I only planned to water the flowers and check whether the cats had scattered trash again. Nothing unusual. Nothing alarming.

But the moment I opened the gate, a horrific smell hit me.

It was so intense that my stomach tightened instantly. A metallic taste filled my mouth, and my chest felt heavy, almost compressed. I took a few steps forward—and then froze.

Near the flower bed, right on the ground, something was lying there.
And it wasn’t still.

It was a reddish, slimy mass, wet and glossy, as if it had been turned inside out. Its surface looked uneven and disturbingly organic. The stench was unbearable—rotting flesh, exactly like the smell of a dead animal left out in the heat. I instinctively stepped back. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it might burst.

My thoughts spiraled into panic.

What is that?
A larva?
Some kind of parasite?
Something not meant to be there?

I could swear it was moving—slowly, subtly, almost rhythmically. Not crawling, not writhing, but pulsing, as if it had its own internal life. A wave of cold fear ran through me. I grabbed my phone, snapped a few photos, and backed away, trying not to breathe too deeply.

Even inside the house, the smell seemed to follow me.

I immediately started searching online. I typed:
“red slimy mass smells like decay.”

I expected a simple explanation. A worm. Spoiled food. A harmless fungus. But the first results made my blood run cold.

“This is not an animal. Not a larva. It is a rare and extremely repulsive species of fungus.”

A fungus?

I stared at the screen in disbelief. What I had seen looked far too much like flesh. Far too alive. And that smell—it didn’t feel natural.

Reading further, I learned that people often call it a “corpse fungus.” It can appear suddenly, sometimes overnight. One day the soil is clean, and the next morning—there it is. Red. Slimy. Obscene. Its odor is deliberate. It mimics the smell of rotting meat to attract flies and scavenging insects.

They land on it.
They crawl across it.
And then they carry its spores elsewhere.

My yard had become part of that process.

I went back outside cautiously and noticed something even more disturbing. Flies were already circling it. Big, black, aggressive ones—the kind you only see around carcasses. They landed on the mass, disappeared briefly into the slime, then lifted off again.

For a moment, it looked like the surface was pulsing. I know how insane that sounds. But the material seemed to contract and expand slowly, like living tissue. Scenes from horror movies flashed through my mind—the ones where everything begins with something small, strange, and ignored.

I felt dizzy. Nauseous.

Later, I found even more disturbing accounts. People wrote that this fungus often appears in soil rich with decaying organic matter. Sometimes in places where animals were buried long ago. Some claimed that after it appeared, they experienced headaches, extreme fatigue, vivid nightmares.

And then a thought crossed my mind—one I desperately wished I hadn’t had:

What was here before we bought this house?
What is buried beneath this ground?

I called a friend who knows a lot about gardening. He listened quietly, then said in a serious tone:
“Don’t touch it with bare hands. Some of these fungi can be toxic. And if it’s appeared, something is wrong with the soil.”

That word stayed with me.

Wrong.

I put on thick gloves, a mask, and grabbed a shovel. When I tried to remove it, the mass stretched and clung to the earth, as if it didn’t want to let go. The smell intensified to the point where my eyes watered and my head spun. I had to stop several times just to steady myself.

When I finally managed to bury it deep, I stood there in silence for a long time. The yard no longer felt familiar. Or safe. Something had shifted.

That night, I didn’t sleep.

I dreamed that I opened the gate again—and the entire yard was covered in those red, pulsing growths. They were emerging from the soil, from beneath the house, from everywhere. And the smell… the smell was everywhere.

In the morning, I went outside to check. The ground looked calm.
Too calm.

But now I know one thing for sure:
when something like that appears near your home, it’s never just a coincidence.
And I can only hope it never comes back.