What the Fluorescence?!: Nonhuman Encounters at the Grocery Store

My husband and I had just walked into Walmart, near the produce section, and I felt someone staring at me. Hard. I looked up, thinking I was imagining it, and locked eyes with a man I knew immediately was not human.

Artemaeus was already gone. He was laser focused on getting his dinner ingredients, hellbent on alfredo, rushing towards dairy without a backward glance. The lights overhead were bright and cold. The A/C in Florida is legendary most of the year because of our subtropical climate, and the store was freezing. The man and I held each other's gaze, intensely, for what felt like a long time. He was standing stock still, his eyes in what seemed to be a look of perpetual shock. I offered him a small smile and a nod, then quietly moved on after Tems. In the dairy section, I told my husband what I saw and asked if he'd noticed anything.

He hadn't. He almost never does during errands.

This was not the first time, and it has only ever happened in a Walmart. What I perceived in that man's face matched, with striking precision, something the medical community recently gave a name to. They're calling it "demon face syndrome." I think that name reveals considerably more than the doctors who coined it intended.

I'm Tillie Treadwell. I've been a paranormal experiencer since infanthood, I spent about a year working with the Catholic church in the United States as a paranormal investigator, case examiner, and ultimately a kind of exorcist- the non-religious variety, which does exist, though we tend to be quieter about it. I was born with brain wave patterns and ear and eye structure anomalies that allow me to perceive tones, frequencies, and parts of the light spectrum that most people cannot, and I have spent decades watching a version of the world that is, I can assure you, considerably more crowded than the one most human beings are accustomed to. What follows requires, at minimum, that you take me at my word long enough to consider the possibility, for whatever my word may be worth.

The clinical term is prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, and it has been documented for just over a century, with fewer than a hundred cases on the books since 1904. The standard explanation is neurological- a glitch in the fusiform face area of the brain, the region responsible for processing human faces, causing it to render those faces as distorted, monstrous, or inhuman. Patients describe seeing stretched features, reptilian textures, pointed ears, bark-textured skin, mouths too wide around too many teeth, eyes that darken and bulge until nearly no white remains, and in some cases geometric shapes replacing facial features entirely. In 2024, a man named Victor Sharrah made international news when Dartmouth College published photorealistic images of what he sees every day, and the images sent a shiver through every corner of the internet that pays attention to this kind of thing. Reports have been ticking upward since then, and the medical literature has not accounted for why.

Most PMO patients see these distortions everywhere- on screens, in photographs, in person- but Sharrah's case is different, and his difference is the reason Dartmouth was able to produce those images at all. His distortions only appear when he looks at people in person, and photographs and screens show faces normally. Whatever he is perceiving requires physical proximity and real-time presence in the room, and I think a neurological glitch would not make that distinction- it would distort faces on screens and in mirrors just as readily as in person. The question most people are asking about PMO is "what is going wrong in these patients' brains?" but perhaps the more useful question, the one the data keeps circling whether anyone wants to follow it there or not, is what if nothing is going wrong at all, and certain people are simply seeing something the rest of us are not?

These reports keep clustering in grocery stores, under fluorescent lights, and I think that pattern deserves far more scrutiny than it is getting.

A fluorescent ballast operates at fifty to two hundred times the electromagnetic output of standard electrical systems, and a grocery store like Walmart or Kroger runs hundreds of these tubes at once alongside refrigeration units, electronic price displays, security systems, and checkout scanners, all of them generating overlapping electromagnetic fields that saturate the space from floor to ceiling. Your body enters an invisible ocean of electromagnetic energy every time you walk through those automatic doors, whether you feel it or not. Michael Persinger's research at Laurentian University showed that exposure to certain electromagnetic fields produces visual distortions, the sensation of a presence, and altered facial perception in otherwise healthy subjects, and paranormal investigators have long noted that running electronics- televisions, appliances, fluorescent lights- create electromagnetic interference that must be accounted for during investigations, with some researchers documenting cases where the activity in a location ceased entirely once a faulty electrical source was repaired.

The relationship between electromagnetic fields and nonhuman activity is not settled, and I do not claim to have the answer, but I suspect that the combination of fluorescent lighting and heavy electrical output in these stores may be interacting with whatever mechanism governs the boundary between what we see and what we do not. The medical community keeps studying the brains of the observers, and nobody, as far as I can tell, is studying the rooms- and that blind spot, I think, is costing people their freedom, because some of these patients are being diagnosed with schizophrenia, medicated with antipsychotics, and in some cases institutionalised for a condition that may have nothing to do with psychosis at all.

The question I keep arriving at is why nonhuman peoples would be in a grocery store in the first place, and the answer may be the same reason you are there- for the food- though they are not eating it the way you do. In European folklore, faerie peoples are said to extract the essence or vibrational content of food rather than consuming the physical substance itself, a form of nourishment the tradition calls foyson, and the folklore is remarkably specific about what happens to food from which the foyson has been taken- animals refuse to eat it, livestock reportedly starve before touching depleted grass, and humans who consume it are described as becoming sickly, weak, and in some cases fatally ill. The locations where this feeding traditionally occurs tend to be magnetically and mineralogically specific, and the modern grocery store is, I think, the most magnetically saturated food environment that human civilisation has ever produced. I have written about foyson and its connection to wild berries and forest disappearances in my recent work for Outer Limits Magazine, and the argument I am making here extends that work into territory I did not, at first, expect it to go- the fluorescent aisle, the midnight shopping run, the places where human beings feel vaguely wrong and never stop to wonder why.

A Walmart is not just a grocery store, and I think this matters more than it might seem at first. It carries clothing, toys, electronics, office supplies, household goods, sporting equipment, and seasonal curiosities, all under one family-centered roof, and that variety pulls in an equally staggering variety of human beings at nearly every hour of the day and night- families with small children, elderly people on fixed incomes, third-shift workers grabbing milk at two in the morning, teenagers killing time, parents in crisis, people in every shade of joy and grief and boredom and exhaustion the human experience has to offer, all of them cycling through the same aisles and generating enormous quantities of emotional and social energy as they go. The food on the shelves is not, I think, the primary attraction for certain nonhuman peoples- the human beings are, and a store like Walmart or Kroger is a place where those humans congregate in predictable, high-density patterns, producing exactly the kind of emotional output that certain nonhuman peoples are known, across centuries of folklore and decades of my own personal observation, to feed upon, easily and readily, at almost any hour, under the electromagnetic cover of an environment that most people find vaguely unpleasant but never once suspicious. The lights are not just concealing them, I think- the lights may be sustaining the very conditions that allow them to be there at all.

So if they are there- feeding, watching, moving among us- how are they hiding? In the folklore of the British Isles, the faerie peoples are said to possess a capacity called glamour, which is not a physical transformation but a perceptual manipulation- a targeted alteration of what the human brain registers when it looks at something that is not what it appears to be. Tim Swartz, whose work I am proud to be published alongside at Zontar Press, explored this in his book Mimics: The Others Among Us, which examines the evidence for nonhuman peoples living in disguise among human beings- beings that look like us, move like us, and participate in human society while being fundamentally something else- and the throughline across every tradition Tim examines is consistent and, I think, difficult to dismiss. They are here. They are passing. The disguise is not always perfect.

I think what PMO patients are seeing is the glamour failing, and I think the descriptions they give support that interpretation. The descriptions do not read to me like random perceptual noise or a misfiring of the visual system- they read like a brief, accidental moment of clarity in which the manipulation drops and the observer catches a glimpse of what is actually underneath, and what they describe- stretched features, reptilian textures, pointed ears, bulging darkened eyes, a mouth that opens too wide- matches centuries of folklore about what nonhuman peoples look like when the glamour is not in place, with a specificity that I find very hard to chalk up to coincidence. The electromagnetic energy that I believe sustains the feeding conditions may also be, occasionally, disrupting the mechanism that keeps the disguise intact. Sharrah's case keeps returning to me, because his distortions only appear in person, never on screens, and I think the electromagnetic conditions of the spaces where he experiences them may have everything to do with why. A neurological glitch would not be selective about medium- it would distort faces on screens just as readily as in person, and the fact that his does not tells me that something else is going on.

If PMO were a stable neurological condition, the case rate should hold roughly steady across decades, and it has not- reports are climbing, specifically in grocery store environments, and the medical community has not offered a satisfying explanation for why. I think something has changed, and I suspect the change is not in human neurology but in the environment, or in the population of nonhuman peoples inhabiting it, or in the electromagnetic conditions governing the boundary between what stays hidden and what, occasionally, slips through. Walmart and Kroger, in my observation and in the pattern of reports I have tracked, attract the highest concentration of these experiences, and if you were a nonhuman person who fed on human emotional and social output, you could not design a better feeding ground, and if you needed electromagnetic cover to maintain your glamour, you could not ask for more saturated conditions. The only problem, I suspect, is that the same saturation occasionally disrupts the very mechanism keeping you invisible, and certain human beings, for reasons that may have as much to do with their individual neurology as with the conditions around them, are catching glimpses of what is underneath.

I will have considerably more to say about the electromagnetic and atmospheric conditions that govern this boundary in my upcoming work for Outer Limits Magazine, but in the meantime, the man near the produce section knew that I could see him, and I wonder soon if you might encounter him too..