Mushrooms

The Mushrooms is a scary campfire story about a juvenile detention center in Ireland where horrible events took place caused by Death’s Head Mushrooms. It is based on a campfire story that was told in the horror movie Shrooms.

In Ireland, people love to tell scary stories. Some people tell stories about the bahshee and others tell tales of evil leprechauns. There’s only one scary story I know and it’s a true story. It’s scary because it’s true, and if it’s true, then it can happen to you.

Well, there’s an abandoned house up there, not too far from where we are now. It used to be a young offenders’ center (or juvenile detention center). They called it Glengarriff. If kids committed a crime and they were under 18, that’s where they ended up.

It was owned by a religious order, kind of like the Christian Brothers. They were known as the Black Knights of Colmcille and there was nothing Christian about them. Most of them ended up there after doing all the missions. All the hot spots: Sierra Leone, Liberia, the inner Congo, Rwanda. And God only knows what horrible sights they’d seen, living amongst mass murderers and cannibals and what have you.

Now, terrible things went on in the house if you didn’t abide by their rules. I mean, they treated the kids like dogs, literally. If a kid was bold or misbehaved, it wasn’t milk and cookies. They were banished to the kennels to live with the guard dogs.

Well, legend had it there was this one Black Brother who was completely unhinged. He delighted in torturing the kids. He put a 3-inch steel blade into an old stick and he would beat the kids with it. He’d take the worst young offenders to the storeroom and he’d hang them from the rafters until they strangled to death. Then, he would claim they committed suicide. He maimed a lot of the other kids with his 3-inch blade and if anyone dared to defy him, he would cut out their tongue.

Well, there were these two young offenders. They were twins. They were difficult boys, but they were very close to each other. They were caught throwing stones at the church. The Black Brother decided to make an example of them.

He took the boys down to the storeroom and poured boiling water over the face of one twin, almost scalding him to death. Then, he made him wear a sack over his head to hide the burns. He then proceeded to hang his twin right in front of him and forced him to watch as his brother swung from the rafters. After that, he laughed and made fun of the surviving boy, christening him “The Lonely Twin”.

Now, in the forest outside the house, there was a small clearing where a patch of mushrooms was growing. The dreaded Death’s Head Mushrooms. They only grow once every seven seasons. They look just like normal mushrooms, but they’re not. If you ate one, according to the ancient Irish Druids, it would give you the ability to commune with the dead, but that came with a price. It would also make you extremely violent and uncontrollably ferocious.

Now, after everything he’d seen, the Lonely Twin had nothing but hate and anger inside of him. He swore he’d have his revenge. So he went out and he picked three pounds of death’s head mushrooms and he put them into the Black Brother’s soup bowl.

Little did he know the violence he would unleash.

78 people were massacred that night. They were butchered beyond belief. Two bodies were never accounted for. The Black Brother and the Lonely Twin. They’re said to haunt the woods around here.

Strange things happen up here around mushroom season. There are reports of mysterious figures lurking in the woods, people getting hit by stones that seem to fly out of nowhere. Some people have even gone missing only for their bodies to turn up mutilated, but they always have one thing in common. The injuries have all been inflicted by a 3-inch steel blade.