The Devil Fungus of South California

**WARNING: This article contains discussion of contagion and body horror. Viewer discretion advised.**

The X-Files episode *El Mundo Gira* covers an outbreak of killer fungus among a Mexican immigrant community in Fresno, California. As Mulder and Scully investigate, a mycologist whose help they have enlisted is able to determine that the lethal pathogen is actually several different strains of fungus, all affected by a specific enzyme which results in extremely fast and dangerous growth on living tissue. This grotesque idea is merely fiction, though, right? Well, a report published in issue six of *Strange Magazine*suggests that this might not be the case.

## Getting Under Your Skin

An anonymous woman (we shall call her Janet) wrote to *Strange Magazine* in order to warn readers of a horrific danger lurking in the deserts of South California. Seven years before moving down to the Palm Springs area, she had been living in Santa Barbara - and had received her first warning of the fate that would eventually befall her when she had casually mentioned her Palm Springs destination to her UPS delivery man. The delivery man told her that she shouldn't go there, saying that there were '*too many weird things in the desert*'. When she asked what he meant by this, he listed several threats - among which were flying cockroaches and '*mushrooms that grow on you*'. She pointed out that it wasn't particularly kind of him to tell her scare stories after she'd already sold her house, but the man just shrugged. Janet would later come to discover that every word the delivery man had said was chillingly true.

Years ago, Janet had been passingly interested in mycology. She had learned to identify the common types, and had gained some understanding of their biology. She knew about one particular species - the stalked puffball of the desert (*Podaxis Pistillaris*) - from an old mushroom hunter's book which she had long since read and discarded. This book described puffball mushrooms as mushrooms which lack the distinctive umbrella shapes of other mushrooms, and instead spread their spores by growing a bulbous shape which then bursts and releases a 'puff' of dusty spores. According to the book, all of these puffballs were safe to eat save for stalked puffball of the desert. This stalked mushroom had apparently been '*implicated in attacks on living tissue*'. The book didn't explain further, but did state that few people were likely to encounter such a toxic fungus as it only fruited during the Summer months, and the desert would be 110 degrees or higher every day - meaning that almost nobody would be near the hazardous growths. However, as human populations have expanded, Janet remarked that far more people were living in the California desert nowadays - and it was very clear to her that people were encountering the fungus.

Four years ago, Janet was gardening when she saw the stalked puffball in full fruit. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the puffball burst all over her - specifically onto her left arm and foot, seeing as they were not covered by clothes and were closest to the mushroom. She was covered in black spores. At this point, she had completely forgotten about the book's prior warning, and so she thought that her blackened appearance was funny. She washed herself clean with a hose to the best of her ability, and moved on with her day. However, the spores remained in her pores and in every scratch and small cut on her arms, neck and feet.

Approximately a month later, she got the first indication that something was very wrong. A series of small black growths started emerging from her left arm. She scrubbed at them, assuming that they were just flecks of road tar that had gotten splashed on her, but this had no effect. Next, she tried dabbing her arm with bleach to see if that would remove the black growths. This also failed at first, but pretty soon afterwards the spots crumbled to dust and fell off. She was relieved at first, but then she touched the area of her arm around where the growths had been and noticed that it '*felt strange*'. There was a circular area on her arm, about 4 inches across, which felt cold and numb. It stayed cold for a while, before beginning to harden and eventually disintegrate. A large sore appeared in its place, and then another near it. These sores were itchy, inflamed and painful. Liquid oozed from them. Horrified, Janet went to several doctors - but none of them had ever heard of such a mushroom infection.

Eventually, with the help of a lot of athlete's foot medication, Janet was able to control the sores growing on her skin. However, she was by no means the only person in the area with this horrific problem. She had apparently heard several stories of hunters shooting rabbits and ducks only to discover that their kills were inedible due to mushrooms already growing on the newly dead animals. She met a man who told her about a persistent sore on his arm which he had to control with agricultural fungicide. She knows a woman who has recurrent black growths on her leg, but now she can't locate her to tell her what she knows about the condition. Janet's husband has only ended up with one black growth on his lower leg so far, and it crumbled off and left a purple scar when Janet touched it with bleach. Janet herself is covered in white scar tissue resembling mycelia. Her left arm apparently looks '*like a map with all the white lines squiggling over it from one big white spot to the other*'.

She talked to several local wildlife experts about the problem, but was assured that the spores of Podaxis Pistillaris should only cause reactions on the skin of particularly sensitive persons. They apparently can't grow on living tissue. When she showed them her arm, still afflicted by active sores years after her exposure, they refused to believe her. As an interesting footnote to this sickening story, Janet noted how the local newspapers never discuss it, and had apparently refused to print her letters. The fungus could be infecting people all the time, but the apparent '*conspiracy of silence*' meant that nobody knew about this looming public health hazard. She wrote to a local plant society and urged them to take action, and although they said they would phone her back, she never received that promised call. Janet stressed how worried she was about the infection potentially affecting local children, and presumably felt that reaching out to *Strange Magazine* was her last resort.

## Fungus Behaving Badly

Now onto analysing Janet's harrowing tale. Did this actually happen? Is it even possible? Well, the first hole in the story I feel it's only polite to dig into is the discrepancies surrounding the identification of the mushroom in question. At the start of Janet's article in *Strange Magazine*, she claims that Podaxis Pistillaris is also known as the Desert Inky Cap Mushroom. As far as I can tell, this is untrue. Instead, its common name is the Desert Shaggy Mane. Despite the *Wikipedia* page on the mushroom only mentioning its presence in Australia, South Africa, Hawaii and the Middle East, it does indeed appear to be present in California as stated on mykoweb.com. This same website also confirms that the spores of the Desert Shaggy Mane are blackish in deposit.

Another minor plot hole in the story is Janet's mention of a photograph of the mushroom being available in a book called *Mushrooms and Other Fungi* by RT and DB Orr. This book doesn't seem to exist, but RT and DB Orr have indeed published books on mushrooms in the United States, and so a simple mistake - despite the detailed reference for the book provided by Janet - seems somewhat possible.

Now onto the most pressing question posed by this story. Can Podaxis Pistillaris actually grow on people's flesh? The answer is no. There is no information about this being possible for any species of mushroom, in fact. Fungal infections of humans are quite common, but actual fruiting mushrooms being responsible for these infections? It's widely regarded as an impossibility (save for one possibly dubious Chinese case from 2017 in which a woman ended up with mushrooms growing in her stomach after she failed to chew the edible fungus properly). What about a paranormal angle to explain what happened to Janet? This might have more backing to it - especially if we define 'paranormal' as anything outside of current science. There is a story from the Summer of 1961 in which the family of one Grady Norman of Elkin, North Carolina was beset by extremely fast-growing and dangerous mold that grew over almost everything in their house after they put down a used piece of linoleum.

Who knows, maybe *El Mundo Gira* was closer to the truth than we thought?