Eating This Mushroom Sent Hundreds Straight to the Hospital. They All See the Same Tiny People

Between June and August, peak mushroom season in the region, Lanmaoa asiatica makes its way into stir-fries, soups, and home-cooked meals across the province. When eaten raw or undercooked, the consequences can be startling, bizarre, and, remarkably, almost always the same.

What makes this phenomenon so unusual is not just the sheer number of people affected, but the uncanny consistency of what they experience. Out of all the wild, unpredictable things the human brain can conjure under chemical influence, hundreds of patients independently report the exact same hallucination: miniature people, sometimes described as elves, soldiers, or dancing figures, populating their immediate environment. It reads like folklore. It is, apparently, neuroscience.

Hundreds of Cases a Year, One Very Specific Vision

Local hospitals in Yunnan treat hundreds of cases of L. asiatica poisoning annually. The profile of symptoms is remarkably uniform: hallucinations occur in over 90 percent of patients, accompanied in some cases by delirium, dizziness, and mania. Symptoms can persist anywhere from one to three days, or even longer. Crucially, there have been no reported deaths linked to the mushroom, and no evidence of lasting damage.

The hallucinations themselves have a quality that researchers find almost as puzzling as the compound causing them. One local professor in Yunnan described eating stir-fried L. asiatica and subsequently seeing hundreds of xiao ren ren, “little people“, marching like soldiers. He estimated them at roughly 2 centimeters tall. “When I lifted the tablecloth higher,” he recounted, as quoted by Colin Domnauer in a piece for the Natural History Museum of Utah, “the heads came off and stuck to the bottom of the cloth and the bodies kept marching in place.”

Psychiatry has a term for this: lilliputian hallucinations, named after the fictional tiny-people island in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The condition refers specifically to hallucinations involving miniature humans, animals, or fantasy entities. In the case of L. asiatica, it appears to be the dominant and near-universal effect.

A Mystery That Has Stumped Scientists for Decades

Here is where the story gets stranger. Despite the regularity of these episodes, no one has definitively identified the chemical compound responsible. Reports of similar “mushroom madness“ date back to the 1930s, and researchers studying comparable effects in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s documented symptoms that closely mirror what Yunnan hospitals see today.

According to Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate studying L. asiatica at the University of Utah and theNatural History Museum of Utah, the case is genuinely baffling.

“It sounded so bizarre that there could be a mushroom out there causing fairytale-like visions reported across cultures and time,” he told the BBC.

What the culprit is not has actually been easier to establish than what it is. Unlike other so-called magic mushrooms, psilocybin is not involved. After completing whole genome sequencing for all species in the L. asiatica group and searching for genes associated with known psychoactive compounds, including psilocybin and ibotenic acid, Domnauer and his team found no evidence of either. “We’re confident that it’s something different or new in this bolete mushroom,” he told The Microdose. Boletes, it is worth noting, are mushrooms distinguished by having pores rather than gills under their caps, and psychoactive properties are rare among them.

Mice, Molecules, and an Answer That Remains Elusive

To get closer to identifying the compound, Domnauer’s team has been administering chemical extracts of L. asiatica to mice and observing behavioral changes. The approach is allowing researchers to narrow down which molecules might be responsible, though no definitive identification has been made yet. According to Domnauer, current tests suggest the chemical in question is not related to any known psychedelic compound, which, if confirmed, would make it genuinely novel to science.

There is also a geographic puzzle layered on top of the chemical one. Similar hallucination reports have emerged from Papua New Guinea, involving what may be related mushroom species.

“It could be the same species,” Domnauer told the BBC, “which would be surprising because Papua New Guinea typically doesn’t share species found in China and the Philippines.”

One additional detail worth noting: genomic analysis has identified a relative of L. asiatica that grows commonly in North America, but it is rarely eaten there, and there are no reports of psychoactive effects in the United States. The trips caused by L. asiatica, which can stretch from hours into days, also appear to be accidental rather than sought out, an unintended consequence of undercooking a culinary mushroom, not a deliberate pursuit.