Every October, people spend money on fake cobwebs and plastic hands reaching out of the lawn.
Meanwhile, three streets over, a rotting stump has produced something considerably more unsettling for free.
Mushrooms have the best common names in the natural world, and the spooky ones are in a league of their own. These were not assigned by committee. They were assigned by people walking through a wood, encountering something they could not explain, and reaching for the most immediate comparison available.
Which was, almost without exception, something grim.
Here are a few that earned their names, all of them fruiting across North America right now, because October happens to be peak season for exactly this.
Mushrooms have the best common names in the natural world, and the spooky ones are in a league of their own.
These were not assigned by committee. They were assigned by people walking through a wood, encountering something they could not explain, and reaching for the most immediate comparison available.
Which was almost always death.
Here are a few that earned their names, all of which are fruiting across North America right now, because October is peak season for exactly this.
Blackened, swollen, slightly crooked shapes pushing up through the soil around a rotting stump.
Sometimes separate, sometimes fused together.
They look precisely like a hand coming up out of the ground, and nobody has ever needed that explained to them.
In parts of Germany they were known as corpse fingers, and were taken as a sign of a sin that had gone unrepented by whoever was buried below.
The reality is less dramatic. Xylaria polymorpha is a saprobic fungus, meaning it feeds on dead wood, and those fingers are its spore-producing structures.
A charming detail: they start out pale, sometimes with a bluish cast, and only darken into their full graveyard appearance as the season goes on. The scariest version is the oldest version.
A pale, lumpy, almost dough-like cap covered in vivid red droplets that look exactly like blood welling up.
Hydnellum peckii also goes by Devil’s Tooth and red-juice tooth, and somewhat optimistically, strawberries and cream.
The fluid comes from guttation, a process where internal pressure forces liquid out through small openings. The red is simply a pigment the fungus produces. One theory is that it happens when the mushroom is growing fast enough that it has to expel the excess.
And here is the part worth knowing.
Despite looking like the aftermath of something terrible, this is a mycorrhizal fungus. It partners with conifers, trading nutrients with their roots and linking trees together underground.
The most horrifying-looking mushroom on this list is one of the most generous organisms in the forest.
This one hatches.
Clathrus archeri begins as a soft gelatinous egg sitting in the leaf litter. Then it splits open and four to eight bright red arms unfurl outward, covered in dark spore slime.
It also goes by octopus stinkhorn, and it smells like rotting meat, which is entirely the point. The stench attracts flies, which pick up the spores and carry them off.
It is a delivery system disguised as a nightmare.
European folklore treated it the same way as Dead Man’s Fingers, as corpses reaching up through the soil. In Borneo it picked up a rather different interpretation that we will leave to your imagination.
The name sounds like tabloid invention. It is not.
Certain Hebeloma species have a strong association with decomposing remains, and they have become a genuine tool in forensic mycology.
Investigators have used the presence of these fungi to help locate buried bodies. The mushroom fruits in response to the particular chemistry of decomposition, and it does so reliably enough to be worth following.
A mushroom that tells you where somebody is buried.
It is difficult to improve on that as a seasonal fact.
One last piece of folklore worth correcting, since the season invites it.
Cemeteries really are unusually rich in mushrooms, and people have assumed for centuries that the fungi are feeding on the dead.
They are not.
The soil in a cemetery is loaded with nitrogen and ammonia, and mycelium finds that enormously appealing. The mushrooms are responding to soil chemistry, not to anybody in particular.
Which is a pattern you may have noticed by now. Every one of these names came from someone seeing a shape and filling the gap with the most frightening story available. Fingers from the grave. Blood from a tooth. Sin surfacing through the soil.
The real explanations are stranger, and considerably more interesting, than the fear was.
That has more or less always been the arrangement with fungi.
We name them for what they resemble, then spend a few centuries working out what they actually are, and the answer is never what anyone guessed.
So this month, go and look. Damp ground, old stumps, the base of conifers, three or four days after rain. Every one of these is out there right now, and most people walk straight past them.
Though if you are planning something for the 31st, a night out has its own X factor, and we may have a thing or two to say about that shortly.
Water Your Mind 💚
Mushie Media of the Week:
"Haunted Redwoods: 5 Spooky Mushrooms and Creepy Fungi"
by: Save the Redwoods League
