Ghost pipe

Ghost pipe: what was it used for?

The Indians, Millspaugh says, valued the juice mixed with water for sore eyes, and Dr. Kunze of New York applied the fresh juice to inflamed eyelids and to the eyes of infants a few days old, and cured a friend’s chronic inflammation of the lids in four weeks. King’s Dispensatory gives the root as a tonic, sedative, nervine, and antispasmodic, used in the fevers, and in the convulsions of children, epilepsy, and chorea, whence the names fit-root and convulsion-root: half a drachm to a drachm of the powder two or three times a day, sometimes with valerian, and “as a substitute for opium, without any deleterious influences.” The juice, alone or with rose-water, for obstinate inflammations of the eye and for ulcers. In eastern Kentucky today the flower is taken for pain, and a recent survey of its use across the United States, as the Kentucky review reports it, found it taken chiefly for pain and also for sleep, grief, anxiety, inflamed eyes, and spiritual well-being.

Ghost pipe: what does modern science say?

Little. Millspaugh could find no analysis of the plant in 1887, and the review of eastern Kentucky’s medicinal plants in 2025 found that not many pharmacological studies had been done on it: one isolated a fungus, Penicillium daleae, from the plant, and from the fungus two cage-like polyketides that regulated neurotransmission in mouse neurons. The one claim of poison has been answered: a single study of 1889 had reported grayanotoxin I, the poison of the rhododendrons, in the plant, and in 2025 mass spectrometry of fifty samples detected neither grayanotoxins nor their analogues, refuting it. The plant has lately seen a rise in consumption across the country, which is why the question was asked.

Ghost pipe: what did the older authorities say?

Charles F. Millspaugh

“This curious herb well deserves its name of corpse plant, so like is it to the general bluish waxy appearance of the dead; then, too, it is cool and clammy to the touch, and rapidly decomposes and turns black even when carefully handled.” Its medical history begins with the Indians’ use of the juice for sore eyes; the former uses in the spasms of children gave it its popular names. The tincture of the whole fresh plant is a brilliant orange-red by transmitted light, with a bitterish odour and a decidedly sweet taste. Not in the Pharmacopoeia, and no officinal preparation in the Eclectic Materia Medica.

King’s American Dispensatory

“The whole plant is ivory-white in all its parts, resembling frozen jelly, and is very succulent and tender, so much so that when handled it dissolves and melts away in the hands like ice.” The root, gathered in September and October and kept in well-stopped bottles, is tonic, sedative, nervine, and antispasmodic; it is reputed to have cured remittent and intermittent fevers; in the convulsions of children, epilepsy, and chorea its administration “has been followed with prompt success.” Lasché in 1889 reported a crystallisable poisonous principle in it, andromedotoxin, found in other heaths. “This plant is undoubtedly one of value, and deserving of more confidence and attention than is at present bestowed upon it. It is, however, seldom or never used at the present day.”

Dr. R. E. Kunze, as Millspaugh quotes him

Woodcock-shooting in a beech grove near Hackensack in early July, he and his friends came on the plant in full bloom, “a space some five feet wide by nine feet long” of snow-white stems and nodding flowers. A friend with chronically inflamed eyelids took to applying the fresh juice of the stems, and “his inflamed lids were entirely cured in four weeks’ time.” Kunze had himself applied it to the eyes of infants only days old, and in old age, “and even where not successfully employed no ill effects have ever been observed thereafter.”