Undercooked wild mushrooms spark hallucinations in Yunnan apartment escape
A Yunnan man climbed from his 27th-floor window after refrying wild jianshouqing and drinking alcohol, then hallucinated he was being invited to train for immortality.
The wild-mushroom meal started at home and ended with a man climbing out of a 27th-floor apartment window. Xue, in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, became so disoriented after eating self-cooked jianshouqing that he believed he had been summoned into a fantasy-like training for immortality.
Xue fried two portions of the mushrooms, ate one serving, refrigerated the rest, then refried the leftovers the next day and drank alcohol with the meal. The combination appears to have deepened the toxic reaction, turning a familiar dish into a dangerous hallucination. At one point he climbed down a pipe before a friend on the 26th floor pulled him back inside.
What makes the episode hard to dismiss is that Xue was not some rookie chasing a foraging thrill. He had lived in Yunnan for decades and cooked wild mushrooms every year, the kind of local familiarity that often breeds confidence at the worst possible moment. In this case, the mistake was not just species ID. It was the whole post-harvest chain: partial cooking, storage, refrying, and pairing the mushrooms with alcohol.
That is the boring part of mushroom safety, and it matters more than the romantic version of foraging. Heat has to be thorough. Leftovers have to be treated carefully. Alcohol can muddy the picture when symptoms start, making a toxic reaction harder to read and more likely to spiral before anyone realizes what is happening. Xue’s apartment escape was dramatic, but the trigger was ordinary kitchen handling.
The bigger backdrop is grim. China CDC Weekly reported 599 mushroom-poisoning incidents across 28 provincial-level administrative divisions in 2024, affecting 1,486 patients and causing 13 deaths. That same tally linked 15 cases to uncooked wild mushrooms and 37 to dried mushrooms. In Yunnan alone, an analysis covering 2018 to 2022 found 3,761 wild-mushroom poisoning incidents, 14,254 poisoned people and 123 deaths.
Yunnan is often called China’s kingdom of wild fungi, with about 900 edible wild mushroom species and more than 90 percent of the country’s edible wild mushroom varieties. That abundance feeds a strong foraging culture, especially in summer, but it also keeps poisoning cases in the headlines. Xue’s climb out of a window is the sharpest reminder yet that the risk does not end when the basket comes home.
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