Mushroom (Murder?) House
Sep. 17th, 2021 07:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI’m currently reading Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, which is about fungal mycelial networks. Like the vast majority of popular science books, it’s somewhat difficult to follow, but there are bits of interesting information scattered about. For instance:
When the English country house Haddon Hall was being renovated, a fruiting body of the dry-rot fungus Serpula was found in a disused stone oven. Its mycelial connections wound back through eight meters of stonework to a rotting floor elsewhere in the building. The floor was where it fed, and the oven was where it fruited.
That’s some Grade A haunted house good shit right there.
This is also the premise of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s horror novel Mexican Gothic, and the fact that this sort of total structural fungal infection is actually possible in real life is delightful.
When the English country house Haddon Hall was being renovated, a fruiting body of the dry-rot fungus Serpula was found in a disused stone oven. Its mycelial connections wound back through eight meters of stonework to a rotting floor elsewhere in the building. The floor was where it fed, and the oven was where it fruited.
That’s some Grade A haunted house good shit right there.
This is also the premise of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s horror novel Mexican Gothic, and the fact that this sort of total structural fungal infection is actually possible in real life is delightful.
