The lonely house centipede seems to get significant attention around here. I’ve read several threads where they were featured. Still, it’s probably been several months since I’ve had the pleasure of thinking about them… until last night.
Not sure why this crawled into my subconscious, but I had a strange and horrifying dream that a house centipede greeted me in the nursery I’m remodeling for my son that is due in 29 days. (Why, yes! I am a little behind schedule.) Apparently the cedar closet chased away all of its food.
Naturally, when this happens, the centipede grows rapidly and disgustingly to human-size proportions. Each of its segments were bulging and showing signs of an impending molt… sort of like Bibendum would look if he had 96 more limbs and his exoskeleton whitewalls had a smaller radius. The beast looked at me and snarled. In its demonic voice it told me that it was starving. Judging by his healthy size, the 'pede wasn’t telling the whole truth. He had a darker secret; one that I was about to learn. In the same way a 11 foot python ingests a rabbit, the house centipede ate my newborn son - but without the whole strangulation aspect.
I’m pretty sure that I saw this starting to happen before we fled our New Mexico house that was infested with centipedes. Not having a baby with me, the 'pedes were threatening our dogs.
I hate those things. I don’t see how anyone can stand them in their house.
If you have a centipede infestation, I would be worried less about the 'pedes than wondering what’s in your house in sufficient quantity that all of them are feeding on.
The single household insect that gives me nightmares is the silverfish. The first time I saw one was a few years ago, and it was sitting still. I moved in closer to examine it, having never seen anything like it before. As I was looking at it, it moved. And I almost vomited. I think my eyes also crossed and I may have squealed like a girl. Its jerky unnatural movement reminded of Samara from The Ring, but this thing was REAL and IN MY HOUSE.
When I was a kid I worked in my mother’s basement pottery studio, which had numerous gigantic house centipedes. One day I spotted the great-grandaddy of them all - it must have been a monsterous four inches long. I took careful aim and beaned it with a handful of wet clay, killing it (though not instantly - the truly gruesome thing about these creatures is how the legs continue to quiver after they are dead).
Anyway, it was such a prime example that I put it on a drying shelf to proudly show off to others - and promptly forgot about it. A week later another employee was cleaning out the shelf and came across the lump of dry clay, picked it up, saw what was imbedded in it - and shrieked like a banshee.
She then put it back - in the deepest, darkest recesses of the studio. A couple of years later someone else found it.
You think a dream about a little ol’ centipede is scary? When the alarm went off this morning it thankfully interrupted my dream about our Secretary of the Treasury. Centipede or Geitner, centipede or Geithner? Yeah, those widdle ol’ pedes don’t seem so awful now, do they?
Malacandra, bwhaaa. How on Earth did you come acrosss that?
Perhaps you were subconsciously remembering this scene from Peter Jackson’s King Kong? None of the assorted dinosaurs, savages, slugs, spiders or apes from that film alarmed me in the least, but the giant centipede scene gave me a case of the heebie-jeebies which is still going on.
I had to open that with one eye closed and the other averted. Why did I feel I needed to open it at all!!!
One of my vivid memories was my mom on the phone and having to say “Hold on, there’s a centipede in my sink!” because we (including her) were all creeped out by it and had to take action!
Last spring one charged me. I was trying to whap it on the ceiling, it fell on the kitchen counter and scurried BACK. I didn’t want to get too close to the counter, I was leaning forward with a fly swatter ---- and it comes out on the floor in FRONT of the bottom cabinet and makes a beeline right for me, at like 50 mph. My second whap was thankfully better than the first.
Google. There was a bit of a “centipedes in your vagina” meme going on not too long back, the link was just one of a number of references. Here’s another.
I’m a crazy bug lover, and I actually think the little 'pedes are cool. I’ve never been bitten by one, even when I pick them up, and they’re great for scaring my dad with.
