Why Mushrooms Are Witchy: Fairy Rings, Fly Agaric, Toadstools
Quick Answer
Why are mushrooms associated with witches? Mushrooms appear overnight, grow in rings, and kill people who guess wrong about them. Europeans called those rings witch rings and blamed them on witches dancing, elves, or the Devil parking his milk churn there. A fairy ring is one underground fungus expanding outward, sometimes for centuries. The witchcraft came from the fact that mushrooms behaved like nothing else people could watch grow.
Mushrooms are witchy for a reason that has nothing to do with aesthetics. A fairy ring is not a group of mushrooms standing in a circle. It is one mushroom. The circle is the edge of a single organism underground, and some of them are older than the villages that feared them.
The ring is one mushroom
A fungus lives as mycelium, a mat of threads spreading through soil. It starts at a point and grows outward at roughly the same rate in every direction. The center runs out of food and dies. The living edge keeps going, and when it fruits, it fruits along that edge. You get a ring, and the ring gets wider every year.
There is a ring near Belfort, France, made by Infundibulicybe geotropa, with a radius of about 300 meters. It is estimated at more than 700 years old.
Nobody in 1400 knew that. They saw grass die in a perfect circle with mushrooms along the line. So they explained it.
Germans called them Hexenringe. Witch rings. Witches danced there on Walpurgisnacht and the fire from their feet killed the grass. The French called them ronds de sorcières, guarded by giant toads with bulging eyes. Scandinavians called them elfdans, elf dances, and Olaus Magnus wrote that the elves burned the rings into the ground. In the Netherlands the Devil had set his milk churn there.
Stepping inside was bad. Depending on where you lived you would die young, lose an eye, or dance until your legs gave out. In parts of Somerset the belief was that you would be hanged.
The mushroom that was ground up to kill flies
Fly agaric is the red one with white spots. The one in every illustration of a witch's forest.
It is called fly agaric because people used it to kill flies. Albertus Magnus wrote it down in De vegetabilibus before 1256: it is called the fly mushroom because it is powdered in milk to kill flies. Carolus Clusius traced the practice to Frankfurt in 1601. Linnaeus saw it done in Småland and named the thing Agaricus muscarius in 1753, from musca, Latin for fly.
Pierre Bulliard tried to replicate it in 1784. He could not get it to kill a single fly.
There is a second reading. Medieval Europeans believed flies could get into your head and cause madness, and this mushroom causes something that looks like it. In one Fribourg dialect it is called tsapi de diablhou. The Devil's hat. Then the Victorians got hold of it. Fairy painters put small winged people on top of fly agarics, and that is why your neighbor has a garden gnome sitting on a red mushroom. The Devil's hat became lawn decor.
It is less deadly than its reputation. The active compound is ibotenic acid, which converts to muscimol when the mushroom dries. The North American Mycological Association reports no reliably documented fatal case in the past hundred years. That is not permission. It will still send you to a hospital.
Why they are called toadstools
The word shows up in the late 14th century as tode-stole. Toad's stool. Etymologists call it a fanciful name, which is the polite way of saying nobody knows who thought of it or why.
Here is the part that gets missed. For about four hundred years, toadstool and mushroom meant the same thing. The split happened around 1800, when toadstool narrowed to the poisonous ones. There is no biological line between a mushroom and a toadstool. There never was. It is a word people invented to sort what fed you from what killed you, and they were not good at it.
The toad was not a random choice. Toads were already in the witchcraft file. Damp places, night, trial testimony as familiars and as ingredients. We have written about how frogs and toads got that reputation, and it comes down to living where people did not want to go. Put a toad on a mushroom and you have labeled the mushroom.
The Salem mushroom theory that will not die
Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye. It produces alkaloids chemically related to LSD, and eating enough contaminated bread causes convulsions, burning skin sensations, and hallucinations.
In 1976, Linnda Caporael published a paper in Science arguing that the Salem witch trials were ergot poisoning. Contaminated rye, sick girls, accusations. It is a clean story and it is everywhere.
It does not hold.
Eight people lived in the Parris household. Two got sick: Betty Parris, nine, and Abigail Williams, eleven. Everyone else ate the same bread and was fine. The accusations then spread to Andover, twenty miles away, which would require a separate contaminated rye supply on the same schedule. And Daniel Elliott gave sworn testimony that one accuser told him she was making it up.
Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb published a rebuttal in Science: the available evidence does not support the hypothesis that ergot poisoning played a role in the Salem crisis. Historians went with the rebuttal. The public did not.
Historian Margot Burns counted more than 200 newspaper articles pushing the ergot explanation, and she credits the timing. The theory landed in 1976, when America was anxious about LSD and wanted a chemical reason children would say insane things. The mushroom theory about witch hysteria became its own folklore. What the records show is in our post on the Salem witch trials.
The flying ointment was not a mushroom
People assume witches flew on mushrooms. The trial records say otherwise. The ointments in testimony were built from belladonna, henbane, mandrake, and jimsonweed. All nightshades. All plants. No fungi in the recipes at all. We covered that mess in the real history of why witches flew on broomsticks. Mushrooms get the credit because mushrooms are the drug people think of now. The confession was about nightshade.
The wood wide web is also mostly a story
The modern version of mushroom magic is the wood wide web. Trees talking through fungal networks. Mother trees feeding their seedlings sugar underground.
Karst, Jones and Hoeksema reviewed the evidence in Nature Ecology & Evolution in 2023, across 26 field studies. Only five had mapped the fungal genets, and only two of those found continuous links between trees. Of 28 experiments testing network effects, five, about 18 percent, showed a positive effect root contact could not also explain. On the claim that mature trees preferentially feed their own offspring, they found no published field evidence. None.
They also tracked the citations. Claims of network function the original papers never demonstrated climbed to almost 50 percent.
So the pattern holds. Mushrooms grow in a ring and people see witches dancing. Girls have seizures and people see poisoned bread. Trees grow near each other and people see a conversation. The fungus is real and it is doing something. It has never once been doing the thing we said.
Our Mushroom Sweatshirt is embroidered, so the mushrooms hold up better than screen print through a winter of wearing it. There is a Mushroom Beanie too, and the witchcraft collection if you want the full forest.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why are mushrooms associated with witches?
Mushrooms appear overnight with no visible seed, grow in perfect circles, and poison people unpredictably. None of that was explainable before mycology existed, so European folklore filled the gap with witches, elves, and the Devil. German folklore named the circles witch rings and said witches had danced there. The association is about unexplained behavior, not appearance.
What is a fairy ring?
A fairy ring is a circle of mushrooms produced by a single underground fungus. The mycelium grows outward from a starting point at an even rate, the center dies as nutrients run out, and the living edge fruits in a ring that widens each year. A ring near Belfort, France has a radius of about 300 meters and is estimated at over 700 years old.
Is it bad luck to step inside a fairy ring?
Folklore across Europe said yes, with the specific punishment varying by region. Reported consequences included dying young, losing an eye, and dancing uncontrollably until collapse. In parts of Somerset the belief was that entering a ring would get you hanged. The rings themselves are harmless, though some of the mushrooms forming them are not safe to eat.
Did ergot poisoning cause the Salem witch trials?
Most historians reject it. The theory was published by Linnda Caporael in Science in 1976, and Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb rebutted it in the same journal, concluding the available evidence does not support it. Only two of the eight people in the Parris household became ill, the accusations spread twenty miles to Andover, and at least one accuser was documented admitting she was faking.
Why is it called fly agaric?
Because people powdered it in milk to kill flies. Albertus Magnus recorded the practice before 1256, Carolus Clusius traced it to Frankfurt in 1601, and Linnaeus named the species Agaricus muscarius in 1753 from the Latin musca, meaning fly. Pierre Bulliard tried to reproduce the fly-killing effect in 1784 and failed.
Why are mushrooms called toadstools?
The word appears in the late 14th century as tode-stole, meaning toad's stool, and etymologists classify it as a fanciful name with no traceable origin. For roughly four centuries toadstool and mushroom were interchangeable. Only around 1800 did toadstool narrow to mean poisonous fungi, and there is no biological distinction between the two.
