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The condition causes faces to appear distorted. "My first thought was I woke up in a demon world," the patient said.

Victor Sharrah had always had sharp vision. But one life-altering day in November 2020, he noticed out of the blue that people’s faces around him looked demonic. 

Their ears, noses and mouths were stretched back, and there were deep grooves in their foreheads, cheeks and chins.

“My first thought was I woke up in a demon world,” said Sharrah, 59, of Clarksville, Tennessee. “You can’t imagine how scary it was.”

Someone he knew taught visually impaired people and suggested he might have prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO. The extremely rare neurological disorder of perception causes faces to appear distorted in shape, size, texture or color. Sharrah felt the symptoms were a match, and he was formally diagnosed last year.

The distortions appear only when he sees people in person — not in photographs or through computer screens.