I know someone who once had the decaying remains of a possum come crashing through the ceiling at her workplace. Maggots and all.
cries
Awww, it’s like the first snow of winter! I’d just advise against trying to catch any on your tongue.
By the by, the offer I made in this thread is still open if anyone wants to try and raise the cash (and the maggots).
And as a bonus, cookies anyone?
I can absolutely guarantee that if this happened at my house, my wife would force us to move… Good luck de-maggotizing your ceiling.
…
**Warning! Very gross story follows!
**
Many years ago, in another house, I noticed a really bad smell. I couldn’t find anything, although I looked for a few days. Then, in a torrential downpour (at night), I went out onto the patio to watch the rain, and noticed that the smell was much stronger. I got my flashlight and raincoat, and started looking in the bushes near the house. I found a dead cat that was so badly decayed that it nearly fell apart when I picked it up with a shovel. The smell was so strong I nearly lost my dinner. I carried it down to the dumpster in the pour rain, and threw it (and the shovel) away.
A few weeks later (this was in the late winter), I was outside and I heard a buzzing sound coming from the same area. I looked over, and saw that the wall of the house was covered with the biggest, blackest, fuzziest flies I had ever seen. They all must have hatched at the same time. I got the bug spray out and proceeded to do some chemical warfare.
Yuck.
I am crying… Brilliant.
My mother once told me a maggot story and for years this was the most disgusting thing I’d ever heard or thought about, so I’ll share it with you guys 
Mom was working in the kitchen and noticed a fly. She hated flies with a passion (although this very incident may have actually been the trigger for the hatred, now that I think about it) and swatted the fly, apparently killing it. At the very moment of the fly’s demise, Mom heard a loud noise in my baby sister’s room. Thinking my sister had fallen out of the crib or pulled something down on herself, she hurried down the hall to attend to the baby.
Well, the baby was fine, but when Mom got back to the kitchen a few minutes later and went to dispose of the fly carcass, she found a huge pile of churning maggots. She guessed that the fly, dead or almost dead, discharged its egg load right there on the kitchen counter.
The house - hell, the neighborhood smelled like bleach for a week.
This story runs counter my limited understanding of the lifecycle of houseflies, but I’m still rather neurotic about the proper - and prompt - disposal of dead flies.
I shouldn’t have clicked on this thread. But at least it might make me less inclined to scream at the one or two little black beetles I splatted today. Hell, they are almost lovable compared to some of the horrors in this thread. 
I suspect the actual answer is even worse (if that’s even possible). Flies lay eggs. So those were probably maggots from something that’s a parasite of flies. Uggh.
About ten years ago, my horse Phelan was in foal. That’s pregnant to the un-horsey. At the first post-breeding vet check (the ultrasound wand goes in through the rectum) the vet asked, “Does that melanoma lump look larger to you?” Phelan was a gray Trakehner. Grey horses very often get lumps caused by melanoma, but they can live a normal lifespan despite that. Well, apparently the hormones from the pregnancy caused the cancer to suddenly go active.
We tried many treatments, surgically debulking the tumor in the rectum, giving her laxatives and bran masshes every day, 2400 mg a day of cimetidine (a human drug to treat heartburn. It had been shown to slow the growth of melanoma in horses). She wasn’t in any pain. Finally we were just trying to keep her alive long enough to foal. At the end, the tumors would rupture and bleed, and the flies were laying eggs. The maggots would puor out of her. The vet said to let them be - they’d only eat necrotic tissue, which would be helpful. Oh, but it was disgusting!
In the end, she went into early labor about two weeks before we were planning to deliver her by C-section. The foal couldn’t pass because the tumors blocked the way, and by the time the vet got there it was dead. He put her down. Animals will break your heart every time.
StG
I read it as “raining magnets” - which is much less gross/
There is always “polygoose” as the plural on mongoose.
Brian
We cleaned up a rotting corpse and now I can happily report:
It’s raining fewer maggots in my house!
Well, that’s always a plus!
Am I the only one that has “It’s Raining Men” running through my head?
Not nearly as gross but kinda cool…last weekend we were planting annuals in the flower pots. I started to take some of the potting soil out of one of the pots to add new when the entire pot blossomed with itty bitty ants. Millions of 'em. It looked like that scene in Mummy with the roaches. <shudder>
Not something one is likely to read about in a James Herriot book…
Damn, I got it easy. I’m sort of annoyed by one single common housefly that managed to get into my house, and escape my efforts at neutralizing it. The battle is not lost, it has only begun.
I have it easy, in the early 90s, a colleague of mine once came home to find a dead man on the landing in front of the apartment in Ukraine and couldn’t get anyone from the city to come collect the body. Finally he and his driver carted him out to the curb one night.
People sometimes call them water bugs or palmetto bugs. And I do not think that ANY roaches, no matter what species, are cute. Those big bastards are the reason why I quit hanging my laundry…I brought in roaches with the clean laundry.
The Fort Worth Zoo has, or had, a display of Madagascar Hissing Roaches. They do hiss, and they’re sort of scary.
In re: the roaches, I have to ask…where do you keep dog food in Florida, if you can’t keep it in the house? Is it just because the closet is dark that that happened? I am blissfully ignorant of these repulsive creatures.
One summer when I was a teenager I could not find a job and so was reduced to going door-to-door as a fundraiser for some obnoxious political cause. (Absolutely pathetic - I did eventually quit to salvage what was left of my self esteem - but that’s a whole other story).
Anyway, the job consisted of trudging from house to house, knocking on doors and trying to get people to donate money. One day, I went up to a somewhat dilapidated house, climbed up the steps onto the porch and walked up to the door, which had glass panes and a curtain hanging on the inside, so you couldn’t see into the house. Crawling in large quantity all over the inside of the glass were flies. Many, many flies. Little flies, not ordinary houseflies. I knocked repeatedly, but no one answered.
I then went to the house next door, where my knock was answered by a not very friendly middle-aged man (most people were not friendly when confronted with a youngster with a clipboard looking for donations, so his abruptness doesn’t necessarily prove anything).
I said “say, I think there may be something wrong at your neighbor’s house…no one is answering the door, and there are FLIES crawling all over the inside of the window.”
He grunted, but didn’t seem interested.
I’ve always wondered what was going on. Had some lonely little old widow living by herself died in there and not yet been discovered? Did the slightly menacing neighbor murder her?!? Or maybe he didn’t murder her, but they’d been having a feud for years over her failure to keep up her house and so he was glad if she was dead?
I’ll never know.
I don’t think that it’s so much that it was simply a closet. It was the nature of the closet. The closet was right next to the outdoors, and contained the hot water heater. Depending on the construction involved, the seal between the building the and the outside, around the piping there, may well have had enough gaps to allow vermin in. And once in, the cockroaches would find it extremely congenital between the humidity, the constant warmth, and now the ready source of relatively high grade food.
The way to avoid such problems are sealing containers for your dog food (such as a good clamp-top trash can), and some boric acid left around the walls of the closet. (Either alone might work, but that whole OMIGAWDGETTITOFFME scream thing (which I’d have done just as badly as the others upthread) means that I’d be willing to go for a little extra protection.)
Ugh, the maggots in the ceiling, yeah.
At my last job, we had a warehouse, with food (sugar, chocolate) near a water source in Sydney, which means rats. No matter how clean you are, you get them.
So naturally, we poisoned them. As my director at the time said, “We poison them, then we act surprised when they die!” Cause they liked to die in the dropped ceiling over the office. In summer. You could locate them by the smell.
One Monday after a long, hot weekend, one died over my office. I called the exterminator, and went to go work in the board room (cause, ugh, the smell) and didn’t realise the exterminator had arrived when I went to duck back into my office to get some papers.
I arrived just in time to see a shower of maggots cascade over him, my desk, and onto my office floor. My one triumph that day was that I did not puke, cry or scream. The smell was HORRENDOUS, and I decided that what I was working on could wait…you know, forever, if needed.
I didn’t eat lunch, though.
GAH!! Yucky. I actually had nightmares about it a couple of times after that. It was just bloody AWFUL.
Cheers,
G