While an extremely rare phenomenon, the so-called “Scaremen” has been documented in seven cases, each of which bears such uncanny similarity to the others that it has warranted a name and entry in this Handbook. The phenomenon manifests as two profound delusions. The first is whence the name is derived, which is the unshakeable belief that everyone around the afflicted has been replaced with a “straw-filled” human shape, the purpose of which is to frighten humans away, much like a scarecrow exists to deter the presence of crows and other pests. As an aside, it is interesting to note that both the scarecrow and Scareman are human-like—this gives an indication as to just how powerfully terrifying the very shape of a human is to animals and humans alike. Though the person afflicted has no sensory indication that would inform them of the straw-stuffed nature of the people around them, the horror of the delusion cannot be shaken from them. The sudden onset of the Scaremen phenomenon sends the sufferer into a protracted frenzy of screaming and self-harm, attempting to flee all human contact like a wild animal. In two of the seven cases, the sufferer did not survive beyond this first delusional phase for very long, so severe was the damage they were able to inflict on their bodies before they could be subdued. 

The second delusion, which hitherto has no treatment and results in death, is that all food, being provided by the Scaremen, is not edible—strictly speaking, it is not that it cannot be eaten, but that eating it will provide no nourishment, that it will pass through the digestive tract completely undigested, like something produced on an alien planet the life on which is based on a system of proteins which cannot be deciphered by the human gut. Food is taken tentatively at first, though the afflicted will insist that it is simply “made of black straw,” and despite the fact that it is, obviously, digestible and nourishing, the afflicted will deny this, even going so far as to dissect their feces to “prove” that the “black straw” they ingested is still there. 

Eventually, all food is refused. The sufferers have been intubated with nasogastric tubes in the attempt to save them from starvation. The initial delusion intensifies after this, during which the sufferer begins to believe that everything is “stuffed with straw,” not just the Scaremen around them, taking care of them in their state—when presented with the fact that the Scaremen are trying to save their lives, the afflicted brush this off as an attempt to prolong their suffering. The end stage of the Scaremen phenomenon is perhaps the strangest. After intubation, the second delusion actually manifests itself in the complete breakdown of the digestive system of the sufferer. Food passes through the gastrointestinal tract undigested and starvation sets in rapidly. In the final days of starvation, it has been observed that the feces produced by the dying do, in fact, resemble very dark straw. No mechanism has been proposed to explain this.