Fifty years ago, a Washington mushroom meeting put Wasson, Guzmán, Ott and Stamets on one program

What happened on Halloween weekend 1976

The Puget Sound Mycological Society (PSMS), the Seattle mushroom club, carried the report in its bulletin, No. 127, dated December 1976. Scott Chilton wrote that "The First Psychotropic Mushroom Foray took place Halloween weekend" at a Washington state park, and that "About 120 people attended."¹

Halloween 1976 fell on a Sunday, and the program the report describes runs from Friday evening to Sunday, so by our count the meeting ran from Friday, October 29, to Sunday, October 31, 1976. Chilton wrote that most people came from California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, and that other states he noted as represented included Idaho, Colorado, Texas, Florida and Arizona.¹

Who was on the program

The bulletin describes the program in this order:¹

• Friday evening: Paul Stamets, described as an "Evergreen State student," showed scanning electron microscope slides.
• Saturday afternoon: Jonathan Ott gave an overview of human use of psychotropic fungi and introduced R. Gordon Wasson, who recounted the early period of the rediscovery of the Mexican mushroom rites, with slides and a sound track of a Mazatec ceremony. Gastón Guzmán of the Polytechnical Institute, Mexico City, the foray's mycologist and a "specialist in the genus Psilocybe," closed the afternoon with a lecture on the ecology of Psilocybe.
• Saturday evening: David Repke and Dale Leslie of San Francisco reported on several years of chemical analysis of Psilocybe. Chilton spoke on Amanita muscaria chemistry, and Dr. Lynn Brady of the UW School of Pharmacy reviewed the ergot story and open questions about Gymnopilus.
• Sunday: a closing talk by Leslie and a panel discussion on recreational use of psychotropic fungi.

The report doesn't name the organizers, and we haven't confirmed them. The date has a conflict too: an event listing on the Psychedelic Science Review site gives October 20, 1976, citing Erowid's calendar of past events.⁹ We follow the bulletin, a report written by someone who was there and printed in December 1976, which says "Halloween weekend."¹

Why it matters in Washington's story

The program mixed Seattle and Olympia names with the scholars of the Mexican mushroom rites. Brady was at the University of Washington's School of Pharmacy.¹ Ott, who died on July 5, 2025, at 76, according to the Chacruna Institute,¹⁰ had been a UW student: a February 1975 PSMS notice for his talk on "The History of Use of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms" described him as a UW student about to leave Seattle for graduate studies in Mexico.³ Stamets was a student at Evergreen in Olympia;¹ his later work runs through the almanac's history and its entry on the Stamets stack.

Mycologia's issue dated November to December 1976 carried Guzmán and Ott's description of a new Psilocybe from the Pacific Northwest,⁴ the species they named for UW botanist Daniel Stuntz (see Psilocybe stuntzii at 50), alongside a survey of the region's psychotropic mushrooms by Guzmán, Ott, J. Boydston and S. H. Pollock.⁵

The bulletin that reported the meeting also carried a warning. Under "Beware of hallucinogenic mushrooms," it said PSMS members had sent in news clippings about young people who ate wild Psilocybe mushrooms, some of whom "even needed emergency medical care," and urged members "to caution people about using hallucinogenic mushrooms since their long-run effect is not fully known."¹ The Washington Poison Center's advice today is to avoid wild mushrooms unless you're an expert, because many toxic types "look suspiciously like edible varieties, and even the experts can be fooled"; call 1-800-222-1222 right away if nausea, vomiting or diarrhea starts after eating one.⁸

A year later the meeting had a sequel. PSMS reported that "The Second International Conference on Hallucinogenic Mushrooms," organized by Ott and Preston Wheaton of Olympia, drew "over 260 registrants" to Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, where the speakers included Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Richard Evans Schultes.² Its proceedings, Teonanácatl, were published in Seattle by Madrona Publishers in 1978 and date that conference to October 27 to 30, 1977.⁶ John W. Allen's Mushroom Pioneers captions a photo of Stamets lecturing at the "1st International Conference on Hallucinogenic Mushrooms, 1976."⁷ For the wider sequence of dates, see the almanac's timeline.