One Foggy October Night in the Forest,

you find yourself guided by nothing but your flashlight and the glow of a full moon. The leaves and twigs crunch like bones beneath your boot. The air is as stiff and still as a corpse. All you can hear is the beating of your own heart, and you traverse the hilly landscape. 

Photographer: Paul Cryan, U.S. Geological Survey, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As you pass through the fallen trees covered in moss, you feel something watching you. At first a whisper, then whoosh and flutter overhead. Your flashlight catches the movement and a glint of silver fur: A hoary bat. Looking up, you watch as the hoary bat flutters across the forest canopy searching for its meal of moths. You remember reading about the hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus), which is a small migratory tree bat that ranges throughout the entirety of North and South America. Being a non-colonial tree bat, the hoary bat lives in isolation during its spring and autumn migratory period, where it pursues resources such as roosting locations, prey (primarily moths), and mating opportunities. During its wintering period, a significant segment of the population aggregates along California’s coast.

Henk Monster, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The hoary bat feels like a good omen until you place your hand on a log to give yourself some stability. Squelch a gooey, cold substance oozes through your fingers. In immediate disgust, you turn your flashlight to investigate. A black goo drips from a deadened tree. You recall an article a few years back about a jelly fungus called Witches Butter, the zombies of the woods. They can survive for months without any water, conserving their energy by drying up into a hardened ball, but within two hours of rain, they begin reconstitution and start reproducing spores. A shiver runs down your spine, and you shake it off. 

Cluster of Monotropa uniflora. Photo by Courtney Celley, USFWS

As you gather yourself, you accidentally shift the focus of your flashlight to the base of a tree. You crouch down to get a closer look at the tiny ghost-like shapes pushing through the duff, translucent white flowers, curved down like bowing heads: Ghost Pipes. They glisten in the moonlight, utterly devoid of any green like other plants. Instead, they steal their nutrients from neighboring plants using underground fungal networks. Ghost Pipe lives in the shadows, nourished by decay, untouched by the sun.

You kneel for a moment, surrounded by fluttering wings, the scent of decay, and wisps of fog surrounding your ankles. It turns out, the forest at night was a perfect alternative to the local haunted house. You haven’t been this spooked since last Halloween.