One day I was eating this, what can best be described as trail mix that we get from the store evey now and then. It contained a mixture of nuts, rasins, things like that. What I didnt know was that there was a little “something” extra in this particular mix.
So I’m eating this mix like theres no tomarrow not paying attention to it at all. I eventually glance at the handfull of trail mix that I’m about to stuff my mouth with when I see all these little white worms squirming around. They could have been maggets, I’m no insect master. So who knows how many of those little bastards I scarffed down without knowing it. Funny thing is it didnt even taste any different.
I love this thread. It’s creeping me out to a high degree.
Story #1 : Late one Sunday night, I bought a box of cat food from a convenince store. I got home, poured it in kitty’s bowl, and discovered that it was about 30% wiggly white worms. Blurgh.
Story #2 : I took a bath at Mom and Dad’s house. I scrubbed my back with the back brush, then hun it back up again. Then I noticed a black spot on the brush. “Hmm, wuzzat?” says I, and scooted cloer to peer at it. The black spot started to move, and a huge hairy black spider extracted itself from the bristles. And I had just been rubbing him all over me. Then he fell in the tub with me. Mom heard a lot of screaming and splashing for a few minutes.
Why am I reading this thread? Gross!
Just after my grandfather died, my family and some close friends went camping on some property my grandmother owned at Greers Ferry Lake, Arkansas. I was 6 and my brother was 3. We learned about all kind of bugs that trip. The most memorable was when we were exploring in the forest and climbed up on a a fallen tree and were immediately covered with fire ant. My brother was almost eaten alive before the parents got to us. To this day he still has sensitivities to all sorts of things (like mosquito bites) because of the fire ants.
These both happened way back when I was maybe about 4 or 5, living in Long Island.
One day I was dragged along to go to the mall. It was a very loooong day, with lots and lots of walking. I felt my shoe was a little bit uncomfortable, but didn’t pay much attention to it. After all, it wasn’t bothering me that much anyways. Well, by the time we’d gotten home in the late afternoon, it was really starting to bug me. I took my shoes off first chance I got, and what do you think I found? A very big and very very flat giant stag beetle. This thing was almost as big as the entire inside of my shoe! And of course, my reaction was along the lines of “Cool! Hey, look what was in my shoe all day!” Although I did start shaking out my shoes before wearing them for a long time.
This one wasn’t really creepy or anything like that (to me anyway). We managed catch a giant stag beetle outside (I guess they were pretty common where we lived), and I decided to put it in my brand new Nature Bug Box. The bug box basically looked like those round-topped lunch pails you see in cartoons or something, but the bottom and two ends were made of wood and the rest was wire mesh. Well, we got the beetle into the box, marveled at it for a while, and left it on the windowsill in the kitchen. Then the next morning, my mom comes down to get coffee and make breakfast and all that, and notices something isn’t right. The beetle’s not in the box. In fact, he had literally ripped a huge hole in the wire mesh!! Then my mom looked down and found him lying on the floor, upside down and buzzing furiously because he couldn’t get up. I don’t remember what happend to him after that, but knowing my mom, he probably ended up worse for wear than the one in my shoe.
These two stories are probably why the giant stag beetle is my favorite insect ever. Big, nasty-looking, and extremely cool.
Dirx
I’m sure I’ve told this one before, although it didn’t happen to me. My friend woke up one morning, bleary and in a morning stupor. He staggered to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Brushing, brushing, the teeth, getting into all those crevices where the plaque likes to hang out. He spits his toothpaste foam into the sink . . . and notices tiny black bits in it. He looks closer, and sees what looks like a hair . . . or an antenna? He then looks at his toothbrush. Embedded in the bristles are the remains of a cockroach.
My own personal story is not so great, but I’ll share it. In fifth grade we had a segment on pet care, in which–duh!–we had to care for some kind of animal for a week or something. My partner and I were assigned the bunny rabbit. Cool! It’s furry, and warm, we can hug it and feed it veggies. We stocked some carrots, lettuce, and celery in a big Ziploc bag, which we then stowed in the cabinet under the cage. Pet care ended, and our bunny didn’t die, so we were feeling pretty good. Until I went to clean out the cabinet under the cage, and found that our pristine plastic bag of veggies was now a foul and viscous soup, teeming with maggots that made the bag undulate and ripple as they climbed over and around one another.
I feel for the poor moderator who has to vet this thread, I really do. Okay, enough of that. 
Congratulations! Every Northwesterner knows the feeling of squishing a slug with a bare foot; the longtimers know it more than once. Since you were just visiting, we’ll call you an honorary Puget Sounder.
My tales:
My brother and I were both attacked by swarms in our toddlerhood. I was locked into a beach gazebo with a wasp nest, and was stung at least a dozen times; to this day I react badly – read, spasmodically – to a deep buzz near my head. And my brother, while still in diapers, was set down in a park in Houston right on a fire ant nest. One minute he’s off to the side with nobody paying attention to him; the next instant he’s bright red and howling like he’s aflame, which of course he basically was.
Later, as a young adolescent, the house I lived in would periodically disgorge from ten to fifty inch-long brown millipedes from the bathtub drain. I’d go in for my morning shower, check the tub, and if it was full of bugs, I’d have to wash 'em back down. As far as I know, they never came up while I was actually showering, swirling around my feet, latching onto my ankles…
In college, one of my professors told me a story about a cabin he lived in while he worked as a smoke jumper. His first night there, he went into the kitchen for a midnight beverage. He didn’t turn on the light; he just went over to the fridge. Before he opened it, he heard a very soft scuttle scuttle scuttle sound in the room. Then he turned on the light, and he got a split-second view of the hundreds of cockroaches covering the ceiling – just before then began raining down on him. Apparently, the wood stove they used for cooking left yummy stuff on the ceiling along with the soot deposits. His cabin-mates hadn’t bothered to tell him.
On my honeymoon, in Fiji, I decided one day to go explore the wild vegetation out behind the resort. I climbed up a hill, looked around, and started down the other side. I lost my footing and slid a few yards, but managed to catch myself. And then I noticed that had I gone another three or four feet, my face would have plowed through a spiderweb with its occupant right in the center. And this thing was huge – the web was at least six feet across, and the spider inside, jet black with orange highlights, had a body the size of my thumb and legs the length of my fingers. I have no idea if it was venomous. I’m glad I didn’t find out. Actually, I still don’t know what kind of spider it was; I took a picture but then never followed up.
Further wonderful bug stories from the archives may be found here. Enjoy, and keep up the good work!
Update! After writing the foregoing, I decided after four years I might as well do some actual research. So I spent some time browsing the web, and I’m 99% certain what I saw was a golden orb spider. Totally harmless to humans, sez that site, and in fact other sites say Fiji is entirely free of poisonous snakes and spiders. So I could have safely blundered into the web, and other than irritating the spider that created it (one site says golden orb webs are unique in that they may last for years; the spider will leave dead bugs scattered around its web so birds can see it and not plow through it), I would have been in no danger.
So – anybody considering a trip to Fiji, fear not the crawlies! Well, other than the stingrays, I guess…
I would just like to say that I have almost vomited at least 5 times while reading this thread. Of course I had to read it all!
I dont really have any gross bug stories. Bugs dont particularly bother me, but spiders invoke a phobia-type reaction in me.
Hey my post got eaten!!
Well, I meant to say that everything was a bad bug encounter for me…I have a horrid phobia.
One of the worst is when I see those awful daddy long leg spiders crawling around my kitchen. Ugh, waltzing about like the own it. Yeah, who’s your daddy.
And speaking of bugs climbing on you…at community service week, we were out in the wilds, hacking away at…things. And of course, there were wild things, like insects. One of them took it upon itself to climb onto my shirt- more specifically, my boobie, which had my shrieking like someone half my age. Sadly, my (male) friend refused to brush it off. 
I would have looked a lot less crazed if he had just gotten rid of it…
'Nother one! A friend of mine moved out to the Gulf side of Texas to get away from Chicago winters. She came back a year later, with her two young children, vowing never to return to the South again. Seems she heard her 18-month old happily babbling in his crib one morning, so she went to investigate, only to find that the child had been carrying on a cheerful conversation with a scorpion that had wandered into the crib.
Hey, speaking of scorpions, whatever happened to Esprix’s Eduardo?
I got attacked by a monstrosity of a creature at a job once. It came scuttling out from under a cooler, causing me to jump up on a nearby chair in a most undignified (and wholly uncharacteristic) manner. Doing so didn’t put me out of its focus, however, as it tried jumping at me. I vacated the chair and trotted as nonchalantly as possible to the other end of the room with this thing chasing me, until I reached the shelf where we kept the wasp-killing Black Flag spray. It took three dousings and nearly ten minutes before the thing succumbed to the toxin.
I’m almost positive the thing was a mole cricket. It was at least 2 1/2 inches long and fast. Scary looking mofo, fo sho.
Heh. Mole cricket.
I used to live years ago in the house that was the inspiration for the Bloom County Boarding House in some comic strip whose name I forget, and we had a honeybee infestation for several years. One summer it got so bad that my alarm went off in the afternoon, and when I woke up the room was pitch black. There were so many bees in my windows that they’d blocked out all the light. It’s a rare experience to live inside a hive. Only stung once, and that’s because I stepped on one.
Gah. I shouldn’t read these threads in the dark. I have a phobia and I know I have a phobia and it’s a bad one too (I legitimately think spiders are going to crawl into my ears and penetrate my ear drums and start replicating in my brain and replacing my brain cells with a pathwork of babyspiderbodies that will unite forces to control my semi-living body and use it to do their evil in the world) … gah gah gah
Okay, well, I was living with a girl friend of mine and having trouble sleeping one night. On previous nights, I’d heard weird buzzingflapping noises as I turned out the lights. I had also noticed the amount of dead bugs in the light fixture hanging from the ceiling had seemed to increased, but I gave it no thought. Dead bugs don’t creep me out. Anyway, I was having trouble sleeping so I decided that the best way to remedy this was to pretend I was doing something purposeful and constructive. I got a notebook, a binder, and a pencil, and laid down in bed determined to write a dance manual that would Change The World.
I promptly fell asleep.
45 minutes later I awoke to a loud buzzing noise and some commotion going on in my hair, which is waist-length. I finally realise there is a bug of some sort in my hair, probably a flying one too, and I start freaking out. I couldn’t bring myself to reach into my hair and pull it out so I banged my head repeatedly into the bed trying to dislodge it. This did not work so I got up and ran into a wall (yes, seriously, I wasn’t exactly thinking) trying to dislodge it. This failed to work so I began beating the back of my head with the binder. Finally the bug fell out onto the bedspread and I saw that it was a huge wasp. I thwapped it with the binder until it stopped twitching, and curled up in a far away room on the couch, whimpering and crying until sunup.
The next day, her parents came over and helped us fumigate the house. It turned out the wasps had built a nest inside the air conditioning unit. There were over 200 dead wasp bodies in the room I was sleeping in after the fumigation had ended. And they didn’t get them all; several were still flying around, including the hellishly large queen.
Gah.
Recently I was in Port Stephens (in Australia) on holiday and my fiance and I were trekking from a shopping centre to the bowling alley by way of a gravel-like path through some tall weeds. Halfway there we decided we’d go back for the car rather than continue to trek (there were reasons, which escape me now). On the way back I looked over at him, intending to lean over and kiss his cheek, when I noticed a Hulking Monstrosity on his shoulder. There was a dragonfly the size of a freakin’ cockatiel on his shoulder. Its legs were thick and hairy and as wide as my pinky. I don’t know how it was possibly alive, it was so unwieldy and huge. It was just clinging to his shirt. It was mostly black. Its wings had a span of half of his shoulder-span. Seriously.
I of course start freaking the hell out and scream something like “ohmygodgetawaygetawaygetawaygetaway!!!” and yank away from him. He’s more rational about bugs than I am, but not much … once I finally managed to stutter “gahbigbugbigbugbigbug” he, too, started freaking out and jumping up and down shouting “Wherewherewherewhere!!!” and I couldn’t really answer him … finally it flew away and I pointed it out to him and he about fainted!
Gah bugs ick.
This thread has jinxed me!! Last night, hubby and I were getting ready to go to bed, straightening the blankets and fluffing the pillows, when I noticed movement - something with legs was slipping UNDER MY PILLOW. Naturally, I screamed, which made the hubby go, “Wha? Wha? WHA???” I’m hopping and pointing and yelling “BUG!”
He grabbed the pillows and looked all over for the bug, then concluded whatever it was had gotten away. I informed him that until the bug was a corpse, I was not getting into the bed. My gawd, it could have been anywhere. So we go back to straightening and fluffing, and I pick up my pillow and decided to shake it out over the bed. I still don’t know what it was, but it came scuttling out of my pillowcase and ran across the bed. It had to be two inches long, and it moved very fast. Hubby kept an eye on it while I ran (still shrieking) for toilet paper. He grabbed the bug and flushed it. When he retuned, I was curled in a small ball on the floor muttering, “in my PILLOW fergossakes!” He assured me that the bug was history, but I did not sleep well last night.
Synnove’s wasp story reminded me of my other interesting insect encounter. I was staying in a bed-sit in north London on a warm autumn night. I had left the window open and the curtains partly drawn. During the night, around 4 AM, I got up to go to the toilet and turned the light on. When I returned to my room, I noticed wasps flying in through the window, attracted by the light. There looked to be hundreds of the buggers flying round. (It was probably only a few dozen but they were moving quickly and I wasn’t wearing my glasses.)
Since I was tired and wanted to go back to bed, I needed a cunning plan. I first closed the window, to stop more coming in. Then I turned the light on in the hall and opened the hall skylight. The skylight was on the other side of the building so I reckoned no wasps would fly in. I left the door open, went back to the bedroom and turned the light off. The wasps in the room started to leave for the hall. After about ten minutes, most had left the room, so I closed the door and turned the light on. All remaining wasps, about half a dozen, were hunted down and killed and I went back to bed.
Next day, there were no wasps in the hall. As I’d hoped, they’d all left through the skylight when the sun came up. I’ve told a few people about this and the vast majority freaked out. The idea of being in a room with hundreds of wasps flying in seems to invoke unreasoning terror. It always amazes me to see people panic when
…when a wasp flies within ten feet of them. Dunno why, wasps have never frightened me even though I’ve been stung a few times as a kid after poking sticks into wasp nests.
One day I’ll learn how cut and paste works…