PICTURED: Tennessee truck driver, 59, who is one of only 75 people in world with ‘demon face syndrome’

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, the ears were pointed upwards, the eyes were slanted and the nostrils flared – but when he left the house he noticed that every person he passed on the street looked the same way.

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 he tried to exit his truck trailer, but Sharrah also said it could have been caused by him experiencing possible carbon monoxide poisoning four months earlier.

Sharrah initially panicked when he woke up to his roommate walking to the bathroom with a horrific face.

‘I thought, ‘What the hell did I just see?,” Sharrah told The Times, adding: ‘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 demon face and he strongly considered putting himself in a psychiatric ward.

‘I was really freaking out at that point. I was going to go have myself committed,’ he told the outlet.

Sharrah is now a 59-year-old former truck driver, and still suffers from seeing demon faces everywhere, although the diagnosis does not extend to pictures or images on television screens.

His ability to see both distorted faces when he looks at a person and normal faces in pictures allowed Sharrah to give researchers the unique opportunity to create a two-dimensional image of what people with demon face syndrome see daily.

‘Our report is especially interesting because […] we can be confident that the distortions of his visualizations accurately reflect what he experiences,’ Dartmouth Professor Brad Duchaine, a coauthor on the new study told Dailymail.com.

While the images replicating the demon faces are disturbing, Sharrah said the reality of watching people walking and talking with this face ‘[is] much more traumatic than the pictures can convey.’

PMO has long been misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, and when Sharrah developed the disorder, he reached out on an online support forum to ask if anyone had experienced the same thing.

An expert responded and suggested he might have PMO and ‘explained that I hadn’t lost my mind or need 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, migraines, or ischemic strokes – when the brain’s blood supply is blocked, preventing the brain tissue from getting oxygen and nutrients which causes the brain cells to die.

Sharrah said he had, in fact, 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 backward and hitting his head after he yanked the door open.

He said he may have also suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning four months before he woke up to seeing demon faces.

Three years after that fateful day, Sharrah said he still sees demon faces and has ‘pretty much gotten used to’ the condition but still hopes it ‘could correct itself and go away.’

PMO can last for only 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 on the hippocampus area of the brain which plays a major role in learning but is primarily associated with memory.

A cyst is similar to a tumor in appearance but is filled with air or fluid that can be drained or removed during a surgical procedure, if necessary – Sharrah did not say if the cyst will be removed.

However, he said experts believe that his disorder could be linked to an issue processing colors because the demon faces become more pronounced when he looks through a red filter, but less so when he looks through green.

Sharrah said he hopes his story will help others currently on medication or whose condition has gone undiagnosed.

‘I don’t want people on medications for psychosis when they just have a vision disorder,’ Sharrah told The Times.

‘I hope we can help [stop] some from experiencing the trauma I did.’