Seeing strange people in your house is never a good sign – especially if they’re miniature, elf-like creatures jumping around, scaling the walls and crawling on the floor. But don’t worry, if you’ve recently had a meal involving a specific type of mushroom, then you haven’t lost your mind. The mushroom is the culprit.
The official, clinical term for these visions is Lilliputian hallucinations, named after the tiny inhabitants of the fictional island in the novel Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. These hallucinations can occur in conjunction with different conditions, such as schizophrenia or alcohol withdrawal, among others.
But none of those causes produce Lilliputian hallucinations as reliably as Lanmaoa asiatica – if consumed raw or undercooked. A reddish-in-colour species of bolete mushroom, it was only formally described and named by scientists in 2015.
Rich in umami flavour, L. asiatica is a locally popular food in the Yunnan Province in China, sold in markets and featured in many restaurant menus. But it comes with a warning – don’t eat it before the 15-minute timer goes off, a precaution adopted by most restaurants selling the mushroom. If you do, “you might see little people,” as recounted to the BBC by Colin Domnauer, doctoral researcher in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, USA.
The history
Although the mushroom is most famous for occurring in the Yunnan Province, where locals refer to it as ‘Jian shou qing’, and the little people it conjures up as ‘xiao ren ren’, it actually pops up independently in two other places.
In Cordillera Administrative Region in the Philippines, it’s known as ‘Sedesdem’, and the elf-like creatures as ‘ansisit’. In 2024, DNA sequencing performed by Domnauer has confirmed that, although they look different from each other, both mushrooms represent the same species.
Reports of a wild mushroom giving people visions of miniature creatures have also come from Papua New Guinea, and date back to the 1930s. When missionaries visited the Western Highlands, they came across a wild mushroom local communities called ‘nonda’ – after consuming it, they appeared to go temporarily insane, which was later dubbed ‘mushroom madness’. One of the features of that madness were Lilliputian hallucinations.
In the 1960s, an American author Gordon Wasson and French botanist Roger Heim, who specialised in mycology (study of fungi), visited Papua New Guinea in search of the culprit of this madness. The collected specimens were sent for testing to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist famous for discovering LSD, but he didn’t find anything of interest. And so, no further research was done.
In December 2025, Colin Domnauer’s supervisor visited Papua New Guinea to search for the same mushrooms, but he failed to find any.
“It could be the same species, which would be surprising because Papua New Guinea typically doesn’t share species found in China and the Philippines,” Donmauer told the BBC.
If it’s not the same species, it would make the mystery even “more interesting from an evolutionary perspective,” according to Donmauer. It would mean the same strange effects evolved completely independently in different mushroom species and in different parts of the world.
The story might go back even further – as Donmauer mentions, an ancient Daoist text from the 3rd century CE refers to a ‘flesh spirit mushroom’ which, if consumed raw, allows one to “see a little person” and “attain transcendence immediately.”
The symptoms
Chemical and genomic analyses performed on L. asiatica at the Dentinger Lab at the Natural History Museum of Utah uncovered that it doesn’t carry either of the gene clusters that build the two best-known fungal hallucinogens – psilocybin of ‘magic mushrooms’ and ibotenic acid of the fly agaric.
So, whatever is causing the Lilliputian hallucinations is like no other known psychedelic compound out there, working via a mechanism not described by science as of yet.
“Searching for an unknown psychoactive compound is a very exciting position to be in, a frontier towards expanding our understanding of the brain and mind,” Donmauer told Psychedelics.co.uk.
And the tiny creatures suddenly appearing in front of the unlucky consumer aren’t the only weird thing about the effects of this mushroom. For one, the trips produced by L. asiatica are unusually long, lasting anywhere from one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours. In some cases, they cause hospital stays due to side effects such as delirium and dizziness. Every year, a hospital in the Yunnan Province treats hundreds of these cases.
Most known psychedelic compounds tend to produce varied alterations to reality, not only from person to person but from one experience to another. But not L. asiatica, in which the little people hallucinations are reliably and repeatedly reported.
“I don’t know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations,” Donmauer told the BBC.
Further research into L. asiatica will not only uncover details about its psychedelic qualities but answer bigger questions concerning consciousness and the connection between mind and reality. More than that, it could help scientists understand what causes spontaneous Lilliputian hallucinations outside of consuming the mysterious mushroom.
Top image: L. asiatica. Credit: Ruanxian Dai, Zhantao Duan, Bin Han, Yating Peng, Lan Zhu, Yuan Shen, Qiang Meng, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons