All Around Pennsauken

By Kathleen Harvey, AAP Columnist

‘Tis the season of ghosts, witches, and other spooky things of lore. However, there are some truly scary things to be wary of when you have children and pets who tend to put everything into their mouths.

The most commonly known are poison ivy, oak, and sumac. They helpfully have poison in their name, making no mistake that these plants should be left alone, or carefully removed while wearing heavy gloves if they are in your backyard. But what about the less well known plants?

Many poisonous plants are quite pretty; some even have beautiful flowers. Most of these are fine to be around, as long as they aren’t ingested. This knowledge can be deployed as a strategy in the garden. For example, spring bulbs are some of my favorite flowers to enjoy. But I have given up trying to grow tulips, because rabbits and squirrels kept digging them up and eating them before they could bloom. However, daffodil bulbs, those brightly colored yellow, white, and orange trumpets, are poisonous if eaten. Wild animals who frequent my garden seem to know that they are toxic if eaten and leave them alone for all to enjoy.

History is chock full of poison lore. Hundreds of years ago, during the time of royalty and nobility, individuals who were envious of wealth, titles, and property would kill each other, sometimes with poison, to reap the benefits of inheritance. Poison was also sometimes used as a form of execution. In 339 B.C., the famous philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. He was given a drink infused with hemlock, an herbaceous perennial that is a paralytic, first paralyzing limbs, and eventually paralyzing the lungs.

One source of accidental poisoning is mushrooms. Some folks will harvest wild mushrooms, as there are many varieties that are quite delicious sautéed and served as a side dish, over steak, or with Marsala wine over chicken or pork chops. However, differentiating wonderful tasting and healthy mushrooms, like portabellas, morels, oysters, chicken of the woods, chanterelles, and shitake mushrooms, from their poisonous look-a-likes can be challenging. Many highly toxic mushrooms look very similar to the edible ones. These have names to ward off people from experimenting. Toxic mushroom varieties, like the Death Cap, Destroying Angel, Amanita, and Autumn Skullcap, can kill or make you very sick if ingested. It’s best to purchase mushrooms from the local market where they, especially the readily available portabellas, are farm grown and harvested by professionals.

Medical cannibalism was popular until about 1700, wrote the literary scholar P. Kenneth Himmelman in Dialectical Anthropology. Human body parts, called mumia, were sold to apothecaries and physicians by the town executioner. Doctors believed that some essence of the life force remained in the body after death, especially in the case of executed criminals or accident victims, cases where life was taken suddenly from an otherwise healthy young person. The remainder of the deceased’s natural life span could thus be ingested by the person consuming his body parts. Ewww…..

If you go on a ghost or haunted house tour this month, maybe some of the restless spirits you encounter will have died of poison, and are still looking for the antidote, or worse, revenge.

Happy Halloween!