We recently returned from France, where we had rented a rural “gite” or vacation villa in Burgundy. The gite was a bit more rustique than we had anticipated; however, this we could put up with.
What sent us out the door and into a hotel were BIG CRAWLY BROWN BUGS which infested the gite. Now, I like critters of all kinds and bugs don’t usually give me the jitters, but these bugs looked like the result of an unholy coupling between cockroaches and millipedes. They had dozens of LONG filament-like legs, and they came out mostly at night to scurry up the walls and across the ceiling. My introduction to them came when I was sitting on the john at 2 a.m. the first night we were there, and one fell from the ceiling landed in my LAP. My husband said it was the first time he heard me scream! Exit, stage droit, to the Sofitel in Dijon, tres presse.
Query to our European dopers: What are these bugs? Are they common in houses? Are they a cockroach, a millipede, or one of Satan’s messengers, sent to earth to give us a glimpse of what hell will be like?
We used to have those in our attic–and I had an attic bedroom. I’m not the squeamish type, but, God, I hated those things.
There was a thread about a month or so ago about them, and someone posted a link to a picture, if you want to relive your memories. I’m not going to go searching for it, though. <<shudder>>
Thanks. I did a Google search using the words “house centipede” and came up with plenty of websites. For those of you who want to get the creeps, here’s one with a good photo:
I noticed that all of these websites refer to them as an American insect, so can only suppose that the ones I saw in Europe are closely related, if not the same bug. I’ve never seen this creepy crawly in California, and that’s why we got the heebie-jeebies. Had I known it in America first, I wouldn’t have been so icked out. Any of you Californians ever seen one of these babies?