The ‘Dead Man’s Fingers’ Fungus Looks As Creepy As It Sounds

If you haven’t seen a real one yet, brace yourselves as we bring you some of the scariest pictures of the fungi that proof it is stuff like these, nightmares are made of and send chills down your spine. Along with the eerie photos, we bring you some creepy facts about the dead man’s fingers.

Nature is beautiful, yes, but it can also be very bizarre. We’ve seen trees with rainbow bark, jellyfish succulents, goldfish plants, and now Xylaria polymorpha, otherwise known as… dead man’s fingers.

Xylaria polymorpha, commonly known as dead man’s fingers, is a saprobic fungus. It is a typical resident of forests and wooded environments, typically emerging from the bases of decaying wood and tree stumps that have been damaged or rotted. It is characterized by its elongated upright, clavate, or strap-like stromata poking up through the ground, much like fingers.

It doesn’t sound very creepy if you just read the description above and maybe many of the photos you saw before don’t look like that creepy, especially when they grow in cluster.

As each fungus grows, it takes on a shape that looks eerily familiar to a finger. To make matters worse, these “fingers” often clump up to form what looks a lot like a zombie’s hand, or what I would imagine a zombie’s hand looks like.