Jack-o'-Lantern
ToxicOmphalotus olearius / illudens
The jack-o'-lantern is the classic chanterelle mistake and one of the most common causes of mushroom poisoning in North America and Europe. The two look superficially alike in colour but differ in three fundamental ways: true gills versus blunt ridges, growing on wood versus growing from soil, and clustered versus scattered.
Quick facts
- If eaten
- Toxic. Causes severe cramping, vomiting and diarrhoea beginning within a few hours, often severe enough for hospital treatment. Not usually fatal but genuinely unpleasant and dangerous to the frail.
- Under the cap
- gills
- Spore print
- white, cream
- Cap
- Bright pumpkin-orange, smooth, funnel-shaped when mature.
- Stem
- Orange, tapering toward the base, and fused with its neighbours in a dense clump.
- Growing on
- wood dead, wood living
- Season
- Late summer through autumn.
How to identify it
- True gills — thin, sharp-edged, blade-like, and separable from the cap flesh.
- Grows in dense clumps from wood, stumps or buried roots. Chanterelles grow singly from soil.
- Solid orange throughout, including the flesh.
- Fresh gills sometimes glow faintly green in complete darkness, though this needs full dark adaptation to see.
What it is confused with
One test settles each of these.
Chanterelles have blunt forking ridges that run down the stem and cannot be cleanly separated from the cap, and they grow singly from soil, not clustered on wood.
Read this before anything else
- Never eat a wild mushroom identified by a website or an app.That includes this one. These tools narrow possibilities; they cannot see your mushroom, its base, its smell or its habitat, and the difference between a meal and a liver transplant is sometimes a feature buried in the soil.
- Get it confirmed in person by an experienced local forager or a mycological society. Most regions have one, most run free identification sessions, and they will look at the actual specimen.
- Dig, do not pull. The cup at the base of a death cap is often underground. Pulling the mushroom leaves the most important feature in the soil.
- If someone has eaten a wild mushroom and feels unwell, call poison control now — in the US, 1-800-222-1222. Do not wait for symptoms to worsen. Amatoxin poisoning has a false recovery phase, and delayed treatment is what makes it fatal. Save any uneaten pieces for identification.