Ok now… it’s the day after I returned from a week long spring break trip with my boyfriend and our mutual best friend. We are sitting in my dorm room doing some homework; I was sitting on my bed and the two guys were sitting at a table. I had my feet dangling over the edge of the bed when this seemingly beetle like thing came running out from under my bed. I’m normally not afraid of bugs at all but didn’t feel like dealing with it, so I told my boyfriend to get rid of it. He walked over, looked at it an said something like, “Hmmm, this isn’t a beetle, it’s like a centipede or something, no, it’s really freakish looking.” He then calls our friend over who looks at it and says, “Hmmm, yeah, that’s one f*cked up looking bug.” Now I go into girly mode. I leap onto my bed and demand that they kill it. This bug was about 3 inches long, had long legs and was pretty freakin fast. Catching that thing was a pain in the arse. It was way fast but we managed to trap it in a tupperware bowl. Now, this thing seem REALLY pissed off at us. I don’t know how, but it seemed to always know where we were because it would always line itself up in the corner that was closest to where we were squatting. You can imagine that this makes us uncomfortable and the tupperware bown was just sitting on the floor, face down with no lid. We very, very much wanted to put a lid on this. So, we try to slide a folder underneath so we can flip it over and put on the lid. No, this didn’t work. At first it seem to better like the idea of trying to burrow under then folder. Finally it decided to get on top of the folder. But, when we flipped it over, it did NOT want to let go, it just hung on the folder. Ok, Time for plan B. We flipped the bowl back over, took out the folder and whipped out some bathroom cleaning supplies. We sprayed a ton of it on the folder and slid it in. Yes, we were trying to gas this monster to death. It really got furious and started rampaging around the bowl and gnashing what looked like freakish bug teeth at us. After a very LONG while, it seemed to lose some of it’s ‘oomph’ and looked like it was starting to keel over. We flip the bowl over again, the bug fell to the bottom of the bowl and we put a lid on it. It was laying at the bottom, twiching every once in a while then finally seemed to stop. The boys took this as an opportunity to research on the internet to find out what this crazy thing was while I preceeded to fully clean my room and move my bed to the other side of the room. It fit the description of a Scutigera very well (same bug Zhora). Here is a link to this crazy thing Scutigera
I find it interesting that it’s native to Europe. I live in Colorado, and I suppose it may have wandered into my dorm room naturally since my dorm was many for international students.
That aside. After we found out what this thing was, we look over to find that our little friend had somehow revived itself. He was still as pissed off as ever but seemed to be less active. He eventually died again, probably from lack of oxygen. That dorm room was a hellhole for me. Not only was there the scutigera incident but I was also frequently assulted by various creepy spiders and I had my very own ant highway that I COULD NOT get rid of no matter what I did.
Another bug story that happened when I was a kid: I was eating crackers when I looked down and a nasty looking worm thing crawled out of my half eaten cracker. Ew. I suppose it was fortunate that it wasn’t half a worm but I didn’t eat crackers for several years after that. Nowadays, I still examine my crackers very well before consumption.
We were camping and The Offspring had been running around in sneakers all day. Towards the evening she came to me and said “I think there’s a centipede in my shoe.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I replied. “You’ve had those on all day! You’d have known before now if there was a centipede in there!”
“But I felt it moving around,” she said. She took off the shoe, tipped it up and a four-inch centipede fell out. The thing had been in there all day. I grabbed the hammer we use for the tent pegs and annihilated the thing. Don’t mess with my kid.
I’ve been lucky to not have any direct contact with something TOO out of the ordinary. I’ve stuck my foot in a shoe that had a cricket in it and leaned against the Hoover damn only to find my arms crawling with red fire ants. That is all the closer I need to get to insects.
Way, way back when I was a wee lad of about 8-10, I went to fair type thing with my parents and some friends. I had gotten one of those ice cream cones that has the chocolate syrup with the nuts mixed in on top and was carrying it and occasionally nibbling.
Suddenly I felt something move on my hand.
I looked down and there was quite possibly the single biggest yellow jacket in world history on the back of my left hand. (At least it seemed like the biggest in the world to me.)
I didn’t dare smash it with my right hand, 'cause I’d tried that before and gotten stung not once, but 6!!! times for my efforts.
Eventually my dad was able to coax the yellow jacket to fly off.
Mine happened a long time ago, in the single digits of my age (now 17.) Anyways, I was eating dinner (bowl of rice white rice), and I felt an itch on my head. I proceded to scratch it, and out fell a semi-small maggot, which promptly fell into my bowl of rice. Needless to say, I was freaked out about my bowls of rice for a while.
Since I work as a Hired Killer, you’d think I’d have a lot of stories, but I imagine it takes a lot to phase me.
There was the time one of the techs brought back this weird, large, green insect that had gotten stuck to a mouse glue board. He was an experienced tech, but he had no idea what it was. Every other tech, even the very experienced ones, all looked at it, and their response was pretty much universal: “What the f**k is that?” We never found out.
The only other encounter I’ve had was when we switched from chemical termite treatments to bait systems. You have to monitor them, and actually look for the live worker termites. Well, I’d seen so many termites in a short period, that I started dreaming about them. Only they were large, real large – like Shetland ponies, and they were chasing me.
Oh, UGH!!! ** Wei ** - you reminded me of an awful series of bug encounters I had last year. My pantry had been taken over by moths. I knew that some of my rice, pasta, etc had moth larvae in them, and I threw away the things I knew to be “contaminated”… Unfortunately, I missed a few things. Once, I was making a pizza, and had gotten as far as rolling out the dough, when I realized it had some strange brown spots in it. On closer examination, these spots were found to have eyeballs. Thus, I concluded they were caterpillars, and threw out the dough (no pizza for me ;( ), and the crawly bag of flour I had used…
The OTHER incident was by far the grosser of the two. I had made some instant rice pilaf (or something of that nature) from a boxed mix… I ate it for dinner, and put the leftovers away in the fridge. It wasn’t until the next day, when I was eating said leftovers for lunch, that I noticed one of my grains of rice was moving. YEEEUUUCK!! In hindsight I wondered how much of my rice had really be larvae… I also wondered how this one had survived being cooked AND refrigerated.
This happened on the first day of school in the fourth grade. There was a small group of locust trees at the edge of the playground. Several of my classmates and I liked to play in this area. Over the summer a large yellow jacket nest had been built in the trees. We were not aware of this hazard until we suddenly found ourselves surrounding by a swarm of these horrid things. We all scurried to get out of there. I was stung twice, one on my arm and one on my chest. Some of the other kids were not as lucky as one girl had at least five stings. At least a dozen of us received stings. I never went near those trees again.
** aquariusrhimme **, you’ve totally solved a mystery!!! We used to get those things all the time in a DC rowhouse where I used to live and never know what the heck they were. They’re pretty gross.
HOLY CRAP! Of all the stories in this thread, that one is by far the creepiest, based on those two little words alone. I’ve literally shuddered at least six times reading this thread. Oooooooogy.
One of my earliest memories is of the willful plunging of my finger into a mud dauber hole. Lordamighty, don’t ever do that!!!
A horse farm I worked at was absolutely infested by wolf spiders. When you moved close to a stable wall, it actually seemed to shimmer as the spiders fled. Very creepy.
I complained to one of the stablehands, and he told me to take a closer look at the spiders. Every other one was feeding on a horsefly. Now these winged bastards bit hard and fast and made life miserable for both horse and man, but if one landed anywhere in that stable it was done for. The spiders never caused any problems for humans, and the workers were rather fond of them. But that shimmering wall trick was still really creepy.
Considering I live in Taiwan, I’ve had to put up with stuff like this for quite a while, so now I don’t even know what’s bad and what’s not… but then again, I’ve never eaten bugs, so that’s a godsend. But I like bugs like praying mantises and locusty grasshopper things – I catch them all the time to freak out my friends. However, I draw the line at cockroaches and stinging insects and big, hairy spiders. Of which there are way too many in Taiwan.
Then again, there’s that time when I switched on the AC and heard a rattling noise – and then was sprayed by cockroaches fleeing the fan and cooling mechanism. Turns out there was a colony of them hiding out in there. Ugh.
A couple of years ago, my sister caught a huge waspy-looking thing in her room. She trapped it in an empty peanut butter jar, and that thing lived in there for over a month before it finally gave up the ghost. And that was despite the fact that a couple of times a day one of us would vehemently shake the jar, causing it to bash against the walls, hoping to break something and speed its demise. I have no idea what kind of bug it was.
Summer before last, I was doing field work for the USFS. My partner and I were driving down a logging road, and came to a large tree accross the road, so we had no choice but to do a 234 point turn to get the truck turned around and head back up to the main road. I got out of the truck and directed while my partner turned the truck around. I though she knew she had it, and could drive forward, but she backed up one more time… and got the drive wheel of the pickup onto the soft shoulder. Stuck.
So I go back there to inspect and figure out how to get some traction to get the truck out. I suddenly feel stinging, and go running accross the road, yelling. We’d managed to drop the drive wheel right on top of a nest of bald-faced hornets. They were none to happy, and made it known by stinging my in the neck 3-4 times. Luckily it was me, as my partner was allergic to bees. I suited up in every article of clothing I could find, so only my eyes were showing, and used the firetools to get the truck out. The whole time I could hear the hornets smacking against my oilskin coat, and against the truck.
Story 2:
In HS we ate a lot of Top Ramen. My preferred method of preparation was with most of the broth drained off, and lots of melted cheddar. Several times in a row, over the course of a couple weeks, I’d prepare my ramen, only to find the finished product infested with small fruit fly/gnat looking things, so this of course resulted in lots of wasted food. My dad and I decided to find the source of these bugs, and closely inspected every ingredient going into the ramen. The noodles, cheese, and seasoning all seemed clean. The finished product again was infested. This happened to me probably 5-6 times, but never happened to another member of my family. I quit eating ramen for a considerable period of time.
This is not a bug or insect story, but this seems like an appropriate place to put it. I was in Seattle, Washington, on vacation at a somewhat rustic campground. There were showers, but they were all in one building, away from the cabins. I couldn’t sleep one late night, so I decided to take a shower. I undressed, grabbed my bathrobe, and headed out across the campgrounds barefoot. Suddenly, my foot hit something slippery, and I peered down to see that I had stepped on a four-inch long banana slug. This would have been bad all by itself, except that this particular banana slug had already been stepped on, and by someone wearing shoes. The only thing ickier than the outside of a banana slug is the INSIDE of a banana slug.
Many years ago I was on a “see the wild life” holiday in Costa Rica. I was staying in a cardboard box that passed itself of as a guest house up in the cloud forest. One evening, just before dusk, a column of army ants (Eciton sp.) entered the room through an ill-fitting window frame, i.e. between the frame and the wall. The ants then searched the half of the room opposite the bed. I sat on the bed and watched, after all I’d come to see the wild life. An astonishing variety of hopping, crawling and creeping things came, literally, out of the woodwork and tried to escape to my side of the room. I spent about ten minutes flicking them all back for the ants. When dusk fell, the ants slowed down and then just stopped moving, practically mid-stride. Some were holding dismembered bits of the assorted hoppers, crawlers and creepers.
I went down to dinner and arrived back in the room about ten p.m. The ants were still there, not moving. They weren’t bothering me so I went to bed. Next morning, I was up at five a.m. to go hiking in the forest. The ants were still there, still not moving. After I’d showered (discovering that the shower’s roof, but not the floor, was on their line of march) the ants started moving and by the time I’d dressed and was ready to go down for breakfast, the ants had gone.
It was a greatholiday, with lots of never to be forgotten moments.