GISHWHES

The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen
The GISHWHES logo as of 2013
Genre	Scavenger hunt
Frequency	Annually
Location(s)	Worldwide
Inaugurated	2011
Founder	Misha Collins
Most recent	July 31 – August 5, 2016
Next event	July 30 – August 6, 2017
Participants	~30,000 (2016)
Website
gishwhes.com

The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen (GISHWHES, pronounced gish-wes) is an annual week-long competitive media scavenger hunt originally held each October or November, but more recently each August. Teams of 15 competitors earn points for submitting photos and videos of themselves completing prompts from a list they receive at the beginning of the week. Actor Misha Collins officially founded GISHWHES in 2011 after a publicity stunt to help the television series Supernatural (on which Collins appears) win a People's Choice Award. The competition holds a world record for being the largest media scavenger hunt ever to take place, and several additional world records.

Actor Misha Collins, known for playing the angel Castiel on the American television series Supernatural, is the founder of GISHWHES. The competition began informally in 2010 when Holly Ollis, a publicist for Warner Bros., asked Collins to engage his audience to help Supernatural move from second place to first in the People's Choice Awards voting. Collins posted a message on Twitter, declaring that if the show won, Ollis had promised him a rhinoceros which he would share with everyone who helped by voting for the show. When Supernatural won the competition, Collins, partially inspired by his time at the University of Chicago as an undergraduate during which he participated in the school's annual scavenger hunt, asked his followers to send him self-addressed stamped envelopes into which he put scavenger hunt prompts written on the backs of jigsaw puzzle pieces from a puzzle depicting a rhino. Soon, participants began to respond to Collins's "absurd" requests. One successful prompt, for example, challenged fans to photograph a group of firemen wearing nothing but kale.