For 59-year-old Victor Sharrah, the terrifying symptoms began on a winter day in Nashville.
“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 told CNN.
Each of the once-familiar faces had a grotesque grimace, elongated eyes and deeply etched scars. When turned to the side, pointy ears suddenly appeared, he said, much like those of Spock, the Vulcan first officer on the USS Enterprise in Star Trek.
“I tried to explain to my roommate what I was seeing, and he thought I was nuts. Then I went outside and all of the faces of people I saw were distorted and still are,” Sharrah said.
“It’s like staring at demons,” he added. “Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly everybody in the world looks like a creature in a horror movie.”
Sharrah has a rare condition called prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, in which parts of the faces of other people appear distorted in shape, texture, position or color. Objects and other parts of a person’s body, however, typically remain undisturbed.
