In 1934, Western scientists first heard reports from Papua New Guinea of people hallucinating tiny humans after eating wild mushrooms, a the phenomenon they dubbed “mushroom madness.”

Anthropologists and mycologists went to Papua New Guinea in the ’50s and ’60s, narrowing the culprit to a few species in the Boletaceae (bolete) family. They did some chemical analyses but couldn’t find any psychoactive components. They even sent samples to Albert Hoffman, who first isolated psilocybin and discovered LSD, but even he couldn’t find an active compound.

Eventually, they concluded that maybe these mushrooms weren’t bioactive at all—maybe this was all just a sociocultural phenomenon. So, research really ended in the 1960s.

Decades later in the 1990s, there were reports from Yunnan in Southwest China of a very similar phenomenon after people ate bolete mushrooms. The species wasn’t clear, but mycologists suggested that it might be L. asiatica, then a newly described mushroom.

In 2024, I heard similar accounts from an Indigenous community in the Philippines’ remote Northern Cordillera region who were consuming a wild mushroom called “Sedesdem” that, according to local knowledge, occasionally caused visions of little people. Known as the “Nonda” in Papua New Guinea and “Jian shou qing” in Yunnan, it’s a culturally important edible mushroom that, if undercooked, produced the hallucinations.

That was the third independent case linking wild mushroom to visions of little people.

I went to Yunnan and the Philippines, spoke with locals and collected L. asiatica and as many specimens in the Lanmaoa genus as I could find for DNA sequencing. That was the first scientific survey of Northern Philippine fungi that had every been done.

It turns out that China’s Jian shou qing and the Philippine’s Sedesdem were both L. asiatica—which was very surprising because at the time, we thought L. asiatica only occurred in China. Unfortunately, when Bryn Dentinger traveled to Papua New Guinea, unusually dry conditions prevented us from collecting specimens for comparison.

Now, three completely independent cultures have reported the same specific type of hallucination, and two cases are attributed to the same DNA-verified mushroom species. That indicates that these bizarre psychological effects aren’t cultural manifestations or coincidences—they must have a shared underlying chemical and neurological basis.