There, half-hidden in the grass beside the flowerbed, lay the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen: a long, stretched skull, a gaunt, elongated body and spidery limbs. Its gray-brown skin had strange vein-like patterns that made my skin crawl. For a heartbeat I convinced myself it was an alien or a mutant. Maybe even a weird fungus? 😱
I stood frozen, heart pounding — and then I discovered what it actually was. The truth left me speechless. 🤯
One early morning, just as the sun began stretching warm, golden fingers across the yard, I stepped outside with a watering can and the kind of slow, sleepy calm that only dawn brings. The air was crisp, birds were halfway through their morning songs, and everything still smelled of last night’s rain. I was barely awake — until something beside the flowerbed snapped me to attention.
Half-hidden in the grass was a shape so wrong it felt like a trick of the light. At first I thought an animal had curled up and died, but the closer I got the worse my imagination ran. It had a long, skeletal skull and a thin, stretched body, with limbs that looked too jointed and too long to belong to anything familiar. Its gray-brown skin — if you could call it skin — was marbled with vein-like patterns that made my skin crawl. I stood frozen, every hair on my arms prickling, caught between panic and disbelief.
For a second I was convinced it was something out of a movie — an alien, a mutant, anything but ordinary. And then I found out what it really was. The answer left me utterly speechless.
My mind went into overdrive. Was it a dead animal? A bizarre, rotting plant? Or—terrifyingly—an alien straight out of those late-night abduction stories? For a moment I seriously considered sprinting back inside and bolting every door. The thing looked like it had crawled out of a sci-fi horror set.
A sliver of reason nudged me: maybe it was just a mushroom. Fungi can be grotesquely inventive, after all. But that explanation felt too tidy. This shape was eerily humanoid, full of little details that made it seem sculpted rather than grown. Still too spooked to touch it, I fumbled for my phone and snapped a photo, then fired it off to a few friends.
The responses were instant and predictably dramatic—“RUN!” one wrote, which made me laugh and shiver at the same time. Others replied with variations of, “What on earth is that?!” No one offered a solid answer, and honestly, I wasn’t about to poke it with a stick to find out.
Out of equal parts desperation and curiosity, I uploaded the photo to a nature and gardening group online. The reactions came flooding in. Most people were baffled. A few tossed out guesses about it being some kind of rare fungus, but nothing sounded convincing. Then one comment stopped me cold:
“Put on gloves. Don’t touch it with bare hands.”
Instant goosebumps. What on earth had I stumbled across that random strangers on the internet felt compelled to warn me like that? My imagination leapt straight to hazmat suits, flashing lights, and government vans rolling up to quarantine my yard. The whole situation was turning surreal.
And then — finally — an experienced voice cut through the noise with a confident answer.
“It’s ginseng,” they wrote.
I blinked — ginseng? The medicinal root? I dug in, skeptical, and then everything clicked. Wild ginseng, when fully grown, can twist into astonishing, almost sculptural shapes. Sometimes it even mimics a human silhouette: elongated “limbs,” a torso, the suggestion of a head. It’s rare. It’s valuable. And when you stumble on it unexpectedly, it can look utterly otherworldly.
My panic dissolved into amazement. All that breathless fear — the fantasy of aliens and mutants — turned out to be a prize hidden in plain sight: a slow-growing, oddly magical root. For a beat I mourned the lack of extraterrestrial proof, then felt a thrill instead. How many people can say they found wild ginseng in their own backyard?
What began as a morning of terror ended as a small, private wonder. I hadn’t found Martians, but I’d discovered something just as mysterious — a buried treasure with a quiet, earthy kind of magic.
