During Hayden Panettiere’s last known public outing, she was laughing about something that happened during Scream 4 (2011). Cameras caught her at LaGuardia on May 20, 2026, the day after her memoir “This Is Me: A Reckoning” hit shelves, and she waved off questions about its most talked-about moments while walking through the terminal with her publicist Kasey Kitchen.
The mushroom trip was one of them. She wrote about trying them on a glamping night with her “Scream 4” castmates and called it one of the funniest and most carefree experiences of her life.
Hayden described the trip as a chaotic but mostly a positive memory from an otherwise fun production period where she bonded closely with the younger cast and crew and laughed a lot. Neve Campbell had rented a property for the group (Panettiere, her friend Allie, and various twenty-something cast/crew members). Feeling safe with trusted friends, Panettiere tried mushrooms for the first time.
David Arquette later arrived, declined the mushrooms himself, and put on his 2006 directorial debut The Tripper (a bloody comedy-slasher). By then Panettiere was deep into the trip; the film’s graphic gore, corpses, viscera, violence, and carnage overwhelmed her and others. She wrote that it felt like her “eyeballs were about to spout blood,” one friend curled into a ball, another put their head between their legs, and someone eventually turned the DVD off. She later said she had no idea what Arquette was thinking (and suspected he might have been messing with them), while still calling him a good friend.
She died August 16 in Greenville, South Carolina, where she’d been temporarily staying, and was pronounced dead at 2:32 p.m. after first responders found her in cardiac arrest. An autopsy found no signs of trauma; cause and manner of death remain pending toxicology.
She was 36. In the months of promoting the memoir, she said she’d shaken off “darkness” and felt she had “a lot more life to live.”
