What’s the point of torturing it? If you dislike 'em so much why prolong your contact with it? Just squish it and get it over and done with.
I had a friend who lived in the hill country outside Austin, TX who finally put up mosquito netting over her in-the-ceiling air conditioning vents in her house because she was tired (!!) of scorpions crawling through the vents and dropping on her and hubby while they were in bed asleep! Eeeeeeeeeek!
Have none of you people ever lived in basement apartments? Anyone who lives in basement apartments never puts on shoes without shaking them out first. I still do that, and it’s been a decade since I’ve lived in a basement. But thank you all for some incredibly gross and disgusting stories. 
(Q.N.Jones, I think some people just aren’t born to shriek. I’ve never shrieked in my life, although I have had opportunity.)
(pps - I’m from Saskatchewan too! Saskatoon area. I have visited Regina, though.)
I was driving a truck one summer in South Carolina, delivering steel pipe and fittings to construction sites throughout the state. I had just dropped off my last load and was headed home via the scenic backroads, which was what I liked best about the job. The cab of the truck had a vent in the roof which could be cranked open, the front rising to form a scoop which let in a rush of cooling air. I was cruising along about 55mph, feeling the breeze when I heard something hit the vent with a ‘whack’, ricochet into my lap and fall out of sight between my legs. Before I could even think of what it might be I heard a buzzing like a high pitched saw. I slid back enough to peek and I saw an extremely agitated two-inch wasp buzzing and spinning in horrifying proximity to my family jewels.
Because I was hunched back in the seat I couldn’t brake and the roadside dropped off to a ditch on either side. My first reaction was to grab my pair of work gloves and attempt to kill the bug. I began to strike repeatedly but couldn’t get a clean shot at him. So here I was still moving at a pretty good clip, trying to keep the truck on the road, cussing a blue streak, and whacking myself furiously in the crotch with a pair of heavy leather gloves. Each miss sent the wasp to a new height of frenzy but any possible sting could not have hurt more than the beating I was giving myself.
Since there was no traffic I coasted to a stop, administered the coup de grace, and went on my way with the vent closed. Even though the wasp was gone my testicles continued to vibrate for the next twenty miles.
LOL, I’ve shrieked. Like the time I ran a stop sign and came thisclose to causing a car accident. And the time that stupid girl ran a red light and nearly T-boned me. So I guess I only shriek in the car.
As for torturing the spider–I was kind of kidding. I did keep it in a cup for awhile, and thought about doing something mean to it, but finally just flushed it. Hey, I was a teenager, OK? I’m hard-pressed to explain a lot of my teenaged behavior.
My boyfriend is deathly afraid of spiders. Kind of silly for a 6’ black/death metaller who rides his bike off of small-ish cliffs for fun, but there you go. I think he’s justified, though. When he was a little kid, probably under the age of 9, they lived in a very, very old house out in the country. One night while he was sleeping, he woke up to a weird crawly sensation to find himself covered in literally HUNDREDS of WOLF SPIDERS.
And now I have to hold his hand whenever we watch Return of the King. 
imnotafraidofspidersbutAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
You mean you weren’t afraid of spiders.
Hey, guys, remember this thread. Good times.
Oh yeah, I just remembered a kinda freaky story - I was eating a bag of spits (sunflower seeds to the rest of y’all), and I normally take a handful and tuck them in my cheek while I eat them. I reached into the bag, and pulled out a very nicely roasted and salted front half of a grasshopper. I look at each handful before cramming them in my mouth now, thankyewverymuch.
Oh, man, almost exactly the same thing happened to me on a highway in California some years back, with the following slight differences: 1) it was a honeybee instead of a wasp, 2) I was wearing shorts, 3) the little bastard’s last act was to sting me. In my case, I ended up running off the road into a freshly plowed field, somehow without damaging anything; well, nothing on the truck at least.
Last Friday, I opened up one of the lower drawers on my desk and immediately thought, “Man, that smells a bit funky.” I pulled the hanging files aside to find, what, you ask, a dead mouse?
Nope.
HALF a dead mouse. Don’t think I really want to know where the other half went.
About 10 years ago, when I lived near Orlando, I went into our bathroom to brush my teeth. I noticed whoever had used the toothpaste hadn’t screwed the cap back on, so I wet my toothbrush, started squeezing, and, yup, a wolf spider came out of the toothpaste tube onto my toothbrush. I’m not usually that freaked out by spiders, I’m pretty tolerant, but it was so unexpected I think I launched my toothbrush into the shower.
2 more related stories from my days in Florida- we had sliding glass doors in our shower there, and one day I slid the glass door open so I could hop in the shower, and unknowingly sliced a lizard in half. 2 legs and an attached and wiggly tail came down on the outside of my shower, onto the floor, and the other half landed in the shower. It still makes me shudder, but I feel sorry for the poor guy, just sitting there.
Oh, and one day I reached in the mailbox to get my mail, and a scorpion was sitting there at the front edge of the box. I got him out with a stick.
Fucking kill me now. I’m so creeped out I’m afraid to move.
A couple of months before our wedding, our best man and maid of honor sprung for a cabin in the Georgia mountains, giving the four of us a nice respite from the stress of planning a huge party for all our families, followed up by a week out of the country. But I digress.
When we get there, I happen to notice a tiny roach up on the tall ceiling of the cabin. We’re in the woods, it’s a small bug, eh, no big deal. We’ve been on the road for three hours, it’s late, and we all want a good night’s rest.
Four in the morning rolls around, and my beautiful bride wakes me up. We turn on the lights, and the one bug on the ceiling has turned into twenty. They’re on the walls, the floor, and worst of all, in my fiancee’s hair.
They offered to let us come back and stay for free some other time. Still not sure if we’re going to take them up on it or not.
This happened to me just a couple weeks ago. I put on my gardening gloves to pick up some deadfall and debris in the yard. When my fingers got in the gloves, I felt a pinch at the tip of one finger. Well, these are gardening gloves: they’re full of little thorns and shards of mulch and lord knows what else. It’s not unusal to have something poke my finger. I stuck my hand in again and felt something fuzzy at the tip of that same finger.
Then I decided it was time to investigate. After much struggle (ever try to turn a gardening glove inside out?) I found a yellowjacket who had crawled up inside my glove to stay warm. It’s dead now…
And now, I will top my own story. All of you who have found bugs, spiders and rodents… feh. You’ve seen nothing until you’re in the kitchen one day and decide to wander out into the living room.
There was a snake slithering across my living room rug!
A snake! WTF? I still don’t know how it got inside the house, but it was a smallish one. Unfortunately, it looked suspiciously like a poisonous one, but I was not about to find my field guide to make a proper identification. (I think it was a baby king snake, but not sure.) I managed to chase him on top of a cushion, which had fallen on the floor (dog cushion) and, with my broom, pushed the snake and his cushion right out the front door. Where I am sure the snake has now taken up residence under my front porch. If it is a king snake, then I’m glad I let him live, because they eat other snakes.
::Shudder::
Oh this is creepy. It’s like group therapy in a strange sort of way (not that I have any experience of it). Anyway, we used to get 6- or 7- inch hairy centipedes in my parents’ basement. I didn’t have contacts back then, just glasses and I was a dancer. So I’d be practicing without my glasses, and I’d see a fuzzy brown stain on the wall.
Move closer to see what it is, and eek! watch it race across the wall in super-fast mode. And then if you killed it it would make a huge mess. So time to call Dad! We used to get those buggers all the time.
And then there was the time when I was walking through a park…about ten years old I think. Felt something fall on my head. Put my hand up, and it’s a spider that in retrospect couldn’t have been huge but at the moment seemed as big as my hand! I ran screaming all the way back to my parents, through half the park.
Yuck. I actually don’t mind bugs, but they have their spheres, and I have mine, and they’re not supposed to be in mine!
I’ve got goosebumps…
One time I picked up my jeans off the floor to put them on (yeah I used to be a slob) and felt something sticking me up near the top of my leg, very near my crotch. I felt it through my jeans, and it moved!!! AAAGGGHHHH! It was a huge tree roach - some of you call them palmetto bugs - and it was in my pants!!! I stripped those jeans off inside out as fast as I could, squealing the whole time.
I hate roaches. And I never leave clothes on the floor any more.
I can deal with bugs, for the most part…
On the other hand, I have never enjoyed the company of bats… And I’ve dealt with an inordinate number of them in my lifetime. When I was young, bats used to occupy our attic, and there were nights when they would be just crawling all over the attic door, banging on the damn thing to get into the house… It’s hard to sleep like that, let me tell you…
But much worse than that was the night I spent in a nice cabin on a canoeing trip. My friend and his family had taken me along for the trip, and we were out in the woods in this nice old authentic cabin… We had heard noises in the chimney throughout the day, but hadn’t thought much of it until we woke up the middle of the night to the screeching of dozens of bats flying around our little cabin, just over our heads… The worst part was that my friend’s father “solved” the problem by opening the door to let the bats get out. Great, here we are in the middle of the woods, and he’s opening the door to help? Somehow, I got back to sleep, and the bats were gone by morning, but a fun time was not had by all…
Ever seen a house centipede? Those things are fucking scary. They look like centipedes but with longer legs. I used to find them in my apartment when I lived in Maryland. I had never seen one before but they are hideous! I would take spiders any day over these things. The move so fast that they are hard to catch. Thank god I have never seen them again now that I am back in Virginia.
Take a look at one here: :eek:
http://www.uark.edu/depts/entomolo/museum/house_centipede.html
[QUOTE=SpacemanSpiff]
I can deal with bugs, for the most part…
On the other hand, I have never enjoyed the company of bats… And I’ve dealt with an inordinate number of them in my lifetime. When I was young, bats used to occupy our attic, and there were nights when they would be just crawling all over the attic door, banging on the damn thing to get into the house… It’s hard to sleep like that, let me tell you…
[QUOTE]
When I was in college, I lived in an attic apartment. One day I’m sitting there and out of the blue comes this black thing flying through the room. It was a bat! The poor thing was terrified and kept flying back and forth in a panic. Luckily my boyfriend was there, and he tried to get it to fly out the front door. But it just wouldn’t leave…so finally he had to hit the poor thing with a broom and killed it. It was so cute and I felt so bad 