Hallucinating Hikers Mistakenly Report Their Friend as ‘Dead’

May 29, 2025

On May 24, at 9 a.m., 911 dispatchers in New York received a strange call from two hikers who were on Cascade Mountain in the Adirondacks. The hikers reported that their friend had died on the mountain and they needed help.

But not all was as it seemed. According to a press release from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the summit steward quickly realized that “the hikers were in an altered mental state,” from ingesting psychedelic mushrooms.

The plot thickened when the third member of their party called while they were still engaging with the steward. It turned out that they weren’t dead after all, but had just gotten separated from the other two. The steward contacted Forest Rangers, who dispatched someone to come assist. Gear Junkie