“non-aggressive” :dubious: :eek:
Yours seems a friendly and delicate creature, but some centipedes where I live are dreaded. Here’s a description and picture of a venomous giant centipede that feeds on lizards, birds, etc. (I’m not sure ours is the exact same species, but is quite similar.)
They’re quite fast and ugly, with a sting more severe than any wasp or scorpion, though non-lethal. Along with mosquitoes and snakes, they’re a species we avoid (though the threat of any of these pales, of course, next to that of H. sapiens :smack: ).
Fortunately we’ve never seen more than 2 or 3 stray babies inside our house. We keep two species of lizard on hand for protection from such things. 
Edited to add: The wiki link above links to a Youtube video which may help show why I find these creatures unpleasant.
Eastern PA, too. The local news reported that thanks to our extra hot summer, there was probably time for them to get two generations out. <wibble>
They also said the best choice was to vacuum them up. It works nicely, but the damn things keep creeping in. UGH.
We have a few of those in the basement of the house, never seen them upstairs. I don’t mind them at all knowing that they eat other bugs, but seeing one still kind of makes me jump. I especially like pointing them out to other people and seeing their reaction. 
Nuke it from orbit.
I’ve encountered house centipedes before, but when we moved to El Paso we found a couple of some other species of demonspawn. They were monsterous. I wish I’d taken pictures because I can’t find any online. They looked kind of like these beasties. IIRC the body had big segments with yellow legs. The last segment had two tail things sticking out. When it got pissed off it raised it’s tail up and charged. Ugh.
I got stung on the leg by one of those motherfuckers in Hong Kong. It was only a baby one but it hurt.
We stayed in an old Chinese house with an infestation in the roof. My girlfriend’s sister was staying, and she got stung on the neck when she was asleep - her whole neck and half her face swelled really badly. The next night she was so freaked out that she decided to stay up the whole night as they were more active in the dark. It got to about 6am and she went into the kitchen to get a glass of water and stepped on another one in bare feet and got stung again. She wasn’t happy at all.
I got stung a second time by one that got into my bed in the Cook Islands. I woke up thinking someone was stubbing a cigarette out on my face. Fuck them.
Smash it. It will leave a lovely, ghostly outline of its legs but not its body. I had these little cave-paintings alllllll over the house I rented in grad school.
Me too.
I never saw one until we spent 3 months in New Mexico. Up until then, I lived in 'pede-free areas.
The house we rented was infested with them. About 6 weeks in, they started appearing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they ruined our little New Mexico sojourn, but they came close. I fookin’ hate those things, and every single night we’d sit in our living room and watch them zoom across the walls. And yes, we found one in our bed one night. Gaaah. I hate hate hate those things.
Born and raised on the beaches of California and I’ve never seen one.
Even now – in my mid-40s – I have yet to see a firefly and can’t remember the last time I experienced a mosquito.
What’s wrong with squash bugs? They’re pretty. Just the other day I found one on the couch, and I was admiring the intricacy of its patterns.
I use house centipedes to scare my dad with.
Is it the video which shoes the damn things eating a rat? Because there’s no way I’m watching even a second of that video again… :mad:
Aww what a gentle soul you are…
Whadda ya nuts!!!
Actually, I was of the same mind the first time I saw one. Which was just last week in the cafe I work at. It was in the bottom of a glass carafe and couldn’t get out. It was presented to me to take care of, wtf was I going to do with it? Smash it? So while I admired it I tried to figure out what it was, then recalled the SD threads about the many legged house predator. I talked to it for a bit, then took it out the back door and dropped it in a landscape bed, where it stretched out, hitched up it’s socks and hightailed it across the ground. At the time I felt like I had just released a little buddha or something, we had a little mutual understanding the centipede and I. But I hope I never see another one!
The one I meant shows a centipede slithering through the jungle and overwhelming a tarantula! Wow, what photography!
I did some Googling to conclude that the centipede we fear in Thailand is of a different genus and is only 6 inches long at most. (The first one I saw (and killed) slithered quickly past my very young bathing baby and sure seemed longer than that!) Funny thing is that the millipedes bother my wife much more than the centipedes. The millipedes are quite slow-moving and non-venomous.
At wikipedia I also read of a long-extinct myriapod up to 8.5 feet in length!
I’m only surprised, really, because it’s hard to fathom being unaware of something so hideously horrible that has long haunted and terrified me. I used to stand on chairs when I saw one and be afraid that if I killed it others would find me and exact revenge. Welcome to the nightmare.
Now I am able to not go into paranoid freakout mode, but I still don’t like them.
We get a lot of earwigs in the house here. Since they eat other bugs, I’m inclined to leave them alone when I find them but my wife insists on their death should she spot one. We have the same relationship with spiders.
Reading their Wiki entry, mommy earwigs are kind of neat.
At least the OP’s centipede kept a decent distance.
I got up this AM, went to the bathroom as usual, reached for the TP–
–and a centipede was on the toilet paper roll.
A small one, but at 5:30 in the morning a half-grown centipede is QUITE large enough. Especially when I came thisclose to picking it up and wiping myself with it!
This thread makes me happy that I live in Arizona. Every now and then I see a big roach on the sidewalk or something but that’s it.
Cowers under the covers.