Hello again, Story Club members.

I'm Ivy, your ghostly host with the most and keeper of the strangest,

spookiest tales on earth.

Today is another Ivy's chilling tale.

This squishy tale, story club members, might make you turn up your nose to mushrooms forever. It's one I call

a fungus among us. Langston, Ellie, Ray, Elsie, and Elliott were on a field trip with Miss Taylor. They

were in the verdant woods of Washington State identifying mushrooms of all varieties, which ones

were poisonous, like the Kosopi, false morale,

deadly galerina and death caps, and which were edible, like the Lionsmane, Blue Chanterell, and the

Yellow Guild, Rusula. It was a fun excursion for the students to get out of the stuffy classroom

and into nature's fresh, crisp air. Miss Taylor did this every autumn with her class, but this was the first

year that everything went wrong. Seriously wrong. First, they ran into a cantankerous man with a

white beard, flinty eyes, and grimy clothes. He said his name was Morgan Stone, and that this was

his area. He was looking for rare truffles to sell to restaurants

and the kids had no business being in this part of the woods.

But this is a state park, the red-haired teacher said.

Everyone has a right to be here.

The angry man disagreed.

He'd been harvesting truffles in this area for years.

It was how he made his living, and he wasn't going to have anyone stealing from him.

To keep her students safe, Miss Taylor quickly rounded up Langston, Ellie, Ray, Elsie, and Elliot.

They headed over a hill, away from that man.

...