Let’s say you’ve gone for a walk in the woods, perhaps you’re a little off-track, maybe you’re mushroom hunting or just passing the time, and then boom: you catch what appears to be a hand clawing its way out of the ground. Real fingers, gnarled and black, cresting through leaf litter — like something out of a terrible nightmare. Your brain immediately switches into horror movie mode. “Oh god. That’s a body.”
No body. You’ve just encountered one of the more bizarre fungal residents of the forest: Dead Man’s Fingers.
The name is creepy enough, but even the scientific name, Xylaria polymorpha, is somewhat less disturbing than what it happens to look like. I saw it for the first time on a damp and overcast autumn afternoon, with leaves everywhere, slick and half-rotting, and as I poked around a rotting stump I noticed a little tuft of finger-like structures, charcoal-colored, and disturbingly spread out in a human-like way. I froze for a second, took a few steps back, and then crouched down to inspect it more carefully — since curiosity always wins.
So… What Are These Creepy Things?
They’re fungi, of course, but not the kind that shows up in storybooks with red caps and white spots. This stuff does not scream “fairy tale” — it looks more like burnt sausages or dried roots which became stuck halfway to being a corpse’s hand. They grow in dead hardwoods, generally stumps or roots, then sit there doing their thing.
Here’s the main distinction: they do not parasitize. They are saprophytes, meaning they thrive on dead organic material. They do not hurt living trees. In fact, they recycle decaying wood, slowly breaking it down.
finger-like fungus
source: Charismatic Planet Via Alliance for the Chesapeake bay
When young, they are soft, pale, and a little fleshy. When they become older, they dry and harden to black with tips that are generally lighter, and sometimes even white. This factor helps with finger resemblance as well. They are not very big, about one to two inches tall, but they grow in groups that can resemble a hand reaching out of the soil.
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