A woman has uncovered a terrifying discovery after ripping out her friend's wet floorboards.
According to Yahoo News, a homeowner named Hannah Sycamore found some stomach-curdling black slime lurking beneath her friend's wet floorboards at their home in Melbourne, Australia.
After Sycamore had stumbled across this harrowing mystery, she wanted to unravel more information so she took to the "Australia & New Zealand Fungus Identification" group on Facebook with the query: "Any ideas what this is?"
Accompanying pictures on the post revealed the unknown grime spiderwebbed across the entirety of the floor in a distinctive black web-like design.
Check out the pictures below:
Many users were quick to share their theories on what the sinister-looking muck was, with some suggesting: "Mycelium", "slime mold" and "tree roots of some sort."
One user quipped that it was "the veins of 'nooope,'" while others said the scary ooze was "terrifying," and looked like the Mind Flayer, the tentacle monster in the Netflix show Stranger Things.
An expert named Adam Labrock - who works at Mushroom Co, an urban fungus farm in New Zealand - commented that the insidious sight could be a "black mold" - which is a fungus that grows and spreads on materials that contain a lot of cellulose, including paper products, wood products, and drywall, per Cleveland Clinic.
He then speculated that it may be Armillaria (honey fungi), adding: "Do you have trees outside this house? Suggest the melanised hyphae have run along roots under the house and then up into the structure."
Labrock was not 100% sure about the "odd" discovery, so he advised Sycamore to ask a structural engineer to examine it.
Even professional mycologists were puzzled by the fungi, as an expert from the state herbarium in Brisbane told Yahoo News that it "doesn't look like traditional mold".
However, they also agreed with Labrock and indicated that it "looks remotely like that are the rhizomorphs of Armillaria," but added that the answer "doesn't make a lot of sense".
Furthermore, another professional named Patricia Kaishian - the Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum in Albany - told the New York Post: "Without examining the fungus in person (looking at it microscopically and looking for other signatures in the structure) I can’t be 100% sure."
"But this looks like the mycelium of 'wet rot' fungus called Coniophora puteana, sometimes also called ‘cellar rot’ or 'kellerschwam' in German," she continued, adding, "This would be my guess, going off these photos alone."
According to Black Mould, Coniophora puteana can be seen around places with active water ingress into the building, near break-in walls, cracked pipes, or places with high condensation.
Let's hope Sycamore was able to figure out what the frightening dark tendrils are...
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