Maryland Police Visit Man’s House After He Posted Photos of Mushrooms

John Garrison and Hope Deery were stoked to find a trove of morel mushrooms while foraging in the woods near their home in Darlington, Maryland. The delicate fungi only sprout for a few weeks each spring, and dedicated mushroom hunters keep the whereabouts of their morel spots a closely-guarded secret. Garrison, who studies wildlife and fisheries biology, snapped photos of their fungi find, and posted them to Facebook with a cheery message saying they were going to “sautée them with brown sugar and cinnamon and see how that turns out.”

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Just hours after his Facebook post, Garrison and Deery had just finished eating the mushrooms when there was a knock at the door. In a follow-up Facebook post, Garrison wrote, “A police officer and an RA were standing outside. We let them in and as soon as the police officer walked in he asked us why we were eating mushrooms and posting about it online.”

The cop was itching to arrest them for eating shrooms, Garrison wrote: “He thought he was on the biggest bust of his career thinking we were having a magic mushroom party before I explained to him that morels are a native choice edible mushroom similar to truffles.”

The police officer refused to believe the couple had consumed a legal substance, even after Garrison retrieved a portion of one of the morels from the trash. “I showed him and he still wasn’t convinced that they weren’t magic mushrooms,” Garrison wrote, “Which was shocking to me because morels look nothing like psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms and I figured a police officer would know what illegal drugs looked like.”

Not Magic, Just Delicious

The skeptical cop wouldn’t budge in his belief that Garrison and Deery were high on hallucinogenic mushrooms until a second police officer arrived and took a look at the remains of their dinner. “I showed her the morel and she immediately knew it was a morel which was a relief,” Garrison wrote in his Facebook post. “They processed our IDs and eventually left. What an experience.”

So who called the cops? Clearly, someone who knows nothing about mushrooms. Morels look absolutely nothing like psilocybin. Pearl-clutchers, snitches and police officers, take note.