WARNING: Carnivorous "Geocaches" Which Eat Kids an

[Vinny]

WARNING: Adult topic -- This topic is not for children, dogs, cats or hamsters!

Folks, I started a thead on the national forums early this morning about a newly-emergent threat in the geo world to children, dogs and hamsters who accompany adult geocachers on cache hunts in heavily wooded areas. I must admit that I posted the thread rather diffidently and a bit hesitantly, as I was not sure how well people would receive this dire news and figured that many might ridicule me for raising the red flag, so to speak. Well, my fears were unfounded, and the thread turned out to be wildly popular on the national forum, receiving wide acclaim, and a few minutes ago, Keystone, the western PA reviewer, suggested to me that I might wish to consider re-posting my original warning note on the local MGS forum as well, in order to better reach a wider audience. And so, here it is, in its entirety, below:

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I have been seeing several threads pop up lately here on the national fourm about caching with kids or offering cutesy fotos of geocaching kids. There are an equal number of threads about people who take their dogs or pet ducks geocchign with them. Folks, I believe that it is time to pay attention as well to the dark side of this phenomenon of taking children or pet dogs geocaching. And so...

I hate to throw a bit of cold water on your party, but please be advised that it is well-known that some "geocaches" in the woods and rural areas, particularly some backcountry caches in dark forests, are in fact carnivorous -- much like pitcher plants and the venus flytrap plant -- and they lure small children (and even pet dogs) close and then eat them. There is even a committee at geocaching.com dedicated to learning more about this phenomenon and the goal is to eventually create an advertising campaign to educate people about this danger.

From the log reports we have seen on most of these caches, the majority of the carnivorous child-eating caches look like cute small gingerbread houses sitting in the woods at or near the cache site. The "houses" often emit an enticing odor of baking bread or baking cookies, and small children are lured inside by the sights and the nice smells. From the reports that I have heard, once a small child or a pet dog has gone fully or partially inside one of these "houses", the entire "gingerbread house" closes its doors and windows and kinda folds in on itself, digesting the child or the dog. There seems to be a second type of carnivorous cache, more a carnivorous cache hide site, where an alluring cache container seems to be under a large clumb of dense underbrush and briars. Reports from across the world tell us that geocaching children are lured into the bushes to grab the cache, and then there is a big gulping sound, and the child is gone.

Most of these carnivorous caches are small enough in size that they can digest only small children. However, experts tell us that a few have grown large enough to eat even full-grown adults, and there was a rather famous case in 2005 of a carnivorous cache in Oregon eating a 6 foot tall 250 pound lumberjack who was geocaching on his lunch break; it also consumed his 140 pound dog as well.

Most experts agree that these carnivorous "geocaches" were not really placed by cachers at all, and rather that they are likely a primitive carnivorous plant life form which has existed on earth in deep forests since life first appeared on earth, feeding on animals and people. The experts tell us that these carnivorous plants are highly intelligent and highly adaptable, and when they realized that people were tramping around in the woods looking for geocaches, well, the immediately started to mimic geocaches and/or geocache hide sites. Apparently these carnivorous plants which look and act like geocaches can survive only in dark damp forests. At this point, the problem seems to be confined to several sharply circumscribed forest areas in the Pacific Northwest, the damp Appalachian forests of Western Maryland, Central and Western Pennsylvania and New York State, and the dark damp forests in northern Croatia and similar forests in eastern Byelorussia (Belarus.) There is also one swamp in southern England where they have been reported.

These carnivorous forest creatures have been well-known to many traditional cultures and have therefore been staples of folklore for hundreds or even thouands of years, and have even appeared in works of fiction. The famed author Manly Wade Wellman, who was a dedicated student and collector of folklore in the Appalachians, wrote a number of novels set in the Appalachians on the east coast of the USA. In several of these novels, he wrote knowingly about "gardinels", which seem to be identical the the gingerbread-house type carnivorous plants described above. He said in a radio interview in 1978 that he had first heard of the gardinels (carnivorous creatures of dark forests which look like gingerbread houses and lure people inside to eat them) from the mountain people of Tennessee and Kentucky, and later from the hill folk of Western North Carolina. One good web article on gardinels appears at http://www.gwthomas.org/gardinel.htm and you can learn a lot more about gardinels if you do a web search on Google using the terms [Manly Wade Wellman gardinel].

[CacheDetectives]

I think they may have the same problem in the mountains of West Virginia:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_de ... ce1310e20e

[VinceHayter]

This makes me rethink the reasoning behind why the city put the fence up in Bayfront park. To protect people from the cliffs? I think not... Maybe "Cliffs area" does mean something named "Cliff" after all.

Come to think of it, when I was rehiding "Miocene Mare 2" I could have swore I smelled something tasty...

[DaisyChain]

I think they may have the same problem in the mountains of West Virginia:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_de ... ce1310e20e

CD, When do we go? After CAM?

[CacheDetectives]

I'm ready when you are, but I think I'll leave Sam at home.

[DaisyChain]

I'm ready when you are, but I think I'll leave Sam at home.

Can we bring the UY and EC team?