Meet a man with a rare malady that distorts faces: ‘It’s like staring at demons’

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, fixed float 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.

"I helped create a computer-generated 2D picture of what I see in faces, but there’s so much more to it," said Sharrah, speaking about research on his case that was published in the "Clinical Pictures" section of The Lancet Thursday.

"What people don’t understand from a picture is that the distorted face is moving, contorting, talking to you, making facial gestures," he added. "It does kind of distance me from other people a bit. I try not to let it because I know what it is, it’s PMO. Yet I still feel like I’m not getting as close to people as I used to."