My friend has ANOTHER weird plant by his cabin.

[Big Frank]

My friend has yet another weird plant growing by his cabin. He had Monotropa uniflora, also known as ghost plant, ghost pipe, or Indian pipe, a herbaceous, parasitic, non-photosynthesizing, perennial flowering plant. Unlike most plants, it's white and doesn't contain chlorophyll. Instead of generating food using the energy from sunlight, its hosts are fungi that grow symbiotically in association with tree roots. Through the fungal web the M. uniflora roots ultimately sap food from where the host fungi are connected to the photosynthetic trees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropa_uniflora

The new mystery plant is Conopholis americana, the American cancer-root, bumeh or bear corn, a perennial, non-photosynthesizing, parasitic plant. When blooming, it resembles a pine cone or cob of corn growing from the roots of mostly oak and beech trees. The root system is parasitic on the roots of oak trees; dependent on the host tree for its nourishment, the suckers of the parasitic roots cause the formation of large rounded knobs on the roots of the host tree. It too feeds through an intermediate fungus that grows symbiotically with the trees. These 2 plants that I've never seen anywhere else in my life have so much in common it's hard to believe. And hard to believe they're both on my friend's property, and nowhere else that I've seen. Here's a pho-toe of the whole clump, and a close-up of a "cone" I laid on a log to get a pic of. Each little "berry" is about 1/4" or so in diameter, and when I popped one open, it had DOZENS of seeds in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conopholis_americana