Doctors in China’s Yunnan Province get ready each year for a wave of patients with a weird complaint. These sick people all arrive describing a really strange symptom: they see tiny, elf-sized people sneaking under doors, climbing up the walls, and hanging onto the furniture.
The Culinary Culprit (yes, we can blame the soup)
The medical center deals with hundreds of these incidents annually. The cause is always the same: Lanmaoa asiatica, a mushroom that grows with pine trees in the local woods and is loved for its rich, meaty taste. From June through August, when the season peaks, you can find this fungus in Yunnan’s markets, at restaurants, and in home-cooked meals.
You have to be extremely careful to cook it all the way through, because if you don’t, the visions will start.
Local Knowledge and Timers
Colin Domnauer, a PhD student at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah who studies L. asiatica, recalls that a waiter at a hot pot joint set a timer for 15 minutes and cautioned them not to take a bite before the alarm rang, or they would likely start spotting tiny humans. He adds that this seems to be something everyone in that culture just knows.
It sounds peculiarly similar to those grape concentrate bricks sold during the Prohibition, with instructions where they told costumers not to dissolve the dried fruit brick in a gallon of water and let it rest in a dark environment for 20 days, lest they might ferment wine by mistake.
A Global Biological Mystery
Apart from Yunnan and a few other locations, this odd mushroom is mostly a total mystery. Giuliana Furci, a mushroom expert who runs the Fungi Foundation—a non-profit focused on finding and saving fungi—notes that although there were plenty of stories about this hallucinogenic mushroom and many searchers, nobody ever successfully identified the species.
Domnauer is determined to crack the long-standing puzzle surrounding this fungus and identify the mysterious chemical behind such consistent hallucinations, as well as what it might teach us about the human mind. He first found out about L. asiaticafrom his mushroom professor back when he was still in college.
“The idea that a mushroom could create such fairytale-style visions for people across different eras and places just seemed incredibly weird,” Domnauer remarks. “I was baffled and felt a strong urge to dig deeper.”
Who wouldn’t like to have an acid trip with Lilliputs?
Existing studies offered a few clues. In a report from 1991, a pair of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences detailed instances in Yunnan Province where people ate a specific mushroom and had what psychiatrists call “Lilliputian hallucinations”—seeing miniature humans, animals, or fantasy creatures. This name comes from the tiny citizens of Lilliput Island in the story Gulliver’s Travels.
The researchers wrote that patients watched these figures moving around everywhere, often with more than ten little beings appearing at once. They added that people spotted the creatures on their outfits while getting dressed and even on their plates during meals. These visions actually became clearer when the patients shut their eyes.
Early Encounters and Missed Clues
Way back in the 1960s, Gordon Wasson and Roger Heim—the American writer and French plant expert who introduced the West to psilocybin mushrooms—stumbled upon a similar phenomenon in Papua New Guinea. They were hunting for a fungus that missionaries visiting three decades prior claimed made the local people lose their minds, a state an anthropologist eventually named “mushroom madness.”
Without realizing it, what they found sounds almost identical to the stories coming out of China today. They gathered samples of the likely mushroom and shipped them off for analysis to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist famous for discovering LSD. However, Hofmann couldn’t find any significant chemicals in the samples. The group decided the accounts they heard were probably just local folklore instead of being caused by a drug, so they stopped researching it.
It took until 2015 for researchers to finally officially describe and name L. asiatica, though they still didn’t have many details about its psychoactive traits. The rest is history.