In response to all this lively discourse, the problem continues in spite of a suitably scoped my @pileofinchis array.
It may not be the actual problem, but as I already wrote in my reply to BrowserUk's one, I'd be curious to know what you are doing with that reference of it that you return from your sub.
use strict scares me
Not only, just like davido "disuse of strictures scares me", but your being scared of use strict; scares me too, since there's really nothing to be scared of, that is: in letting perl help you to write good code.

In reply to Re^3: Ghostly subroutine variables haunting me in subsequent calls by blazar
in thread Ghostly subroutine variables haunting me in subsequent calls by moonunit

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