Dont go geocaching at night!

It was one of those average nights, we just finished high school and fell into this weird time in life where you eventually start to miss having a daily routine. With nothing in mind me and 4 other friends (2 male, 2 female) decided to go out Geocaching (for those who don't know, Geocaching is an iphone app which shows you the location of hidden “caches” which can contain anything from a Book to write your name in to, to a chest filled with personal belongings of other Seekers. In my case it was in Berlin, Germany on the 17th of July at around 23:00.

A good friend of mine, liv, who had the initial idea of going Geocaching said we would simply go to the nearest point of our current location, at this point in time we were at “S-bahnhof Halensee” and followed the directions on her Iphone. After a short walk we finally arrived at our destination and began searching around wild for the Cache using the Led light on our phones. Approximately 5 minutes after searching around aimlessly we decided to take a break and make a plan to find the cache, yes indeed we really were motivated. We all sat down on some stones in the area and started planning. At this point in time about 15 minutes have passed. When suddenly a relatively short but muscular man, dressed all in black at the age of around 35-40 with a man bag around his shoulder, short sleeves and blonde short hair came up to our group and asked for a lighter. The way he came up to us in the first place caught my attention immediately, since he could not have seen uns easily since the road he walked on was elevated and we stood in the dark next to some larger bushes, if anything he heard us, even if he heard us, even then, the precision and determination within his steps caught the entire groups attention before he was even close enough to speak a single word. Once he was close enough by the way he spoke i knew, there was something fishy about the situation. He had stigmatism, it was not extremely strong but noticeable. By that i don't mean to insult anyone with stigmatism, it just fit to the atmosphere of the entire situation. It was just generally weird to see a grown man on a Thursday night at around midnight in a park isolated from any Pedestrian traffic since it was next to a freeway.

After he lit his cigarette and we expected him to go on with whatever he was doing he began to ask questions which he seemingly already knew the answer to:

“what are you doing here” - we are geocaching "is this your first time searing” - well for us it his but the girls already found one before “do you all know each other or did you just meet here” -we know each other for ages must be 8+ years “can you also chat on this app” -no

We answered all the questions honest not yet noticing what we were about to get into “well the other time people where here looking they were much older, you look pretty young, how old are you?” He insisted to look with us for the cache and started being really fake enthusiastic about it. This guy pretended to look at every single fencepost there was and there were about 150 of them leading up to the bridge he was talking about. Constantly repeating “If we don't find this one here i know where to find one for sure, its just right under this bridge” “Come follow me to the bridge, there is one for sure” He just asked us too often, he really wanted us to go there. When he noticed the group wouldn't follow he asked all of us individually while we looked in the fenceposts with him. Now note that he only began asking us to go to the bridge with him after he knew that all of us were total “noobs” at this game. The thing is … there only ever is one box in each location.

It was Impossible to get rid of him even in a medium-polite manner wer told him that we didn't want him to help us look for the Cache nor did we want to go with him under the bridge where allegedly he knew a second box is located.

At this point in time it was around 23:40 and we have been walking along the fence leading to the bridge for a while now and are slowly getting closer to it. The guy was luring us away from the freeway and closer to the bridge.

I had to make a decision of either confronting him by asking what the hell he was doing here and that the girls we have with us feel threatened by him and want you to leave. Or i could suggest to look on the other side of the fence next to the street where cars could see us and we were not completely isolated. As you may have guessed, i did go for the second option…Simply because if i force him to expose his true intentions, what ever this guy had waiting for us at this bridge could be waiting inside his man bag.

Although he still insisted to go to the bridge he followed us to the other side of the fence where started to be less enthusiastic and slightly more secluded. He still wanted to convince my friend in a 1on1 talk to go look with him in the dark side of the park. This had to stop now! Now feeling safer with street lights and cars passing by me, i told him that we would search tomorrow since it was simply too dark. One last time he tried to get uns to the bridge. I said: “ no we all don't want to” and at an instance he was gone. Walking towards the bridge and then disappeared in the dark.

So what was he doing there? Was he just a random stranger with good intentions and we were being paranoid? Was he just trying to help?

These questions were left unanswered until the next day.

The next day at around 5 pm i get a call from the girl who registered her account and used her phone for geocaching the night before. She called me in panic and said that the guy from yesterday sat next to her on the train, got off the train at the same stop as her and then went into the direct opposite way of her not to be seen again. Until now...

If you are interested in seeing the place here are the cords from google earth:

52°29'48.61"N 13°16'56.40"E

Please be safe out there when trying such a game there are people out there with goals different to yours. I hope everything made sense. The world is a F***ed up place

I personally think that he may have set up the entire cache himself and resulted to cydia apps such as M-spy to track down the gps location.

What do you think?