An orange swirl of sparks escaped into the midnight sky, and Todd Skinner’s friends couldn’t stop watching. It was 11:41 pm. Flames licked nearby tree branches. Earlier that day, before eating mushrooms, someone set fire to two ricks of wood near the lake house and now it was getting out of hand. The guests, all in their early twenties, were partying there at the invitation of Skinner, who supplied the mushrooms and a beautiful setting near Grand Lake, Oklahoma.
Staring at the bonfire, they noticed the wind picking up. We should put the fire out, a voice suggested. They were sky-high from the mushrooms, yet rooted to the ground, helpless. Another problem was the clock. It wasn’t moving like usual. The minutes had been throbbing and unthrobbing all night. An eternity later it was still 11:41 pm.
Throughout his teens, Skinner had perfected Psilocybe mushroom growing techniques and often grew bulk amounts, as evidenced by the two large polybags packed with dried mushrooms on the table (an eyewitness recalls them weighing about five pounds). The batch he brought to the lake house contained light magic; during the mushroom’s mycelium phase, he shone a Daylight 65 bulb on them for a few seconds.
“These were of a particularly potent fucking grade, man,” recalls a former Cascia Hall classmate of Skinner’s. “I mean literally, within four to five minutes, I knew I was in for a ride—it started crawling up my back and everything got wavy really fast. They just kicked my ass.”
Paid subscribers continue below! You’ll read Skinner’s account of how he marshaled a group of TU students into his mushroom operations, you’ll see rare images of his mail-order mushroom spore collection, and you’ll learn what happened at the time-dilating party. But first… join me on a behind-the-scenes visit to the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Research Center.
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