Earlier this week a bug flew into my ear, and it died there.
Before it died, it was alive, inside of my ear.
Something was inside of my head that was not me.
It moved inside of my head, and I felt it and I heard it all at once.
Have you ever seen a fly trapped between two panes of glass?
It buzzes and whines and flings itself frantically about without ceasing.
It will do the same thing in the human ear.
It will fling itself in every direction but outside.
I went mad, and I stayed mad, and I am mad now.
I would have clawed out my own ear, had it not died in there.
Once it died — once we killed it with the judicious application of mineral oil –
I no longer cared about anything.
“I can wait,” I said. “I’ll go to the doctor tomorrow. I still want to go to the beach.”
Once you’ve had a live bug in your ear, a dead one cannot scare you.
A dead bug does not move.
Anything can be endured.
Please share your own stories with bugs and bodily integrity below in the comments. We have been through the fire together, my sisters and brothers.
Nothing can hurt us now.
Tags: body horror, bugs, ears, weird true tales, you guys are so lucky i chose this picture from the fly and not another one
I have inhaled many, many flies, given that I ride horses a lot and chat while I’m going quite fast. I am not sure whether it’s worse when they go up your nose and die in your sinuses, or down your throat and you can feel them buzzing halfway down.
once a bug flew into my eye and died in there, and it didn’t come out for like two days. i wished for death.
Oh yes, I really hate that.
I have a bad habit of cycling without sunglasses (it’s early morning! I shouldn’t have to wear them!), which means I get bugs in my mouth and, worse, my eyes on a fairly regular basis. The ones that stay in your eye for a day or two are the worst. Sometimes you can’t even see anything when you look closely in the mirror, but SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT and you know it’s there, and then one blessed day you’ll blink and it just flakes out.
I believe I will starting using “I wished for death” when describing terrible situations. It’s a very dignified way to express horror, I think!
Ooh, I hate when that happens. Especially if they sting first.
I ride a bicycle in rural areas and keep bees, so I’m used to ingesting bugs or getting them stuck in terrible places, but I’ve never had a bug in my ear. Mallory is special.
Thank you for not choosing the other one.
If anyone needs me I will be under my desk whimpering.
i once ingested an amoeba in africa, does that count? a very nice indian doctor killed it with some incredibly strong antibiotics (along with everything else in my stomach)
We all have our crosses to bear. It seems that I am doomed to ask, “BUT PRAY, TO WHICH PART OF THIS VAST CONTINENT DO YOU REFER?” for evermore. #seriouslythough #countrieshavenames #withlovefromafrica
#PREACH
Yeah I had one of those horrible little white closet moths wedge itself into my ear once and it was the worst thing to ever happen, to anybody. They keep scrabbling around and clawing at things and working their way deeper, inside your skull, and every time it quiets down and you think it might have just died or gotten out or something it starts again.
oh my god what is it going to take to get you to create an account because i have to approve your comments in moderation all the tiiiiiime
by which i mean i love you and you’re clearly A Toastie so go ahead and settle in and get an account so you don’t have to wait to see your comments show up, i’m not mad at you
I can’t speak for Goatse Fanfiction, but personally, I delayed getting an account just because I’ve been exposed to so many unmoderated internet things that it was nice to see moderation in action.
I didn’t know real unmoderated accounts were a thing! I don’t know anything! I have bugs in my head!
Bless you and everyone at the Toast forever for moderating comments. This site, The Hairpin, and Offbeat Bride are The BEST for keeping comments awesome.
AAGGHH! Good Night Nurse, this story wins hands down no matter what comes after it. All of the freaking heebie-jeebies, ALL OF THEM.
OH and BTW I have the world’s worst health insurance and this was on a Saturday night, so I had to wait until next Monday evening to go to a doctor and get it flushed out.
Turns out you can pass a weekend pretty quickly thinking “don’t think about the head infestation” over and over to periodic skull buzzing.
Ack, a moth flew into my dad’s ear once, years ago, while he was operating lights for a production at the local amphitheater. It did the same thing to him, and he ended up in the ER that night because it was so traumatizing.
My mom will not forgive me for telling this story, BUT.
Once she was camping with my dad long before aravis was born or even thought of, and she went to use a vault toilet in a remote campground somewhere and did not notice the toilet was home to a variety of crawly things and buzzy things. And a wasp landed in her underwear, unbeknownst to my mom, who was preoccupied, and she did not notice the wasp until she went to go replace her pants.
The wasp stung her in an extremely sensitive, delicate area which NO ONE wishes to have a wasp sting them in. She went weeping to find my dad for sensitive first aid. It was not a great day.
THIS IS MY NIGHTMARE.
Aravis’ story is worse than mine, but today’s the day I get to share my yellow-jacket story that I couldn’t tell my (male) coworkers yesterday. When I was eight I was stuck in a car with a yellow jacket, and being eight, I flipped out and started swatting at it. That mofo FLEW UP MY DRESS and stung me near the knee and on the butt cheek. THE BUTT CHEEK. I had to be sedated, no joke.
These days I’m known to touch honeybees or bumbles occasionally (and gently) as they’re gathering pollen. Fuzzy! (I know, I should leave them alone, especially the beleaguered honeybees. I just like to prove to myself that I can do it.) I still give wasps and hornets a healthy, wide berth, though.
Which Amy are you? Are you my Amy, or the other Amy? Because if you are my Amy, and you haven’t told me this story, I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU.
(You are the other Amy, and I am sorry for all-capsing you. Oh no! How terrible! Yellow jackets: the sting makes people cry, I think, because I always feel like cry after getting stung.)
(I also pet bees, and so does the Amy I was talking to – it is nice to meet another bee-petter – and the confluence of an Amy who comments on the toast and pets bees seemed unusual enough that there could be only one.)
Ugh WASPS the other summer one flew out of the mailbox and stung me and I had golf-ball sized swelling on my arm. h8 them!
I had a wasp crawl up the inside of my jeans when I was picnicking on the green at the college I was applying to and when I stood up it stung the hell out of the inside of my knee and that was horrible enough, I don’t like to imagine my butt or…more sensitive places.
Had an angry rash the size of my hand for years afterwards whenever I got hot. Eventually it faded.
(Ended up attending that college. Never, ever sat on the green again.)
THE EXACT SAME THING happened to me when I was eight, except it was a friend who accidentally swatted it up my skirt. It was awful.
I had a yellowjacket sting me twice when I was at overnight camp, including once on my un-bra-ed pubescent chest. I calmly went to the camp nurse and sat patiently until she was free, at which point she was aghast that I hadn’t asked her to see me right away.
I also had a lizard crawl into my underwear as a wildlife-obsessed 5-year-old in Costa Rica. I have blocked that from my memory, but it’s one of my mom’s favorite stories.
In retrospect, the natural world and I don’t get along as well as I think we do.
I once inadvertently sat on a yellow jacket. It was deviously blending it with the pattern on the bedspread on the bed in my aunt’s guest bedroom. It stung the back of my thigh *and* my hand. This was at least 15 years ago. My aunt still has that same bedspread on that same bed and I side-eye it every time I go over there.
And this is why I don’t go camping.
OH MY GOD.
This is like the real-life version of that Girl Scout camping fear that a snake will come out of the latrine and bite your butt. 🙁
I watched a show once about botflies that laid their eggs in a man’s head, and then they grew in there until he could hear them and his helmet didn’t fit anymore. And now I secretly half wish this on every fb friend who manages to take an exotic vacation outside the country. (WARNING: do NOT google botfly unless you want to vomit)
Botflies are hideous – horses get them a lot. We all (horse-owning people) have special knives for scraping the eggs off them before the horses eat the eggs when scratching themselves and then erupt in bot flies.
Horse people are totally boss. I could never.
You’ve got to be properly careful about washing hands and scrubbing under nails after de-botting! Horse people are often notoriously careless about general hygiene in terms of eating with filthy hands, but that is one ironclad rule.
BOTFLIES. The squirrels on the campus where I went to college all had botflies and it was very, very horrifying.
The billy goat at the farm I WWOOFed on in Costa Rica had a botfly larvae situation in his extremely prominent testicular sac. He was a nasty bastard, but I still felt horrified on his behalf.
One time at summer camp I had my friend french braid my hair. After complaining about an hair tickling my scalp all day we discovered that it was actually a june bug that had crawled into my hair and was lodged my braids. It was stuck and flailing against my head and I was 10 so of course I cried. If you have seen a june bug then you would know that crying is an acceptable response to a half-smushed, still alive june bug stuck in your french braids.
Shaking out your hair during summer and having bugs fall out is soooo icky. Why were they there all along??? Agh!
In 8th grade, I had a really traumatizing moment where I was sitting in the library and the kid next to me said, “What’s that?” Then put his pencil in my hair and took it out and, alas, a bug was crawling on the pencil. No one was mean to me about it – at least not vocally/in front of me – but it was mortifying. Now when I’m outside and find little ants in my hair, I just flick them out and shudder, then try to block it out entirely.
When I was in high school, I took Japanese language courses. Our teacher was from Japan, and he ate nattou religiously. Nattou is basically fermented soy beans, and is eaten for the microorganisms that accumulate on it. The way I understand it, these microorganisms, once ingested, clean out your intestines, which is supposedly healthy.
One day, he brought enough for the class, and my friends tried it. Being a horribly picky eater, I abstained. For the next few days, they were exhausted. Reflecting on why they had no energy, their best guess was that the microorganisms within them were consuming significant amounts of their food before their own bodies had the chance to process it into bodyfuel(tm).
P.S. It is a total myth that people swallow eight spiders a year.
Also I’m like 98% sure that if I had a live bug lodged anywhere INSIDE MY BODY I would be driving to the emergency room posthaste and just not giving a single shit if they made fun of me afterwards. Not one single fuck.
When you said you had a bug in your ear, all I could think of was poor John Hanning Speke. The most gruesome scene in “Mountains of the Moon” is when he has a beetle get in his ear: “Speke suffered severely when he became temporarily deaf after a beetle crawled into his ear and he tried to remove it with a knife. He also later went temporarily blind.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hanning_Speke
Oh god…I was JUST going to mention that scene. I watched that movie late at night, in Florida, while working an unpaid internship, with no medical coverage and a raging ear infection that made me want to jam pointed objects into my ear. I…get…very uncomfortable just thinking about my ear/the scene/that night/scissors…sometimes…
Not a bug actually inside my body but….I once sat through a Russian lit class in college with the girl across the table staring at me intently for most of the class. I thought she was cool and brilliant so I was flattered. After class she walked up to me and my heart was fluttering. She reaching her hand toward me and brushed my hair near my cheek. I wondered if we were going to start making out. One of THE LARGEST spiders I have seen fell out of my hair and onto the table. IT WAS THERE. RIGHT BESIDE MY CHEEK AND MY EYE AND I DID NOT KNOW. IT WAS SO LARGE.
And this is nothing compared to what you have been through Mallory. In the words of Molly Solverson, “I’m not sure that I want to live in a world where a thing like that can happen to a person.”
I feel like there is a social contract that you don’t just SIT THERE LOOKING at a spider in someone’s HAIR without telling them or doing something! I would be so mad if that happened to me!
A while ago, I was wearing a fairly low-cut vest top in the summer, and doing my normal horsey chores – felt a tickling in my cleavage, assumed it was a bit of hay or something, ignored it, felt it keep tickling, looked down and it was a HUGE spider – must have been an inch across. I’m actually fine with spiders, but this one gave me such a shock I did do the whole leaping in the air and squeaking thing while I fished it out of my boobs.
NO.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
Another Bugs On Not In Me Story: I walked under this tree once where a bunch of caterpillars had hatched and were all hanging down all over it. Very disgusting, whatever. I thought I had successfully avoided running into any of them, but when I got home after like a half an hour on the bus I felt a little tickle near the top of my cleavage and I scratched it through my shirt AND THERE WAS A CATERPILLAR IN THERE AND I SMASHED IT AGAINST MYSELF ACCIDENTALLY. AGAINST MY CLEAVAGE.
This story completely destroyed me. I’m ruined.
It is NOT OKAY to sit and stare at someone unwittingly harboring a spider on their person. That girl was NOT COOL AND BRILLIANT or she would have intervened sooner. (Maybe the spider was dangling near you most of the class, and she only intervened when it touched your person? In your shoes, I would have been telling myself that palatable version for years.)
I once made a friend of a stand-offish new acquaintance by seeing a spider on her shoulder and, not knowing if she’d be anxious about, saying “Come here a sec,” scooping it off, cupping my hands together, and taking it outside.
As it turned out, she was terrified of spiders; when I closed the door, she was yelling “WHAT WAS IT WAS THERE A SPIDER ON ME?”
I said “Nothing, it’s nothing” and she just about cried in gratitude that I didn’t make her acknowledge what had happened. (Note: if ever you see a centipede near me, please follow this protocol.)
Do they make earmuffs for summer?
EARPLUGS.
I haven’t slept without earplugs since I saw THAT ONE SCENE in The Wrath of Khan. In theaters. I was twelve.
My family has a history of bug-in-ear situations, and since I work in the same field as my dad, my supervisors occasionally suggest I replace the muffs on earmuffs with tea strainers – said modified muff would be part of my PPE.
My bug story is not gross. To me it is even lovely, but others may not find it so: I was once enjoying some outdoor lovin’ with a gentleman friend on a huge boulder in a river. After we nuded up and were making out, I looked down just in time to see a big dragonfly come buzzing over and ever-so-gently alight on the very tip of my partner’s boner. I thought it was great and clearly a sign that nature approved of us, but he was less thrilled and scared it away.
This is AMAZING and I agree that it was definitely a sign of approval from nature. Also, thanks for not sharing something that made me want to die and/or remove myself from my body.
Huh. My husbands father got a chunk of his arm chomped out by a dragonfly (apparently), so maybe he was right to scare it off.
A chunk of his arm? Was this a dragonfly or a dragon?
Dude needs to get some perspective, this is way less obnoxious than when birds start landing on you and deer gather round to stare while you’re doin’ it.
I once napped on the grass before a date on campus, as you do when you’re a precocious 19-year-old college student, and awoke to find two ladybugs mating on my skirt. I thought it was a sign that my date would go well. It did not. Nature was just trolling me.
A bee once flew into my ear when I was pumping gas. I reflexively dug it out and flicked it away without really thinking about it. Then I thought about it and almost died. I’m almost dying now writing this.
I’m almost dying just reading it and now am going to be Very Nervous next time I put gas in my car.
There are leeches in…the Amazon, maybe (that’s where most terrifying animals/plants are) that will crawl up your nose while you’re sleeping, and then drink so much of your blood that they swell up and can’t get out and you just suffocate. I read about them when I was a kid in one of those ‘Introduction To Terrifying Things’ compendiums that children love, and even though it’s been almost 20 years, the thought of these leeches still haunts me. I can’t bring myself to Google them, and I’m hoping someone knowledgeable will show up here and tell me that they’re a myth.
See the Crazy Amazon Creature that stuck with me was the long, thin fish that swims up any penis it finds and then deploys barbs to stay there, but your nose leech is definitely going to haunt me for a loooong time.
CANDIRU
Basically not as scary as reported! Thanks, wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candiru#Attacks_on_h…
I just googled “nose leech,” and this is not going to help: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8623332…
“The leech could feed on aquatic mammals, from their noses and mouths for example, where they could stay for weeks at a time.”
OH GOD. On the plus side, it doesn’t sound like these leeches actually kill their hosts. That’s something.
There’s also a fish in the Amazon that’ll swim up your urethra and lodge itself there with barbs. Rainforests are great and all but man are they ever full of absolute horrors.
EDIT: I’d grouch that someone else beat me to it, but I’m too busy being pleased that multiple people already know about it.
I didn’t even finish reading your sentence before I nope nope nope nope scrolled away from it… just as I would react to an actual threat to my wellbeing
Twelve-year-old me has some serious questions, like how did they get it out and what kind of bug was it and did the doctor offer to let you keep it
I like you.
Dcotors never offer to let you keep things — I routinely ask if I can keep things like wisdom teeth or cysts and please observe that I have been given none of these things. (I shouldn’t say “routinely”. I have had one wisdom tooth and one cyst removed. But I didn’t get to keep either one.)
#stillbitter
A surprising amount of my birthing class was about how to make the doctors let you keep your placenta if you wanted to.
I once had bones removed from my ankles and asked to keep them. I woke up and asked for the bones, and was told they had been thrown away. AND THEN! I found out the asshole doctor showed them to my dad and boyfriend, but got rid of them before I woke up. They literally have seen parts of me that I never will. That doctor was the worst. I still feel violated.
*hssssssssssss* WORST, I hope that doctor gets a bug in his ear
God you shoulda taken his as a fair replacement.
It’s like, I really had plans to bore a hole in them and put them on an anklet, and he ruined it. He was also the worst and is likely the reason misandry exists.
That would have been so awesome! Jerk dr.
And this is exactly why I sleep with earplugs.
something half-woke me during the night – sleeping the sleep teenagers only can sleep in a triple layer bunk bed in a dorm. it was itchy. but not worth waking up over; i was a teenager, after all. waking up in the morning, i observed that my entire body was covered in tiny little red bumps. they were not just itchy; they were maddeningly itchy. and if you’re allergic to creepy crawlies’ bites, like they figured out i was after several days in which my sanity plummeted to unknown depths because of the itching, this is bad news. they did not take up residence in any orifices (as far as i know), but invaded i sure felt. don’t let the bed bugs bite has made perfect sense to me ever since.
wait so like what kind of bug was it? there’s like a zillion different kinds.
When I was a bridesmaid last year, a bee landed on my eye during the ceremony. I did not flinch. I DID NOT FLINCH.
Above and beyond.
You’re an actual real hero.
Man even those British soldiers who get assigned to stand around in the funny hats and let tourists mess with them are gonna flinch for bee-eye
Once when I was singing in an outdoor choir performance, a HUGE bee flew into one of my choir mate’s ears and then took its sweet time exploring before lazily flying away again.
She never stopped smiling and never stopped singing.
I think it gave our choir director inflated expectations for the rest of our performances.
*bows down* I am not worthy to type in your internet presence!
I did tell EVERYONE about it at the reception though, just to make sure they knew how great I am.
No bodily penetration, but a true story about a flying insect nearly suffocating a biker.
Said motorcyclist was riding on a hot day and, contrary to his usual safety-first habits, unzipped his jacket a few inches. As you know, motorcycle jackets incorporate padding, rigid slide plates, and modern day chain mail for protection. This day the jacket was mostly closed, just flapping back and forth no more than a couple of inches in the region of the rider’s chest.
Suddenly the biker sees a flying insect he is gaining on so rapidly he cannot change course to avoid it. The June Bug managed to find that slight opening in the jacket and died on the biker’s chest.
At highway speed, the impact was great. So great that the biker’s chest muscles clenched and he could no longer breathe. Barely maintaining control of his bike, he slowed to a stop on the highway shoulder and struggled to inhale. After what seemed an eternity he was able to take in air in tiny quantities.
He was still coughing when a state trooper stopped to check on him. Unable to talk, the biker pantomimed the event. The trooper guessed correctly and, after a good laugh, told the biker it was June Bug season and issued a stern reminder to zip up that jacket fully. No reminder needed: I know that biker, and 30 years later he stills closes that jacket up to his neck even on the hottest days.
June Bugs: biker haters of the insect world.
I haven’t ingested any bugs (although I did listen to that rumour that everyone swallows 10 spiders a year in their sleep with interest) but I once got a mosquito bite on my clit. It was terrible. Someone told me to heat a spoon and apply it to the site of the bite but I think they got this information from general mosquito bite recovery culture and not clit mosquito bite recovery culture, and after I tried their cure I couldn’t wear underwear for three days.
WHAT, OH MY GOD. I’m so sorry.
AAAAAAH OH NO. 🙁
D: D: D: (many, tiny screams)
NONE OF THAT IS OKAY I AM SO SORRRRRRRRRY
Once I bit into a sandwich and half an earwig started wriggling around in my mouth. It bit my tongue with those pincers.
The other half was still in my sandwich.
I have loathed sandwiches since.
Oh my god this story will haunt me forever. Oh my god. Is this true? Oh my god. I always knew my distrust of sandwiches was legit.
YES, I was about 8 and it has traumatised me for 20 years
aaah noo earwig sandwich noooooo your family makes the worst sandwiches
I’M SCREAMING
I was once chased by yellow jackets while eating KFC popcorn chicken and I haven’t been able to touch the stuff since then.
Earwig trauma may trump that juuuuuuuuust a little though (dear lord)
::open mouthed screams until passes out from lack of oxygen::
This literally is a nightmare of mine (well, not this specifically, but earwigs in general feature in a bug-related horror thought.
I am flailing around and making a mess of things at my desk. oh god oh god oh god.
I said “BLEGH” out loud before I even got to it biting you, which I sincerely hope I will wipe from my brain as too horrible to contemplate.
Thank you for validating my choice to avoid sandwiches.
Ohhhhh, the tongue-bite! When I was in pre-school, I was riding one of those bobbily metal playground animals on giant springs (what on earth are those things called?) on a very windy day, and singing into the wind (I was a gleeful little thing). A red ant blew into my mouth and bit me on the tongue, and I can still remember that awful stinging pain!
Not even going to lie as I read that I got this intense desire to rinse my own tongue out of a kind of sympathy OH GOD I’ve always hated sandwiches FLAMES FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE
For my part, I thought it was something to do with a culture clash or whatever (can handle rice, can handle noodles, but sandwiches? despite being born and raised in a sandwich-eating country? NOPE), but you have revealed to us the truth. I am so sorry that happened to you.
1. When I was about 5 years old, I had a terrible itching in my ear, and my mother didn’t really believe me. She put sweet oil or mineral oil or something like that in there with a cottonball, and the next morning at breakfast she was semi-berating me for whining about my ear the night before. I pulled out the cottonball and two huge dead black ants fell out of my ear.
2. In college, I was sitting on the ground in a park for a while. When I got up to leave, I felt a pain in my butt cheek. I got the terrible sinking feeling of “oh my god there’s a bug on me,” went behind a tree, unbuttoned my pants and a huge unidentified bug (maybe a dragonfly or something similarly sized) flew out of my pants. It had crawled into my jeans and underwear somehow and bitten me on the butt 9 times before I released it.
BOY is this ever the wrong thread for a bug-phobic lady to be reading. I’m going to assume all of y’all have awesome/horrific stories and am just going to show myself out now.
My younger brother had a beetle fly into his ear while we were camping. It was in there for about 45 minutes, until he stopped climbing on rocks and turning over logs long enough to tell my mom. She scrunched his ear and the beetle flew out, and there were jokes and merriment because my dad has also had an insect fly into his ear.
That night, he woke up and explained there were things crawling in his ear. Long story short: bug had laid eggs, eggs hatched, he had a colony of maggots in his ear.
He was eventually fine, and complained significantly less, ear-bemaggoted, than I did, forced to be outside.
D:
NOOOOOOOO
I should note that “eventually fine” means “after a doctor took a very gentle water pick to his ear, he had to wear an earplug while swimming for a week”. I realize now it indicates a more severe situation.
I’m generally pretty okay with gross bug stories, but I draw the line at EAR MAGGOTS ahhhhhhh
I was sitting in a lecture once in college and realized partway through that there were things falling from the ceiling. They were larvae of some kind, falling from a nest on the ceiling. Onto me, onto my books. Into my hair. It was a guest lecture and I didn’t want to leave in the middle, so I just sat there. After class ended, a girl came up to me and said, “Um, you…you have bugs in your hair.” I didn’t know how to explain so I was just sort of like “Haha…yeah…”
I always checked the ceiling before choosing a seat from then on.
Once I licked an envelope and there was a squished cockroach on it.
full body shudders
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I was once reviewing a terrible piece of outdoor theatre while wearing shorts, an excessively flimsy pair of underwear, and sitting on metal bleachers. There were quite a number of ants around, several of which I removed from my person between taking notes. However, I apparently missed the approach of one that crawled up my leg, into my underwear, and ALL OVER MY LABIA . Because I was very serious about my responsibilities as a Theatahhhh Critic, I couldn’t get up and deal with it, nor could I stick my hands down my bottoms in full view of the cast and other spectators. So I just continued taking notes while that ant got fresher with me than, at that point, any human had managed.
(It eventually just wandered off onto the bleacher like nothing had happened.)
Ants…so frickin’ cavalier…
The bugs didn’t go inside me, per se, but I had bedbugs during a semester in Florence and woke up once to 60 individual bites all over my body.
I used to cycle near daily, and three years in a row, around the first day of spring, a bug smooshed its way into my eyeball. Pretty good. And it was always the right.
I still remember when I was in kindergarten, bursting out of the school doors for recess and screaming with joy—until a fly flew into my mouth. (It tasted super bitter, btw.)
A family story goes that my aunt saw my toddler cousin chewing on something and asked what she was eating. “Raisins!” she said proudly, pointing to the windowsill where several dead bugs lay.
I’ve never gotten over that This American Life story about the family that lived with so many roaches that one of them had to go to the doctor to get a roach removed from her ear—twice. TWICE. Roaches body horror noooo! Second only to gross parasite worms for me, probably.
I got a tick in my ear once when I was little. I’d tell you how I got it out or what happened after that, but I think I’ve effectively blocked it out. All I remember was telling my mom that something in my ear was itching and her FLIPPING THE FUCK OUT.
I stepped into an outdoor shower once in Costa Rica and turned the water on and pulled the curtain across, and there was a spider bigger than my hand in a fold of the curtain right at face level. Not exactly a bug-on-my-body story, but I think being naked four inches away from a giant tarantula still counts.
Also, our entire bodies are crawling with billions of invisible bacteria at all times, yay! We are really more walking bacteria colonies than individual beings.
would rather touch 10000000 bugs than ever look at a real life tarantula thanks but no thanks
I played with tarantulas as a kid. They’re not poisonous. They’re slow-moving and slow to anger. Just handle them gently and move slowly. My sister and I had tarantula races. Plus, they have so many different pretty colors and patterns.
But I understand completely how freaky they look to anyone without a proper introduction. So big. So fuzzy.
NOPE
True, I actually handled a class pet tarantula in Grade 2 and am generally not overly freaked out by spiders. But unexpectedly finding oneself in an enclosed space eye-to-eye with one whose eyes were big enough that I could see my vulnerably nude self reflected in them was rather unsettling.
I’m with you. I would scream bloody murder were I face-to-naked-face with anything even half the size of a tarantula indoors. Arachnids in my house are, by definition, *not* properly introduced. I trap them and usher them outdoors where they may have a rent-free existence in my yard as long as they agree to consume all the particularly hateful insects (wasps, ants, mosquitoes) and STAY OUT OF MY HOUSE.
I AM NEVER GOING TO A PLACE WHERE TARANTULAS JUST WANDER ABOUT.
NOOOOOOO.
Once, I was relaxing in the bath and a huge dead cockroach came floating out from somewhere behind me. I levitated out in a total Gift of Fear-style calm escape, and found myself standing naked, silent, and wide-eyed in front of my confused husband. I survived, but the roach and the book I had been reading did not.
No. Not this. Not today.
*reads comments for some unknown reason*
*screams silently*
One hazard of going to college in the south is that the bugs are freaking enormous, and sometimes you have a stupid apartmentmate who holds parties during the summer with the apartment door wide open to the outside world. (Another hazard of going to college in the south is that it’s unbearably hot in the summer, so there is less than zero reason to do this.) The apartment then becomes filled with giant bugs so that sometimes you come home during one of these parties, wash your face in the bathroom sink, then turn and wipe it on your towel which now has a giant daddy long legs residing on it. As you feel its spindly legs scrape down your cheek, you curse your apartmentmate, and her children, and her children’s children.
While on a mission trip to the Bahamas in my misspent youth, we had a sand flea… Situation.
I counted bites when I got home. They were in the hundreds.
Oh god why did I read the whole comment section WHY 🙁 🙁 🙁
One time, a bee stung me ON THE BACK OF MY TONGUE.
I was walking my dog, and I opened my mouth to tell him to sit and the bee flew right in before I even knew what was happening. It stung my tongue, and as I flailed around trying to get it out I ended up biting the bee in half (it crunched) before spitting it onto the ground.
My middle school nemesis (his name was Brandon. One time he threw a spitball at me and I slapped him and he cried and then sent his dad to complain to my mom about it) was across the street watching the whole thing.
When I got home my mom made me put half an onion on the back of my tongue to get the stinger out.
OMG ME TOO except I was 6 and it was hiding in my cup of juice. 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁
Wait. How does the onion work?
It sucks the singer out! Trust me, it really does work it’s just not so fun when you have half an onion jammed at the back of your mouth. But on a leg, or arm or something it’s great and makes the sting hurt less/heal faster.
The summer I was 19, I was on my way to babysitting, drinking something (iced tea?) out of a straw. I guess I must’ve pulled the straw out of the drink, because somehow, I sucked a WASP up through the straw. It stung the back of my throat and the roof of my mouth before I managed to spit it out.
Some nice stranger walked me the two blocks to the house I was supposed to be babysitting at. The family gave me a ton of Benadryl and Advil, drove me home, and missed their play. I was a wreck for an embarrassing number of hours afterwards—from the shock more than anything. (Don’t get me wrong: it hurt like nobody’s business.)
I was mostly fine by the next day, and I babysat for that family for a few more years!
I completely regret not having the wherewithal to check whether the wasp was killed in the ordeal.
oh my god. this is so much worse that anything wasp related that I can imagine (except maybe multiple wasps being involved). I hate wasps and don’t care how undignified I look when I see one and run/flail away sometimes knocking things over in the process. So awful, way to prevail!
There’s some sort of cloud of tiny bugs hovering around lake michigan right now and every time I go outside, one flies up my nose and doesn’t come out.
It’s midge season! http://journaltimes.com/news/local/a-plague-of-mi…
I was riding a bike to my BFF’s house when I was about 10, and I heard a buzzing sound right as something smacked my ear. I pulled over to check it out, but couldn’t feel anything, so I proceeded. A few minutes later, BFF and I were getting our Playmobil on in her basement when I felt a tickle in my ear. Without thinking, I plucked out the live bug and flung it on the ground.
Her cat stalked it and ate it.
(And yes, I already told this story in a tweet and no, I do not care because I LOVE the mixture of horror and bemused pride I get to relive with every retelling.)
Did anyone else insert their own hair into their ears whilst reading this? Ready made ear plugs?
I had to go look at gifs of tiny fluffy kittens after reading all of this. I …have nothing useful to contribute, other than the world is horrifying and I am still screaming inside.
D:
My family used to have a house with a big yard that was prone to getting those bees (wasps?) that build their nests underground, and every once in a while my dad would run one over with the lawn mower and proceed to do what my mom gleefully referred to as “the bee dance.”
Gleefully. I like your mom.
My mom is the best and also terrible!
I had a wasp crawl up my pantleg and sting me in a laundrymat once. It was fall, a hot day, the door was open and I had seen it tapping the inside of the window when I came in, but not done anything about it. When I felt something crawling up around my knee a load or so later, I KNEW what it was, yelled, got stung, starting swearing, tried to roll my pant leg all the way to my knee, failed, got stung a few more times, swore much more and started jumping up and down. It fell out, I jumped on top of it, still swearing and proceeded to jump on it and swear until it was a smear. At this point, I realized that no-one in the laundrymat had seen the wasp, I had just had some kind of berserker episode in front of strangers, but had to finish doing the rest of my laundry. Good times…
But how did you get the laundromat up your pantleg?
A bug crawling inside my ear while I sleep is one of my worst fears. Like in that episode of House.
Like ten years ago, several of my friends and I were watching a movie in my family’s living room, which has a large window looking out to the backyard. My sister was out there mowing the lawn, and I guess she ran over a fallen beehive, so all of the sudden she’s no longer pushing the lawnmower, but is wildly flailing around as some double-digit number of bees flew up her shirt and shorts, etc. All my friends and I could do was laugh hysterically…she was fine though, so it’s okay! I’m laughing again thinking about this now.
My finest (worst) hour was diving into a pile of leaves as a child and emerging with a slug stuck in my hair. D: D: D:
There was also the time I was out walking the dog through the local park and a wasp emerged from the clover and stung me directly on my toe. I walked the mile home swearing quietly and fervently with every single step.
Not my story, but my uncle’s. One night, when he was about 10 or so, he wakes the family up screaming, with blood pouring out of his ear. They go to the hospital, and manage to dig out half of an insect. Several nights later, the blood pouring repeated, and this time the doctor’s got the rest of it. My dad said for quite a while afterwards, he would sleep with his pillow over his head to block any insects. I don’t put a pillow over my head because of that story, but I do make sure my hair is covering my ears if possible before going to sleep (as if the hair is really going to block something from crawling inside).
I once found a Japanese beetle in my ear. I’d been swimming the night before in a pool surrounded by pine trees, which for some reason seemed to attract the beetles, so it must have gotten in there then. Or maybe it was in my hair and it crawled into my ear while I was sleeping. I’d like to think it wasn’t in there all night. Anyway I woke up the next morning and felt something off going on with my ear so I reached in thinking it was just some kind of debris. I was 11 and outside pretty much constantly so it didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility for some kind of leave or something to be in there. But it wasn’t a leave sadly, it was a living Japanese beetle. This felt deeply, viscerally wrong – body horror levels of wrong (not that I knew what that was at 11) and so I freaked the fuck out screaming and thrashing around nearly giving myself whiplash in the process. It was the worst, I still hate those fuckers.
When I was little my mom told me about how a family friend had to have a moth that had flown into his ear SURGICALLY REMOVED and she never understood why I always slept with earmuffs when we went camping in our moth-infested trailer uugghhhhhh
“Please share your own stories with bugs and bodily integrity below in the comments.”
scrolls down, sees “156 comments,” dies inside
OH NO THE STORIES YOU MADE ME REMEMBER
I was taking a lovely long bath, washing my hair, scrubbing my back, luxuriating in the hot water, so blissfully clean and happy. Then from the corner of my fuzzy vision, I saw something floating with me in the bathwater. I put on my glasses and SCREAMED.
It was a centipede corpse longer than my finger. Apparently it had been in the tub when I ran the bath, so for the better part of an hour, I’d been scrubbing and splashing myself – my face, my hair, my [REDACTED] – with hideous centipede juice. (I can’t explain the phobia, which came to me late in life, but it’s surprisingly powerful.)
I practically levitated out of that tub, splashing centipede juice all over our tiny bathroom, drained the tub, disposed of the… thing… , shook out the shower curtain and towels just to be sure nothing was lurking there, showered, scrubbed out the tub, showered again, drew another bath, and realized that I just couldn’t get back in there.
I had forgotten and thought I was clean. But I am not clean. I will never be clean.
When I was very little, my grandfather told me that earwigs, if given half a chance, would crawl into my ear and inside my skull and just hang out there, eating bits of my brain, until it died.
To this day no bug makes my skin crawl like earwigs. My kneejerk reaction when I see one is to whip off my shoe and use it to crush the earwig over and over again. They’re fucking REVOLTING.
(My grandfather also told me a story about a man who never bathed, so he had a thick layer of dirt on his scalp. One day a seed fell in his hair, and when it rained it took root and a tree grew on his head. I think the purpose of this story was to emphasize the importance of proper hygiene. My grandfather was a great man, but also a little bit weird.)
I want to thank everybody for their comments. I’ve had a terribly shitty and emotionally draining day and I laughed out loud at several of these. It was great.
Now on to my story. Technically it is not my story, but a former supervisor’s. She was waitressing and kept feeling a tickle in her throat. She would clear her throat and it would subside momentarily, but then come back. As the night wore on it was becoming increasingly disruptive to be trying not to cough while talking to customers and bringing people food, so she got a coworker to cover her tables and went out back to really give it her all with her coughing. After a moment of hearty coughing, she felt something in her mouth. She spat into the trash and was horrified to see that she had expectorated a spider. The worst part? It was still alive.
oh good god I might never sleep again. WHY WAS IT STILL ALIVE? WHY?
Also sorry about your shitty day.
The campus of the college I attended was wet and flat, and therefore had a noteworthy gnat problem.
I more than once had to walk through a dense yet expansive swarm of gnats, only to find that I had decimated them with my own body. The first time, I had dead gnats all down my front, with tiny blood/bug guts spots on my shirt. Only more horrifying was when I cleaned the gnat corpses off my arms, legs and torso, only to find still more in my hair and on my neck.
Still, none of that was as bad as when I rode my bike through a similar swarm. That resulted in all the above, plus getting stabbed in the eye by a gnat and having to periodically spit gnats out of my mouth.
One time I woke up and I tasted something odd on my tongue. There was something there. I took it out of my mouth. It was a dead spider. A spider had crawled into my mouth but I squashed/suffocated it in my sleep. It tasted bitter. I should have left it on a bedside table as a warning to the other spiders. Here lives a giantess who has little mercy, even in her sleep.
Recently I was running on a summer’s day in rural England. Imagine hedgerows that were shaggy with wild flowers, blackberries ripening, the sounds of sheep and tractors in the distance, and the air was warm and smelled of hay. Suddenly something smacked the back of my throat and I began to cough. I spit out a fly and it flew away. IT FLEW AWAY. I made more of an effort to run with my mouth closed.
One time a wasp stung my thigh/hip my while I was napping. IN MY BED. UNDER THE COVERS. IN OCTOBER. It was horrific. The top of my leg swelled up to look like a front-butt.
When I was in elementary school, I was working at my little desk when a tiny bug fell from above onto my paper. I was unnerved, especially as I suspected it did not come from the ceiling but from my hair. I asked the girl at the desk next to me to squish it, and she did.
I’m going to fast-forward through the trauma of head lice to get to the actual amusing part of the story, which is that a year or so later, when I made unique valentines for every kid in my class, the only thing I could remember about this girl was that she squished my head louse. So I drew a picture of a shoe smashing a head louse on the front of her valentine.
I don’t know why I thought that would be a good valentine.
When I was in fifth grade, my public California elementary school offered a trip to the East Coast during Spring Break, and as my parents could afford it at the time, they sent me. It was a great trip in most respects. However, early on, we were in a bus together with the windows open, cruising down some Virginia highway, when a bug flew into my EYE. It scared the bejeezus out of me, and I desperately tried to fish it out, but nothing doing. No one else could see the bug, and eventually, I gave up and decided I’d been wrong about it. Montage of a fantastic week of historical sites and largely unsupervised hijinks, and then an airplane ride home. I am back in California when I rub my eyes and a horrific pearl emerges. The dead bug had been in there long enough to become coated in eye gunk and solidified. It is both the grossest and the coolest thing in my life at that time. (I have since grown fruitful and multiplied and have seen much grosser – and cooler – things.)
Louisiana. I have had termite(s) in my ears. Darling, it will pass – my dog just rolled in Dead Pigeon this morning. It happens.
One afternoon after playing outside, my youngest brother, toddler-aged, came up to my mom and told her there was a slug in his ear. She laughed and didn’t think anything of it–she didn’t even know he knew the word “slug” and assumed he meant something else.
He was really insistent about it, though, so she decided to humor him and take a look.
There was a slug in his ear. To this day we have no idea how it got there.
Smart move! I once lived in a apartment that had a pigeon nesting in the transom window over the balcony door, which was all very cute and naturey until it got cold outside. When our heat came on, all these little black dots started spreading out across the kitchen ceiling like a film about a galaxy exploding but with the colors reversed. That's how I learned that pigeons all carry pigeon lice and you need to burn that shit before it decides to come inside. Ugh, pigeons. Do not approach!
I once woke up in the middle of the night with something moving in my ear, and when I knocked it out it was an earwig! Cliché, right? Does anyone else remember that time in the 90s when Southern Ontario was like 50% earwigs by weight? They were in everything. I used to have to clear them out from under my bike seat before going to work. Ugh.
I once woke up in the middle of the night with something moving in my ear, and when I knocked it out it was an earwig! Cliché, right? Does anyone else remember that time in the 90s when Southern Ontario was like 50% earwigs by weight? They were in everything. I used to have to clear them out from under my bike seat before going to work. Ugh.
I was eating lunch at a pizza place once and there was a horrible mean old woman complaining about everything to the people at the counter. And as she berated them I watched a wasp hover around the opening of her coffee cup and then CLIMB IN. She turned back to her coffee and made one of those ‘can you believe these idiots’ faces at me, and I shut my mouth tight and stared at her. And she picked up the cup and I almost said nothing, but before she sipped it I yelled Wait!! because I remembered poor McCauley Culkin in My Girl.
So my high school theology teacher came into class one day with a HORROR STORY of his adventures the night before:
He’d been sleeping with the windows open, and felt something tickle his ear. He swatted at it sleepily, and felt it crawl INTO HIS EAR CANAL. It was apparently very noisy and kind of painful, so he woke up his wife, and she drove him to the emergency room. Once there, the ER doctor took a look and found a cockroach. In his ear.
And this was in Florida, where the cockroaches are actually palmetto bugs and they are HUGE and the WORST THINGS EVER.
I now get freaked out every time I feel something on my face in the night. Which is hard when you have cats.
A former supervisor with a bee allergy once had one FLY INTO HIS MOUTH WHILE HE WAS ON THE WAY TO WORK AND STING HIM IN THE THROAT. He was fine but it was a hospital situation because he couldn’t swallow benadryl by the time he got to us.
So, y’know, don’t drive with the window down and your mouth open.
I have decided to wear earplugs everywhere forever until I die.
My big brother had a spider living in his ear. We’re Australian. Yes, you understand now.
In the winters when I was a teenager, hundreds of ladybugs would come and nest on the central timber of our ceiling. One time, I was making hot chocolate in the kitchen and a ladybug fell into my cup just as I took my first sip. It was bitter and horrible. Worse, I once woke up to a buzzing in my ear and found that a ladybug had crawled in. It came out easily, thankfully.
I HAVE A BUG THAT FLEW IN MY EAR RIGHT NOW I NEES HELP YOUR ARTICLE DID NOT HELP ITS FLAPPINGS ITS WINGS HELP ME
This isn't about bugs… , but once I was at a cousin's wedding, and as you know, there was a feast there. My mom got me a lobster as a main dish. It fidgeted. it moved. It fell out of my plate. It started to walk slowly away. Shot it with a rifle. End of story. Ever since that day, when I went to the store, I gouged out eyeballs of all seafood.
When I was very young, I had a thing for raisins. After a while I stopped liking them as much, and a few boxes of them had been left in the cabinets for a long while. On the hunt for food a couple years in the future and knowing that raisins don't generally go bad, I decided that they were probably my best option for my mid-day snack. THEY WERE NOT. I unwittingly had ate over half a fairly good sized box of raisins, which were, unfortunately for my younger self covered with worms and worm larvae. Ever since, I haven't been able to eat a single raisin without thinking there aren't some unwanted guests along for the ride.
I had a bug fly in my ear months ago and it died in there I didn't think anything of it and never went to the doctor… Could it still be dead in there .?! Does it somehow fall out or should I get my ass to the doctor to get it checked out? It causes me no pain and doesn't bother my hearing. But obviously the thought of having a dead bug (unknown) inside my ear is terrifying. I hate insects.!!
My story isn't that extreme, but is still my personal trauma.
While I was at a party, most of the food was outside, so I was there. It was pretty dark except for the lights we used, so many mosquitoes would gather and fly around. A specific mosquito flew by. I moved away from it, but it was too late. It flew into my shirt, and for a while, I didn't notice. When I finally had the courage to put my hand in, I managed to take out it's wing. YES, I HAD UNINTENTIONALLY RIPPED IT APART. When I took it out, I was already coiling in disgust. Worst of all, it was still crawling. I stepped on it, but I am still grossed out ever since.