A creepy encounter.

If you go down into the woods in the Autumn you might be in for a surprise; you might even be lucky enough to find some dead men's finger sticking out of the ground, as I did today.

They aren't, of course, the fingers of real dead men but rather the fruiting body of the fungus Xylaria polymorpha which is known colloquially as dead man's fingers. It is a saprobic fungus, that is to say that it gets its nutrition from dead and decaying organic matter. It is a common inhabitant of forest and woodland and usually grows, as here, from the bases of rotting or injured tree stumps and decaying wood.