Share your stories here! Spider stories are welcome, too.
Once, without looking, I drank from a can of soda before realizing that it was crawling with ants! :smack:
Ever seen a cranefly? I talkin’ BIG and UGLY… and in my backyard. Lots of 'em.
<shudder>
I once got a potato bug in my hair.
In case you aren’t familiar with these, um, lovely insects, here’s a link.
I was leaning against a fence, and felt something in my hair. Thinking it was a leaf, I reached up to pull it out. Turned out to be Mr. Potato Bug up there.
Also, once pulled a bloated tick off of my housemates’ dog without realizing what it was. When I saw that the little thing caught in Emma’s fur was wiggling I shrieked and dropped it. I washed my hands in scalding water for about five minutes afterwards.
I was trying to take a midterm, and a little white spider landed on the back of my neck. I didn’t know it was a spider, so reached around to scratch the itch and when I brought my hand back around the spider was tossed onto my midterm. To make it worse, it had apparently established some kind of web anchor on me, so blowing it off only resulted it landing on my leg. Eventually, I bid it farewell by sending it sailing a few feet away, to keep my neighbor company. 
I had an insect in my shirt. We were at a Ren fest, and parked a mile away in a field, and walked to the grounds. Shortly after I got out of the car I felt something crawling around under my shirt. I did the normal flap shirt and dance around thing. I was pretty sure it was gone, and went on my way. I still felt creepy crawly though. We entered the grounds, and again I felt like something was in my shirt. I looked down my shirt and saw a set of insect legs disappear around the edge of my bra. :eek: I ran to the restroom facilities, ripped off my shirt and bra, and shook both out very well. I still have nightmares.
I was lying in bed half awake, and my lower lip felt huge. I figured it was just a fever blister growing, and it was no big deal, and would be hardly noticable when I got up. When I looked in the mirror, my lip was HUGE!!! I went to the doctor, and he prescribed some antihistamines. The odd thing was, that I had some kind of vague memory of having something crawling on my lip, trying to remove it, and eventually eating it after it bit me in the wee hours of the morning.
The doctor’s first comment was priceless- “Wow, your lip -is- big!”
Maybe not creepy, but hilarious from my friends’ point of view:
We were in two vehicles, a Mazda compact with a sunroof and a pickup. I was in the back seat of the Mazda, we were heading for a Pirate game at Three Rivers (this was in the 80’s) west on the Parkway, and two guys were in the pickup right behind us- so they got a good view of the action.
The wind was whipping through the open sunroof, and I enjoyed the breeze until a large wasp flew in and buzzed toward my face! it was about 1 1/2 inches long, with a stinger about twice as long as its body. I found out later it was some type of boring wasp that hunts grubs in wood, but that stinger looked HUGE.
I grabbed a newspaper that I had been reading and swatted at the wasp, several times, and each time it effortlessly flew around my blow and buzzed toward my face. I beat the paper around frantically and my wild gyrations finally knocked the wasp to the carseat.
I pushed down with the paper, squashing the wasp against the seat. I held the paper down for a few seconds, then picked it up to see what I had killed.
It fluttered back up toward my face. I jumped back, causing the car to rock and finally getting noticed by the driver, who ask “What the hell happened?”
I slapped the wasp to the seat again, this time crushing the paper around. I din’t let up for a full minute, as i explained to the driver what I just went through. I looked back through the window and the two guys in the truck were laughing hysterically.
The wasp didn’t come back up, but when we got to the game everyone got a good laugh again. [geek mode] We figured that the wasp had at least 4 hit dice. [/geek mode]
This happened many years ago when I still smoked weed and weed products.
I was in the mood for some braineaters, a.k.a. bottle tokes, and I only had the smallest nub of a cigarette to use as I did not smoke cigarettes at the time and bummed the occasionalone to use for braineaters. The only bottle I had prepared for this purpose was sitting under my couch and I had not used it for several days. In my haste to load and inhale as many eaters as possible before the cigarette buned down to the filter I failed to notice the spider sitting in it’s web inside the bottle.
Now you know why they are called braineaters.
I had a roomie in college who, towards the end of exam week, found himself crawling with speed bugs.
I couldn’t see ‘em (I guess they’re really small), but he was pickin’ at 'em for days. It looked horrible. Or he did, anyway.
The most “freakazoid” one I ever had was one evening in Maine back when I was a teenager. A group of us had gone swimming and had just tossed our T-Shirts, sneakers, towels and such on the beach among the rocks and sand - this was a freshwater lake.
We swam until it started to get dark and we decided to go back in the house. Like everyone else, I grabbed my shirt and sneakers and towel and headed up the bank. I had finally dried myself off enough to pull my T-Shirt back on by the time I got to the house. I finished drying off and suddenly got a shock as I discovered that something was biting (HARD) at my armpit!
I ditched the shirt about as fast as I could, still being partially damp and all, and discovered this rather large beetle that had ridden along inside my shirt and had decided that it didn’t like being partly squished when I put the shirt on.
For several days after that, I had a VERY large red welt under my arm - a very uncomfortable place for that sort of thing.
This happened when I was 13. To this day, (I’m 41 now) I still shake out my clothes after going swimming - EVEN if it’s just the pool at the local community center!!!
A friend of mine was working in Russia. He had a shower one evening and then smeared his bod with a fruity sweet-smelling moisturizer lotion. Imagine his delight waking up in the morning to find himself crawling with cockroaches which were slurping on his delicious smelling skin.
Mrs. RickJay’s dad’s girlfriend owns a cottage on a little island up on Georgian Bay. So he first night we’re up there I go into the cupboard to get a plate, and when I take it down what spills onto me?
Dozens of CoCkroAchEs!!!
Hideous little bastards in my hair, on my shoulders, everywhere. I screamed like a little girl. Only later did I find out the place had always been infested with cockroaches. However, the woman refused to believe they were roaches - she said they were just “brown bugs” - and would not use proper anti-roach methods of extermination, so she couldn’t understand why they kept coming back.
You know who doesn’t keep coming back now? Us.
My friend Keith got down a coffee mug one morning off the shelf and was just about to pour boiling water into it. He happened to glance into it first, and saw *a roach giving birth in it. *
He did pour in the boiling water, but didn’t add coffee . . .
Close to midnight, I was reading in the living room when I noticed a big bug on the top corner of the opposite wall. It was flat, three inches long, and had many many legs. No idea what it was. Rolled up a magazine, climbed on a chair, and SMACK. Missed. The bug went down the wall and crawled into the computer desk where I could not find it. I started freaking out because there was a big scary insect on the loose. I closed my bedroom door and stuffed a towel on the bottom. This sucker was very flat and could have crawled underneath. I started to relax and considered my room a bug-free zone until I noticed the air vents. The leggy monster could crawl into the air vent in the living room, make its way into the bedroom, and get me while I slept. There was no way I was going to get any sleep at home that night. I called up a friend to stay at her house, packed a bag, and left my place for the night due to an insect. I returned the next day and never saw it again, although I did move out a few months later.
Turns out it was a three inch centipede. You try sleeping with this insect running around your home.
http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/images/myriapoda/chilopoda/scutigera.jpg
I’ve got a couple. The way my classrooms were set up at my grade school in New York, we had a cubby/arts area in the back with a connecting bathroom, and on the side of the classroom area next to the teachers desk was a sink and water fountain. If you fiddled with the little screw at the bottom of the water fountain, you could adjust the water preasure to insane proportions.
One day, one of the students looked up, and there hanging out on the ceiling was a wolf Spider. This thing was like, six inches long and hairy as hell. You could see its eyes from the floor six feet away. Well, it was just a little ways over the water fountain, so some friends and I took turns adjusting the screw and trying to hit the fucking thing down. We never got it by the time the teacher caught us and called maintanance to came kill it, but we did leave a nice waterstain on the ceiling.
The grossest experience I’ve had happened around that same time in my life (2nd-4th grade). We were having dinner and eating corn. We’ve got plenty of those little corn ender things, you know it’s got little prongs in it you stick in the end of corn so you can hold it without actually getting your hands on the corn and getting all buttery and stuff. Well, as I was putting one in, I noticed there was a little bump or something in the corn on one end. So, I used the prongs to poke at it, and ended up fishing a caterpiller out of my corn on the cob. Needless to say, I didn’t eat corn on the cob for a good number of years after that.
2nd Russia story… my friends were working in a Russian office building and they had put in a large industrial sized coffee maker. Everybody was working long hours and guzzling lots of coffe but the machine started to clog up. Eventually it got almost completely plugged so they took it apart to clean it and found all the inner workings completely plugged up with boiled dead cockroaches. They had been drinking coffee filtered through a thick sludge of cockroach corpses. I wonder if it gave the coffee a kind of nutty taste?
Singapore, '95. Sitting around in my friend’s bungalow one evening, with the front door open, drinking arrat, when this… thing flew in the door and landed on the wall.
I’ve lived in many tropical areas, and seen many creepy crawlies - moths the size of pigeons, spiders the size of dinner plates, centipedes the size of snakes - but I have never, ever seen anything as grotesque as this. To this day I have no idea what it was. My friend, who’d been in Singapore for years, said he’d never seen anything like it.
It looked like the bastard offspring of a locust, a cockroach and a cicada. The abdomen was the size of a baby’s fist, puke-green in colour, soft, and pulsating. It was so big that I didn’t know how it could become airborne on its small, veined, transparent wings. The head was wide, with two huge shiny green eyes, and swivelled as it clung to the wall. The tip of the abdomen was dipping onto the wall every so often and depositing a glistening egg. Every time it layed one it levered itself up on its spindly, spiked legs and spidered, undulating, up the wall.
My girlfriend screamed to get it out of the room. Being unafraid of crawlies, I gingerly put my hand up to it, and closed my fingers around it. Its legs were very firmly adhered to the wall, and it didn’t want to let go, so I was tugging gently against its springy legs, with my hand under the abdomen, which I thought was going to burst, or the legs were going to rip off. Eventually I managed to prise the legs off, one by one, and as I got each one off the wall, it wrapped itself round my fingers. I took it out into the garden and tried to throw it down, but it was now holding onto my hand. A reasonable amount of gentle thrashing persuaded it to drop off my hand, and I retreated back into the house. We closed the insect screen.
About 20 minutes later, my friend’s cat pawed at the screen to be let into the house. It was holding something in its mouth as it settled itself down on the living room floor and started to crunch away. I think you can guess what it was…
Mine happened just this morning. I got on the subway, to go to work, and was idly gazing at a poster on the wall of the subway train advertizing some fruit drink. The poster was a picture of a forest, with a sign posted reading something like “avoid blood-swollen ticks” Very weird poster. What was even weirder was that right in the middle of it was a preying mantis. A REAL praying mantis. It was just standing there on the poster, head downward, right over a passenger. For a long time I thought it was a fake bug; just part of the ad, since it was so appropriate. But it statrted moving around, and then I was sure it was real. Eww, eww! I stared at the thing the entire ride into work, and s/he never left the poster. Furthermore, no one else seemed to notice him/her. The train was full of people, but I don’t think anyone saw the little bugger but me. And I wasn’t going to say anything. The last thing I wanted was to cause a fuss… So as far as I know, s/he’s still there, blending into the green background of the poster.
I actually feel a little guilty that I didn’t save the poor bastard.
I had a sprained ankle while I was at camp one year. Right before bed, I unwrapped and rewrapped the Ace bandage a little more tightly. When I woke up the next morning, it appears that while rewrapping the bandage I picked up a “guest” of the eight-legged variety. The thing had literally tried to bite its way out of the bandage prison, and my ankle was about three times its normal size. I counted six separate mountainous swellings on my ankle.
A couple years back, I was in a not-so-pleasant hotel room. When I used the washcloth one morning, I felt something oddly slick across my lips. I pulled the washcloth away and glanced in the mirror to see something large and brown—it was a ROACH WING! The roach was in the washcloth and I had pulled off its wing by smearing the cloth across my face. Ecch.
My Ex brother in law woke up from an afternoon nap with an Ear ache. The Ache continued for the rest of the evening, and into the next morning when he went to the doctor. The doctor looked into his ear to discover that a cock roach had lodged itself in there and was eating his eardrum. He didn’t have the appropriate tools to dislodge the thing, but he was able to kill it using alcohol or some other stuff. But my brother in law had to wait until the next day to get to doctor who could extract the thing.