out to be his roommate.
His roommate’s mouth was stretched wide, his ears were pointed upwards, his eyes were slanted and his nostrils flared – but when he left the house he noticed that every person he passed on the street looked the same.
It turns out that Sharrah, now 59, has a rare condition called prosopometamorphopsia (PMO), or demon face syndrome, which has only been recorded in 75 cases and causes the mind to distort people’s faces.
Experts suspected he developed demon face syndrome years after he hit his head after the door jammed while trying to exit his truck trailer, but Sharrah also said it could have been caused by experiencing a possible carbon monoxide poisoning four months earlier.
Victor Sharrah started seeing demon faces when he was 56 years old
Victor Sharrah as a younger man (age unknown) – He currently lives in Clarkesville, about 50 miles north of Nashville, Tennessee
Demon face syndrome is an incredibly rare condition, with only 75 people diagnosed in the world
Sharrah initially panicked when he woke up to his roommate going to the bathroom with a horrible look on his face.
“I was like, ‘What the hell did I just see?'” Sharrah said The timesadding: ‘It was like something out of a movie, like a demon face.’
When he left his apartment to walk his dog in Clarkesville, about 50 miles north of Nashville, every person Sharrah saw had a demonic face, and he strongly considered committing himself to a psychiatric ward.
‘I was really scared at the time. I was going to go and commit,’ he told the paper.
Victor Sharrah woke up one morning to see his roommate with a demon face and when he left the house he noticed demon faces everywhere.
Demon face syndrome can be caused by epilepsy, brain damage, stroke or migraine
Now a 59-year-old former truck driver, Sharrah still suffers from seeing demonic faces everywhere, although the diagnosis does not extend to pictures or images on TV screens.
The photo shows Sharrah as a young person
His ability to see both distorted faces when looking at a person and normal faces in photos allowed Sharrah to give researchers the unique opportunity to create a two-dimensional image of what people with demon face syndrome see on a daily basis.
“Our report is particularly interesting because (…) we can be sure that the distortions of his visualizations accurately reflect what he is experiencing,” Dartmouth professor Brad Duchaine, a co-author on the new study, told Dailymail.com.
While the images replicating the demon’s faces are disturbing, Sharrah said the reality of seeing people walking and talking with this face “(is) much more traumatic than the images can convey.”
PMO has long been misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, and when Sharrah developed the disorder, he contacted an online support forum to ask if anyone had experienced the same.
Sharrah said he had hit his head in 2007 and may have been exposed to carbon monoxide poisoning four months before developing the disorder
Demon faces show mouths stretched wide, ears pointing upwards, slanted eyes and flared nostrils
An expert responded, suggesting he might have PMO and ‘explained that I hadn’t lost my mind or needed to be committed,’ Sharrah told The Times.
She immediately asked him: ‘When was your brain injury?’ he added.
PMO can develop from a head injury, epilepsy, migraine or ischemic stroke – when the brain’s blood supply is blocked, preventing brain tissue from getting oxygen and nutrients, causing brain cells to die.
Sharrah said he had actually hit his head in 2007 when he was exiting his truck trailer and the door had jammed.
He first hit his chin on the handle before falling backwards and hitting his head after he jerked the door open.
He said he may also have suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning four months before he woke up to see demon faces.
Three years on from that fateful day, Sharrah said he still sees demon faces and has ‘pretty much got used to’ the condition, but still hopes it ‘can correct itself and go away’.
PMO may only last a few days or weeks, but in some cases the perceived distortions can last for years.
Sharrah underwent tests that revealed he had a one-centimeter cyst in the hippocampus area of the brain, which plays a major role in learning but is primarily associated with memory.
A cyst is similar in appearance to a tumor but is filled with air or fluid that can be drained or removed during surgery if necessary — Sharrah did not say whether the cyst will be removed.
However, he said experts believe his disorder may be linked to a color-processing problem because the demon’s faces become more pronounced when looking through a red filter, but less so when looking through green.
Sharrah said he hopes his story will help others currently on medication or whose condition has gone undiagnosed.
“I don’t want to put people on anti-psychotic medication when they just have a vision disorder,” Sharrah told The Times.
‘I hope we can help (stop) some from experiencing the trauma I did.’