Let's start with what this isn't. It isn't a recreational drug, and we're not recommending that anyone try it. What's described here is a form of food poisoning from a wild mushroom, and eating wild mushrooms you haven't had expertly identified can kill you. Now for the strange part.
An ordinary dinner in Yunnan
Lanmaoa asiatica is a wild bolete mushroom, popular and widely sold in Yunnan in south-west China. Kunming has what's been described as the largest wild mushroom market in the world, with more than 200 species. Properly cooked, this one is regular food. Its local name, Jian shou qing, means roughly "turns blue in the hand", because it changes colour when touched.
Undercook it, and that's when reports of the visions begin.
What people see
The descriptions are remarkably consistent. People see dozens or hundreds of tiny people between about 3 and 30 centimetres tall, in full detail, who look solid and move around the real world. Around 90% describe them as elves, clowns or other fairy-like figures in brightly coloured clothes.
These little figures also seem to obey physics. They walk around objects and don't pass through them. They climb things. They fall off the edge of the table. One person reported watching them jump off a spoon into soup, then finding that they were still there, in their mouth, on taking a bite.
The same mushroom, in another country
In 2024 an Indigenous community in the Cordillera of the northern Philippines reported a mushroom they call Sedesdem, which sometimes causes visions of little people. A DNA analysis by Colin Domnauer and Bryn Dentinger at the University of Utah, published in Mycologia in 2026, found that the Yunnan mushroom and the Philippine one are the same species.
There's a further tantalising thread. "Mushroom madness" has been reported in Papua New Guinea since 1934, but no samples could be collected there, so that mushroom remains unconfirmed.
The missing chemical
Here's the real mystery. The researchers searched chemically and genetically for the known psychoactive compounds found in mushrooms, including psilocybin, and found no trace. They think it's a new compound that nobody has yet isolated or identified.
Which raises some questions we'd love to have answers to. Why do different people, in different places, describe such similar figures? Why does cooking stop it? Does the compound break down with heat? No one knows yet. We also couldn't find any source saying how quickly the visions begin or how long they last, so we don't claim to know that either.
Not a "magic mushroom" story
The paper itself covers 53 specimens and 17 species, four of them new to science, which is a big deal for mycologists. If you see this described as a magic mushroom story, be wary: no psilocybin was found, and what's being described is poisoning.
If you want to explore mushrooms safely, buy them from a shop or grow them from a kit. The only foraging we recommend is with an expert standing next to you.
