- Cut off my entire arm and face
- Move
- Throw myself into the whole sun
- Excommunicate myself from every church and religion any ancestor of mine has ever joined
- Just shudder until I died
- Throw everything I own off of my back porch until my lower back exploded
- Kick myself to actual death
- Set all of my shoes on fire and move to whatever climate has the fewest bugs, maybe the desert, which I know still has some bugs but not bugs that fly I feel like
- Go to a movie theater and buy a ticket to see twelve movies in a row and refuse to leave between screenings
- just straight up The Cask of Amontillado myself
- Scream until I traveled through time to either before or after there are moths
- Sink from waking life into dreams
- No
- Reject everything about existence and just give it all back to the void and demand we start afresh
- Turn into a beautiful swan
- Squash it with something heavy then throw whatever I squashed it with away
- Scream until my throat exploded
- Remove all of my skin
- Turn into a boat and sail away
Once at summer camp my best friend smashed a miller WITH HER BARE HAND and as we all shuddered and screeched like for days we didn’t notice which hand she had used and then she LICKED HER (other) HAND and we all faded into nonexistence I’m actually writing this from a realm of dreams goodbye
Seven long years, the Miller’s Daughter has watched and waited. The oldest fish in the millpond gave her its flesh for her sustenance, its scales for her armor, its bones for her darts. She is coming! Warn your friend!
(Sophia from Golden Girls voice) Picture it, Namibia, 2007–I was on a tour of southern Africa, and we camped out every night after driving from place to place in an off-road type bus. We camped at a really cool spot in the Kalahari one night, with an outdoor bar nearby with a chandelier made from beer bottles.
We sat down to dinner around the campfire, and proceeded to be dive-bombed by swarms of huge moths, each the size of my hand. Giant, brown, disgusting moths. They kept flying at our mouths while we were trying to eat (I assume the heat from our breath??), and I remember one got partially in my mouth. I lasted about 15 minutes, then freaked out and had to run to the tent to hide. I still had to come out and wash dishes (by a light-bulb, ugh) and use the bathroom (more lights, ugh). Just UGH. Still scarred.
This is a concise summary of how I feel about not just moths, but also butterflies.
I used to scream and run away from butterflies as a child, but it’s because some well-meaning adult had told me that if I grabbed one, the dust on its wings would come off and it would die, and I was terrified that one would brush past me and then I would be A MURDERER.
Vaguely similar – my well meaning grandmother once told me cheerily that dragonflies would sew my eyes shut if I slept near them. WHY?? There was no reason. Just a casual observance.
That’s slightly messed up.
Wh…? That’s on a whole different level.
I was told this too, presumably by some relative who was never a child and therefore had no idea how literally children take things, but my resolutely down-to-earth mother was more than happy to dispel this notion and then point out how beautiful their wings shimmered all rainbow colors, and from then on I lorded my lack-of-dragonfly-fear over classmates who had similar relatives but lacked my awesome mother.
I was told this too and never questioned it! Is it not true?
No, that’s earwigs. Dragonflies will land on top of your head and refuse to leave.
I think if I had grabbed at them with my clumsy toddler hands, it could have hurt them, but it’s fine to let them land on you. I think the dust is a myth, though.
I was taught that too, it’s pretty common and I guess I just took it for granted as a real thing until reading this just now. I googled and now I know it’s a myth, so thanks, now I know it’s ok to get a butterfly to land on me, if I can.
(My kid likes butterflies – but he’s terrified of birds.)
I am fine with butterflies and moths, but if I even see a caterpillar I freak out. I used to be afraid to even run over them with my bike.
we had a years-long, very serious tent caterpillar infestation in northern Ontario in the 90’s. we lost a lot of trees, which was the most damaging impact, but it was also just disgusting. The sidewalks were covered with crushed caterpillar remains, they’d drop from the trees onto your head and climb into your clothes if you sat on the ground. I found one in my bra while gardening once.
This makes me want to cry
There are a lot of poisonous caterpillars where I am living right now. They haven’t gotten me yet, but it’s only a matter of time…
I think we can safely assume butterflies are implicitly included in the above. http://the-toast.net/2015/04/29/a-butterfly-is-ju…
To quote Mallory from that article, “to heckfuck with all of them.”
In 4th? grade in spring we had butterfly larvae (I don’t remember if they started out as eggs or caterpillars) in this box that was a bunch of kind of mini cubbies with netting in front so that we could see them developing into butterflies. I wasn’t scared per se, but I wasn’t very comfortable with it either. All the other kids were seemingly interested but I just tried not to pay any attention to it.
They are just gross bugs with wings! I will not be fooled by pretty colors. They are just as horrific as all the others. (others = literally any bug)
ME TOO. No one care’s if you fear the moth, but tell someone you’re afraid of butterflies and they’ll mock you into next week. They have the same creepy flight patterns! It’s the same!
Butterflies and moths don’t fly right, I don’t trust their aimless meanderings.
They fly in fractal patterns – it’s what triggers my phobia. Daddy long legs/crane flies are the same. Their flight triggers a wrongness alarm in my head that causes me to cry/scream, drop into the foetal position, and beg whoever I’m with to just bloody GET RID OF IT until I’m sure I’m safe and my heartbeat slows down from like 3000bpm.
I’m not especially happy with other flying insects which fly in more “logical” patterns, but they don’t set off my raw panic in the same way as moths etc if we’re in a confined space together.
One of my earliest memories is seeing my mum freaking out about a daddy long legs in our sitting room, so. Thanks, mum (though she says she ‘caught’ the fear from her mother, who once nearly fainted when a bird flew into their house).
UGGGHHHHHHH just reading this made my skin crawl. I didn’t know about the fractal patterns, though, which is interesting!
Cask of Amontillado yourself and find out there are 3 moths trapped with you 🙁
That is *definitely* how it would go, especially since any sensible person is going to do the bricking-up in daylight hours, only to realize upon completion that it wasn’t that they weren’t there, it was just that THE MOTHS WERE ASLEEP.
when I was at a summer camp, I woke up in the middle of the night to ants in my sleeping bag, which is fine cause ants are chill so I gracefully thrashed around for several minutes and moved to a different bed, where, hours later, I would wake up face-to-face with a giant beetle and that’s why I actually no longer have an epidermis.
“which is fine cause ants are chill”
So . . . you don’t like somewhere with fire ants, I take it? Or do you have magic ant-calming abilities? Because if I had to describe fire ants, I would say they are ants with zero chill.
I and my fella had to describe fire ants to some northerners once while we were on a road trip (in fire ant territory) and they were APPALLED.
my youngest had his first run in with fire ants at soccer practice last week and I’m still internally shuddering
my brother as a baby once plopped down, diaper and all, on a fire ant hill and i think it was only the speed and agony with which my mother had to de-ant him that prevented her from ritually murdering my father for moving us to texas.
I am here for all of your fire ant stories! I had no idea what they were when we moved to Texas when I was 11. The first week we moved here, I spilled some slurpee on my sandalled foot while standing outside a 7-11, and I found out about them the hard way.
That was the same week my mom killed a scorpion in the tub. Texas did not make such a great impression on me at first.
Will try to remember next time I am cursing winter.
BTW hopelessshade that sounds AWFUL. Your poor brother!
i suspect he survived unscathed but really, who knows what of his current life we can ascribe to that formative moment.
When I was about 8, I picked up something in the yard without knowing there was a fire ant hill underneath until they swarmed up my arm and then I spent the rest of the afternoon sobbing in a bath. They absolutely have zero chill!
ZERO CHILL
And people ask how I could hate camping….
Nature. Scary and overrated.
Amen to that! Nature: Not even once.
This reminds me of the time I went to the butterfly room at the Met, and once I got in realized that butterflies and moths are pretty much the same thing and they were EVERYWHERE and landing ALL OVER ME. And I freaked out and speedily left the room of nightmares.
And by “The Met” I obviously mean The Museum Of Natural History. Whoops!
Butterfly World, age 10, same realization. Still horrified.
Same. Ughhhhhhh. One landed on my brother’s lip and we did not know what to do it was terrible. And it just chilled there like it found its new permanent dwelling. F dat.
Substitute “palmetto bugs” for “moths” and this is me right here.
I was just gonna say. I found one on my toothbrush once right as I was going to brush my teeth and I had to throw away everything on the bathroom counter.
noooooooooo
I once walked in on a palmetto bug lounging on the handle of my toothbrush, gently lapping at the bristles with its bug mouth parts like “oh hey im just having dinner”
And now all the toothbrushes live in freezer baggies.
I would have burned down the house and moved to a nunnery in Antarctica.
I found a cockroach on my toothbrush once when I lived in Indiana. I boiled it and used it again because I was Brave and Poor, but I also boiled my little gum massager thing and it melted. After that I stored my toothbrush INSIDE the medicine cabinet.
All the toothbrush stories are VERY ALARMING and why is this not on the local news like every night?? Hide your toothbrushes for the love of all that is holy.
Oh god, I had one fall out of my medicine cabinet once, and it fled between the cabinets/floor where there was no way I could pursue it. Next morning? Same thing. I cleaned the whole bathroom with bleach after that.
A cockroach once fell OUT OF NOWHERE and onto my head while I was showering. I was fully prepared to just immediately find a new place to live, but my then-husband could not be convinced.
The guest bedroom of that same house was invaded by slugs a few times and I could never figure out where the hell they were coming from and I’m not going to say that any of these incidents are the reason why I’m no longer either married or living in Arkansas but I’m not going to deny it either.
That is just basic good sense.
I am job searching and someone asked me if I was generalizing to a specific area and I said “not the south” and they made a couple stabs as to why that would be and I said “no, I saw a picture of a palmetto bug once.”
I am going to Georgia in August, I am scared.
Rightly so. Mister did NOT specify “not the South” in his PhD search, and now we live in Atlanta.
Oh hey, I will be in Atlanta! It’s only for a week so hopefully I will not see anything too horrific and buggy.
Also, we have moths, and it’s terrible. I like to knit with The Good Stuff, so the infestation is fast forwarding my progress toward Moth-Eaten-Shawl-Wearing Crone territory.
Oh my god. Every spring I find some fresh hell of moths in my sweater and yarn stash. I’ve tried and tried. I vacuum, I freeze, I wash, I segregate and repack. I think I’ve got them. Then the year clocks around and a new batch of the little fuckers emerge.
Green Way sticky/pheremone traps are working pretty well on the adult moths, and Trader Joes has some inexpensive Lavender Dryer sachets that I’ve tucked in with my stash and knits. Unfortunately, the dog’s poo bags are lavender scented, so now there’s unpleasant cross-associations every time I wrap myself in a shawl…
pavo sum; coquor
After my partner and I first started living together, we spend a summer in Athens, GA subletting a friend’s apartment while she was out of the country. Neither of us was used to cockroaches, and there are SO MANY in Athens. We continually found them on the walls and kitchen counters, and when we went out and walked through the downtown area we would have to pick our way through hundreds of them in huge awful skittering crowds. I don’t know where in GA you’re headed, but if it’s Athens I would pack a high-quality flamethrower, and maybe some kind of enchanted armor?
Mr Daki was recently in Athens to give a lecture, and he won’t shut up about how great it is, how friendly, all the fun buildings and whatever, and I sincerely need him to revisit the place in August so his pipe dream of us moving there someday dies.
I mean, we have lots of roaches here in Houston, but they respond to my chemical warfare. And they don’t just fucking roam the fucking streets.
I can’t imagine “crowds” of those things. That’s a special level of hell that my poor sinner’s brain can’t process.
My parents, when newly married, were living in dad’s home state of Florida. Being poor college students, when they found a free fridge on the side of the road, they took it home. Got it home and filled it with food. Only to watch cockroaches stream out of the rubber seal around the door. They got rid of the fridge, but for the rest of the time they lived in that apartment they couldn’t get rid of the cockroach infestation they’d created.
This right here is why I won’t buy used microwaves or any other electronics from a pawnshop or anywhere else. I read that they like the warmth and can stay in there for a long time, and you don’t know until you get it home.
Also, bedbugs. Never ever ever pick up furniture from the road, ever. It was maybe okay ten years ago, but bedbugs are making a big comeback and they’re harder to kill than cockroaches and they *bite.*
Wait, aren’t palmetto bugs just cockroaches, but bigger in the South because it is largely a hot, moist climate?
much bigger, much harder to kill, and *CAN FLY*
We have them in Sydney toooooooo skittering in hordes across the footpath in summer and flying around inside, hitting windows and making afraid they will crack the glass
I might be in Florida in July and ditto.
I was going to say, this but with centipedes.
Literally the reason I will never move back to the Gulf Coast, whence I came.
ETA: Sometimes people think I’m joking when I tell them that. I am not joking.
My husband and I got married and then immediately moved to South Carolina. Our first night in the new apartment, we were sleeping on our foldout couch because the rest of our furniture hadn’t arrived yet. All the wedding presents were piled in one corner. In the middle of the night, I felt something…RUN ACROSS MY FACE. I flew across the room, turned on the light and saw a palmetto bug vanish into the pile of wedding presents. My husband refused to move all the presents in the middle of the night and hunt down the bug. I stayed awake in frozen fear the rest of the night. Only the thought of how it would look to get divorced two days after the wedding kept our relationship whole.
Mom?
(I joke, but for real my parents also moved to SC after getting married, and for years I’ve been regaled with stories of cockroaches the size of hamsters in the kitchen that dad didn’t feel like dealing with.)
A few weeks later, we adopted a kitten who turned out to be a vicious killer and would leave dismembered palmetto bugs by our front door, so problem solved. Not sure what I would have done if we’d had chronic palmetto bug infestations in the kitchen.
When I lived in Texas one of my cats chased roaches, but it ate one only once. Then–OK, you might not want to keep reading this, if you do, YOU’VE BEEN WARNED–so it ate the dead roach, and fifteen minutes later, vomited that fucker right on up, and it was TWITCHING. I panicked so much that I couldn’t clean it up right away (hard to clean up cat puke while running away screaming), and when I came back into the room the puke was there BUT THE FUCKING ROACH WAS GONE because it was still motherfucking ALIVE and had crawled away.
(This cat is not by any means the crispest chip in the basket, and it usually takes him about 50 mistakes before he learns a lesson, but he never ever ate another roach. )
I miss many, many things about Texas, but the roaches are NOT one of those things.
OMG, you warned me and I still kept reading and OMG OMG OMG I have to go lie down for awhile.
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
no no no no no no no no no no
Having once accidentally swallowed a horsefly while biking (lesson learned: no mouth-breathing on the woodsy trails), felt it struggling to keep from going down, thrown it up on the gravel, and watched it fly away, I empathize with your cat.
Oh my god I think I just turned myself inside out in horror.
just reading “palmetto bugs” made my whole body shudder
Actually let out a tiny scream and scared the cat at remembering those abominations.
Who the fuck came up with the devious and yet brilliant notion of calling fucking cockroaches “palmetto bugs”? This means that unsuspecting northerners are all “oh la dee la, palmetto bugs” until we actually see one and realize y’all meant GIANT FUCKING FLYING GODSDAMN COCKROACHES and we flee screaming.
I read moth as “Mother” in the title, and was real confused about why all the comments mentioned insects- I never knew so many people were being raised by bugs.
Actually every Toast commenter except for you is a giant collection of bugs who have banded together to learn to type. It just never comes up. We thought you knew.
we are all seth macfarlane
brb setting myself on fire because OH MY GOD I AM A GIANT PILE OF BUGS
I love that you read all the way down that list under the impression it was cataloguing “The Things I Would Do If My Mother Ever Touched Me, Even For A Second”, but it was the comments section that confused you! xD
I got moth dust on my hand once and that’s probably why everything bad that has ever happened to me.
OT, but I used to live off Bee Cave Road and my aunt still does, so I always smile when I see your name.
My doctor’s office was on Bee Cave Road, which I could not have told you five minutes ago but seeing the name suddenly reminded me. And now I’m wondering why, the entire time I was in the area, I never wondered where the Bee Cave was. It seems like the kind of thing it would be worth knowing…
We just had pantry moths in the cat’s food and they would fly out at me every time I opened the container. We finally had to give up on that batch of food and just throw it all away with the moths. It took quite a bit of running around and killing them all to end the infestation. At least the cat helped with the moth killing.
Remain vigilant- I have learned that with pantry moths there’s never any real end to the infestation. They ebb and flow, but never truly leave. Look through all the stuff in your cabinets, they can get into any container that exists like horrible moth magicians.
Also, excellent username.
One thing that does help: get pheremone glue traps that trap the males, inhibiting the breeding cycle.
Luckily the cat food is upstairs away from our food. I have not seen any moths since the great eradication over the weekend. Fingers crossed.
I have pantry moths but i CANNOT FIND THEIR HOMES.
You’ll come across it some day, and that may be the worst day of your life. We found them living INSIDE A FRAMED PICTURE once, under the mat. What the actual fuck, pantry moths. (I swear we are not very dirty, we just have several pets and their food attracts vermin. The picture was next to the goddamn birds.)
Just look for the writhing mass. It will be somewhere.
this is me and grasshoppers forever. I just imploded into myself and became a black hole just thinking about it.
DO YOU REMEMBER THE GRASSHOPPER PLAGUE IN “ON THE BANKS OF PLUM CREEK”
sorry to shout it is just my worst childhood nightmare of all time second only to all the times I ever saw an actual bug and also the time I put on my sneaker without taking the wasp out of the toe first as I did not know it was in there. at least it wasn’t a grasshopper I guess.
sorry I’m nothing floating in space right now I cannot think of evil hoppy twitchy things that CAN FLY IN YOUR FACE
No amount of James and the Giant Peach viewings will ever convince me that grasshoppers aren’t straight from hell. Oh god, just thinking of their weird segmented bodies is making me want to rip my skin off.
Despite having a father and three brothers, I was always my house’s designated ‘creepy crawly’ person (yay for subverting gender roles, at least). I can’t count the number of spiders, bees, wasps, chipmunks (our cats were great at catching them, bad at killing them) and bats (no idea how they got in) I have had to catch and release back into the wild (I’m too softhearted to kill anything). Moths are chump change.
I had a deal with my brother – he would kill spiders for me and I would kill ants for him. He would get super freaked out by ants, especially the little tiny swarmy ones. One time they got into our dishwasher 🙁
This is me, but with spiders. I KNOW MOST OF THEM ARE GOOD BUT ARRRRRGH NO
Ditto: snakes
YEP. I am unreasonably, illogically afraid of two things on this planet and one of them is spiders. I can’t even look at a photo of them. Ugh, just thinking about a spider made me shudder just now. I’ll take care of everyone’s moths for them if y’all will deal with the spiders.
I am okay with snakes, too, so I can help you out there, bb.
the only thing that helped me with my spider phobia was A) seeing some of them run in terror from me, and B) moving to China and being told that the spiders are dead friends and relatives coming to check in on you. That really helped. Like, I’d get all cold and stop breathing, and then think to myself, “Okay, this is Grampa. It’s okay. Hi, Grampa.”
Nope. Neither of those helps me.
I am the same re: spiders, to the point of being totally immobilized if the quantity/degree of spider is bad enough.
I can’t look at photos either – there is nothing worse than scrolling through facebook on my phone and finding that some jerk friend has posted what they think is a totally innocuous interesting article about spiders, with cover photo… One of these days I’m gonna reflexively throw my phone and break it.
Snakes and moths? Both fine.
A bonding moment on our honeymoon involved me and husband, a large spider, lots of shrieking and huddling together for safety, and eventual murder and disposal of the body.
… of the spider, right
“But spiders kill the other bugs!” YES BUT I’M NOT AFRAID OF OTHER BUGS, YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID
100% using this from now on thank you.
spiders are fine as long as they are outside and far away from me. If I can see them, not fine
I once asked my dad to remove a spider egg sack hanging out by our hall light and he just laughed at me. Then they hatched…and fell into my hair. My mom was brushing my hair later that night and went “it’s full of spiders”. GOODBYE
THIS IS THE WORST STORY I HAVE EVER HEARD
(full body shudders in my office)
There used to be a spider that hung out in the corner of the bathroom and one day I realised that it had laid/made an egg sac. I kept forgetting to do anything about it until the morning when I was washing my hair and the egg sac hatched and I had to go to work not knowing if there were spiderlings in my hair…
IT’S LIKE NONE OF YOU EVER READ CHARLOTTE’S WEB AND LEARNED THAT SPIDERS CAN BE OUR DEAREST FRIENDS.
Actually crying. Crying forever.
I am absolutely certain that every spider in history has but one life goal: to be on my face. No one has ever been able to prove otherwise.
I used to give spiders the benefit of the doubt until I was bit by a Brown Recluse spider in the middle of my back. Fortunately, without knowing I was bit, I took a shower, and I love long showers where very hot water hits me in the back for a long time because that probably saved me a lot of time in a hospital having skin grafts. I still have a mark that looks like someone put a cigar out on me.
My mom was so desperate to have a family pet she adopted a moth that was hanging out in her bedroom and was devastated when my uncle loudly announced over their card game he killed it but good (he thought he was doing her a favour, poor guy).
When we finally got “Caber” the golden retriever, she was overjoyed and specifically told me upon his death 13 years later to put his ashes with hers and NOT my father’s. So upon her death, I took her ashes (I already had Dad’s ashes), Caber’s ashes (neither brother wanted him) and here they all sit, just hanging out.
I had a spider I called Shelob living in the corner of my bedroom, she wasnt really a pet but I did used to usher flies her way every now and again. Mum made me evict her when she had babies.
Like a disgraced Victorian chambermaid.
This comment keeps on cracking me up, I’m reading it for the third time and still laughing. Well played.
I had my own bathroom at home during high school, but one time I was using my mom’s out of convenience or something, and a spider dropped out of the bathtub faucet. I, arachnophobic, went and got my dad to remove it. Mom got all upset that we had killed her bathroom pet.
Sorry NOT SORRY.
When I was a teenager, our house got infested with moths from some birdseed (this is a Thing. My mom now stores her bird seed in the freezer to prevent this), and they started building their moth cocoons in one corner of my bedroom ceiling.
I used to consider moths to be harmless outside creatures that probably got lost on their way to Somewhere Not My House, like maybe a frolic party in the meadow. Now I know that they are basically tattered, flappy cockroaches that must be destroyed on sight, before they breed.
:: immediately leaves work to immolate the bag of birdseed stored under my kitchen sink ::
tattered, flappy cockroaches
I was actually fine with moths until this point. Now they are pure nightmare fuel.
Once worked in a nature store that sold a very wide range of birdseed. Can confirm: it’s a thing, and the only prevention is to use up the seed quickly and avoid storing it someplace nice and warm. Keep your birdseed in your fridge or freezer if you’re not using it reasonably quickly.
You should also store flour mixes for pancakes and bread in a plastic bag in the freezer for a couple of days to kill whatever might have been laid in it, or use it up quick. Otherwise, you’ll find those little meal worms/weevils in there.
I had such a bad clothes moth infestation among my yarn stash that I had to throw it all out. All 4 60-gallon garbage bags worth. I was too sad to cry. I now have about 10 balls of dark blue silk/wool blend in bags in my freezer. The internet told me it only had to stay in for 12 hours, but I haven’t had the heart to take it out yet…I think it’s been a week. I guess at some point I’ll be ready to knit again… To hell with moths!!!
I just sent an emergency text to my husband instructing him to move our open, outdoor bag of bird seed into sealed containers. He did so with no questions, my hero.
19 years ago a moth flew into my ear and was trapped and had to be extracted with a tiny vacuum in an ER after the most harrowing hours of my life where I could hear it in my head. I endorse this list wholeheartedly, as I am still haunted by this moment in my nightmares.
I am so happy you survived that, so sorry that this happened to you. You are strong and beautiful!
This is my nightmare.
this is the worst thing I ever heard in my life. I got bit by a centipede in bed one time and had its two tiny jaw-prints on me for days after and I once put on a shoe that a big scary bug was already using and it did not take kindly to it but those stories are nothing now, I am nothing
I once put my foot into a shoe that was currently housing a cave cricket. I pulled my foot out because there was something prickly and that cricket jumped out, three feet into the air.
Oh god, I am undone with this.
Oh my god. I think I’m going to be haunted from just READING about this.
I got bit on the tongue by a mystery bug once, but this is worse.
Just, D:
Nightmares forever. Holy shit.
When I was a teen, I woke up from a nap to my Mom gently brushing my forehead with her fingers, only it wasn’t my Mom at all, but a cockroach who was RUNNING ACROSS MY FACE. And still, that story seems to fade into nothing now that I have heard yours.
No. I return this story to the void.
This week has been quite eventful for me. First, my cat gifted me a stuck in transition cockroach that was half red and half white, which made my screams audible only to dogs. The next day, while I was out on my midnight fridge-raid another cockroach flew and sat on my arm, needless to say i am still trying to shake my arm out of its socket and off of my body.
“i am still trying to shake my arm out of its socket and off of my body.”
This is the only reasonable reaction to this.
But it still won’t come off!
I chucked my charming piggy-shaped cutting board (I named it Truffle) across the kitchen when I found a cockroach sitting on it. I still have the pieces, but Truffle was never the same.
You need to move to a sterile space-capsule of some kind, clearly. The cat, if it behaves, may accompany you.
I can only imagine the final scene from Alien where Ripley discovers the alien’s latched onto the shuttle, but scarier, with molting cockroaches hiding inside the capsule.
I am from a place that is Not Warm so cockroaches require specific conditions to truly thrive, and the terrible apartment complex I worked at when I moved here apparently had them in spades. Maintenance mentioned seeing a few so I had the exterminator go spray a unit I had someone moving into two days later, and in between the cleaner stopped by and called me to go YOU CAN’T HAVE ANYONE MOVE IN HERE. I went over and there were literally thousands??? on the walls?? in the dishwasher??? in the kitchen cabinets????? out and about and sort of dying but also EVERYWHERE???? So, y’know. That was how I met my first cockroach(es).
That was also the job where someone once presented me with a zip-loc baggie full of bedbugs.
This is the night I die. I never thought I would die like this, but imagining that scene you just described, yup, this is it. Goodbye all.
Yeah I pretty much turned up and went
ahhhhhhh oh nooooooooooooooooo
i feel unclean just reading that
auuuugggghhhhhhhhh
The hell is a stuck in transition cockroach, oh god don’t tell me I don’t even want to know!
For real, I’m too scared to google it!
It’s a molting cockroach, the stuff of nightmares. I have to burn a portion of my brain to purge its memory.
Moths are among my top phobias. Once I was staying with a family friend in a room with dark wood paneling on the walls/floor and every night there was a HUGE moth that matched the floor and walls exactly. So I would feel it flying around when I was trying to sleep, and then when I turned the light on I couldn’t find it because it was blending in with the floor, so I would go back to sleep and it would start up all over again. I’m shuddering at my desk thinking about it now. They were also at least an inch long so if I did find it I couldn’t work up the guts to kill it anyways :/
this sounds like a thing that really happened but is also just nightmarish enough to be something you imagined
I initially read “moth” as “mother,” and now I am taking a good hard look at who I am as a person because I read this entire piece under this misconception without a second thought.
WHOA
As a mother, I am laughing really hard rn.
I did most of those things when my mother touched me! The list made sense!
These are all things I would do if a mudskipper brushed up against me, plus eviscerating all of my internal organs and/or committing seppuku, whichever is more expedient.
Ooh once I went swimming in a lake my family built a cottage near, and I came out and walked around with my family like NBD until someone pointed at my toe and said “what’s THAT?” “That” was a leech. I’m not sure if I’ve ever screamed louder. This was at least 20 years ago and I still get a full-body shudder when I think about it. Good thing my family has a lot of nurses in it.
There was a very large moth (“mothadactyl” as I cleverly dubbed it) that spent an entire week hanging out on the light outside our back door and every time you opened the door it flipped out and erratically flew everywhere and I screamed a lot and thank god we had a front door because it would have been really awkward to explain to my boss that I was taking a week off for moths.
TRIGGER WARNING FOR SERIOUSLY GROSS MOTH STORY: OK so once on a college camping field trip, the professor bet a student a $1 that he couldn’t eat a moth. Oh, and part of the bet was that the kid had to hold the moth alive in his mouth for 3 seconds before chewing it so “all that dusty shit will be on the inside of your mouth.”
The kid did it, and it was probably the most horrific thing I have ever witnessed.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THAT PROFESSOR
HE SHOULD BE DISQUALIFIED FROM INTERACTING WITH ANY KIND OF STUDENTS
or moths
YES GOOD POINT
MY FACE RIGHT NOW I CAN’T.
Please excuse me while I go obsessively wash my mouth out with Listerine just at the thought of that dust.
Earth sciences program?
Either you know me in real life or you know earth scientists way too well.
The latter, sounds like field study shenanigans I’ve heard of before.
1. Pour yourself a bowl of raisin bran
2. Get the milk and fill it up
3. Eat about four spoonfuls
4. Pause to look at television, then look back at bowl
5. Stare in shock and awe at the little weevils bobbing up in the milk
6. Burn the house to the ground and change your mouth out for a fresh one
Oh God. This just brought back the memory of eating most of a sleeve of Ritz crackers before noticing little tiny worms crawling in and out of the holes in the few remaining crackers in the sleeve.
BRB throwing up until I die.
Worms: Why
Probably pantry moth worms.
I’m feeling that feeling when you can’t even scream because you are too horrified and also might vomit.
Oh my god oh my god
SCREAMING. Dead now.
FUUUUUUUCKKKKKK NOOOOOOOOOO WHYYYYYYYYYY
this but with pouring pasta into boiling water
This but with a bowl of top ramen while camping, at night. Except I ate like half the bowl.
This but with cereal when you’re housesitting at your boyfriend’s parents place.
I actually went to a walk-in clinic. They laughed at me (not really laughed, “I just ate bugs” is apparently not a health risk.)
I still won’t eat Cheerios. This happened to me when I was 10. THEY HAD FORMED THEMSELVES INTO LITTLE “O” SHAPES TO BLEND IN.
I’m dead ugh no no no
JESUS WHAT?!?
My mom once ate a granola bar and realized halfway through that there were maggots in it.
She drank a whole bottle of wine after that. I was ten. I thought my drunk mom who ate bugs was the FUNNIEST THING EVER.
And then as an adult, I went to take a swig of my wine and there was a huge drowned fly in it. Drinking more wine didn’t help.
My first baking experience, as like, a 9-year-old:
1) Made cinnamon muffins from children’s recipe book I got for birthday.
2) Ate like 3 of them? I was v. unsupervised as a child.
3) When I slowed down the muffin binge, took a closer look at the last half-muffin and was like, hmm what did I put in that would be little flecks in the muffin?
4) The flecks all have legs.
5) Scream.
6) At some point I screamed to my mom, and she was went and looked at the flour bag and was like “oh yeah that happens sometimes it’s just weevils, you’re fine” all nonchalant to my HORROR.
7) Insist on inspecting the flour after the fact whenever my mom cooks anything for the rest of my childhood.
8) Do not bake ever again personally until an adult.
I still inspect the flour every time I bake, although my fiance and I keep flour in a sealed glass container and this has never happened to me since. There are so many things I’m learning from this thread I need to be way more vigilant about inspecting though D:
This is precisely how I react to spiders. I can’t decide if, after being raised in the country, I actually enjoy living in the city like I do now, or if I just did it to get away from living in a place with lots of spiders.
This week I’ve discovered something. I too had a evangelical childhood, was forced to read The Five Languages, and have an encyclopedic memory for weird fairy tales.
But with this article I just realized: Toasties, I AM Mallory. She is always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself BECAUSE SHE’S WRITING ABOUT MOTHS.
I feel this way about tent caterpillars. One time one got on me and fortunately I brushed it off by reflex before I realized what was happening because otherwise I would have screamed and run around the street and generally behaved like a non-adult. This was a few years ago during the time in the northern tier of Pennsylvania when the entire town became an apocalyptic caterpillar hellscape–they were dangling from trees and wafting in the breeze. I walked to and from work like a paranoid drunk every single day.
Growing up, there was this one stretch of road in my neighborhood without any houses built along it and there’s be a TON of those things (or maybe something similar?) falling off the trees onto the pavement. I had zero problems with them at that point, and my mom let my brother and me collect them and keep them in jars because no one would care when they inevitably died.
Now, I can’t believe I willingly touched them D: D: D:
There was a really bad infestation in NH when I was about 4, and my dad HATED those things because they destroyed his trees (which he loved) and so it rubbed off on me. When the other kids at daycare would catch them and play with them, I thought they were insane.
I was the groundskeeper for these rich people for a few years and one year in particular their property was infested with tent caterpillars. They really wanted me to keep on top of them, so every day for the whole summer I would spend at least a couple hours roaming their 300 acres for tent caterpillars. I’d climb on up, fish as much of the (horrid, horrid) webbing as I could, while those little fuckers squirmed around and brought them to a spot where I would literally kill them with fire.
AAAAAAHHHHHHHH! My dad would burn their nests out, too, but I hate them dead as much as I hate them alive. I also hate their horrid cocoons. I would probably also hate their moths if I could identify them.
My parents used to pay my brother a dollar per ziplock baggie he collected of those monstrosities, which were then disposed of by burning. ugh ugh ugh.
I posted in a thread about this! We had many summers in a row with terrible tent caterpillar infestations when I was a teenager. They are The Worst Animal.
Have you ever seen the movie Angels and Insects? Great and very strange film, if you can get past the speaking patterns of the main male character. But this scene is terrifying, if you hate moths! Start at 37:00 or so. https://youtu.be/dvJrAgXZVbI
great book too! but the book is less strange.
<3
The movie gets on my nerves only because it doesn’t hold up to the awesomeness of the book, but that scene, movie or book, is awesome.
Anyone who thinks moths are not awful are living a delusion. I used to be one of those people, until a real life moth horror story happened to me.
Gonna leave some space here so you can scroll by without reading the gory details.
Yep. This needs some space. How about puppies? Think about puppies and move on.
Still with me? Want to know the true horror of moths?
So I never freaked out about moths that much. Spiders, definitely. But moths I brushed away, like a chump. Last summer I was getting ready for bed one night and saw a little moth way up on the ceiling. I was tired and thought “eh, whatever” and went to bed.
That was my worst mistake. I underestimated the true horror of moths. Because I was dozing off when I felt something. In my ear. It was flapping. IT WAS A MOTH.
I jumped out of bed because I thought this couldn’t have happened. But it had. There was a fucking moth flapping in my ear. I spent ten minutes crying and freaking out before making my husband drive me to the ER because this was the worst thing that could happen and I needed medical attention immediately. At the ER, they flushed my ear with stuff to kill the moth and sanitize me, and eventually got it sucked out.
I wear earplugs now when I go to bed. If I’m out and see a moth, I cover my ears. Because apparently this isn’t rare. This happens. This is a real nightmare and we have to KILL ALL THE MOTHS.
no no no no I know you warned and put space but noooooo. I am so glad you are ok!!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
THANK YOU FOR WARNING US
I WAS PREVIOUSLY MOTH-NEUTRAL, NOW I JOIN THE PLATFORM OF KILL ALL THE MOTHS
EVERYONE START WEARING EAR PROTECTION TO BED
But! If you keep the room dark and hold a flashlight near your ear, the moth will fly out again on it its own! (Or at least that’s what the ER doc said when my dad went in with a junebug in his ear.)
Re the raisin bran nightmare above: samesies, except substitute porridge with raisins for raisin bran, and cockroach for weevils. And add: realize what is happening when the raisin, in the porridge, in the spoon, on the way to your mouth, MOVES. And then FLIES at you, when you throw the entire thing in the air in horror. And then settles in the lace on your nightie and you have to take the nightie off without letting the cockroach touch you. But then revert to burning house down, and moving to the desert.
*silent screams*
I WILL NEVER EAT AGAIN AND ALSO POSSIBLY BURN DOWN THE UNIVERSE AS A PRECAUTION.
I feel like you need some kind of medal for surviving that.
As an entomologist this post and comment thread is making me so so sad. Everyone please feel free to send me your moths as well as any other problem insects and I will take good care of them. (And yes, this does include things like wasps. Wasps are absolutely assholes but I have saved enough of them that we have come to an Understanding)
You feel free to come to my house and rehome every single centipede, which are essentially evil incarnate if evil had about a million wiggly legs and ran super fast all around your shower.
I do not understand these people. What is a moth going to do, flap at you??
You dont want moths stop putting fake moons on everything
READ THE ABOVE STORY BY ANNIE ABOUT THE MOTH INSIDE THE EAR
I AM NEVER TURNING MY CAPSLOCK OFF
Oh come on ANYTHING can crawl in your ear. My friend’s dad had an ant in his ear for long enough for it to get infected and require medical attention, is he afraid of ants? I dont know, we didnt keep in touch.
I laughed.
“ANYTHING can crawl in your ear” is not a way to get people less afraid of moths, it will just make people more afraid of ANYTHING.
Dying laughing over here.
Okay man, if the idea of a moth fluttering INSIDE your ear while you’re unable to get it out doesn’t freak you out, we’ll put all the moths in your bedroom.
Yeah, the vast majority of these posts bewilder me. Moths don’t bother me at all??
I too have come to an Understanding with wasps. When I was 16 two of them stung (or bit? I forget which one they do) two of my fingers, which swelled up like sausages and burned like crazy. Ever since that day, random wasps would just fly around me, land on my shirt & just chill, and I was like, “Meh, NBD.”
I’m not entirely sure what I gave up as part of our secret, unspoken pact but I really hope it wasn’t something vital.
When I was a mail carrier I had an understanding with bees. I remember once walking up a front path with overgrown lavender on each side that was humming with bees. I walked through it bare-legged, brushing against all the lavender, and all the bees just politely flew into the air before landing again. I think they knew I was minding my own business. There was also a couple of times that, while pulled over with the door open (for an apartment box), a bee flew into my vehicle, and it could take a good five minutes to get it out without hurting it, but I was determined.
The one wasp nest I saw got knocked off the mailbox and stomped in its infancy. And a yellow jacket once stung me near my ankle, the little motherfucker. God DAMN that hurt.
Don’t worry, not everyone is anti-bug. I like everything except June bugs. Oh and those bite-y Asian beetles that masquerade as ladybugs.
I will also take you rmoths and butterflies and bumblebees and pollinators! But anything with more than 6 legs has to fuck right off and live on a different planet.
Once, in marriage counselling, my (now) ex-husband referred to us having sex as a “session” and years later the memory still evokes these reactions. But moths, no. Moths and spiders and snakes are like puppies in comparison. In fact thinking of fluttering, fuzzy moths is soothing me right now.
they say that in Cosmo sometimes. “Sex sessions.” Bleurch.
Revolting.
My sister once called me to initiate the following conversation, which I produce verbatim:
Me (seeing her name on my phone): Hey!
Her: I AM IN AN ELEVATOR AND THERE IS A MOTH IN HERE WITH ME SO IF SOMEONE FINDS MY DEAD BODY IN HERE LATER I WANT YOU TO TELL THE WORLD THAT IS WHY
I rescue moths and take them outside but if a spider ever touches my bare skin, I will tear my own flesh off and fling it into a swamp.
me too
The town I grew up in has a cutter moth infestation every 7 years or so – cyclical like the midwest has with cicadas. That last year before I moved away, the drought and the rain and whatever else in the climate made it a perfect storm for the worst cutter moth infestation in memory. I would walk out of my house and immediately be covered. I’d try to wipe them off as best as I could but when I got in the car they’d be there with me. Once I was driving to work and they took to dive bombing their way up my skirt – I almost died. I hate them so very very much.
cutworm moth, not cutter moth.
Ahhhhhhhh! I am normally fine with moths, but too many of anything is NIGHTMARE FODDER.
this is the worst thing I have ever heard I am going to go dig a hole and crawl into it and die
This is a cockroach story and not a moth story, but: once while i was studying in my horrible student apartment, I became suddenly and violently aware of a huge cockroach hanging out on the wall beside my face. I screamed and it ran under the couch. At this point I realized that I could (1) go back to studying knowing that there was a cockroach RIGHT THERE which could emerge at any moment, or (2) lift up the couch and run the risk of it scuttling up onto my arm. I chose option (3): spray an entire can of Raid into the space under the couch.
Figuring it must be dead, I then lifted up the couch to retrieve its corpse for ritual defilement and disposal, and it SAUNTERED OUT FROM UNDER THE COUCH LIKE NOTHING HAD HAPPENED. I hit it so hard with a shoe that I sprained my wrist, and that is how a cockroach screwed up my sophomore piano recital.
Yeah, cockroaches are indestructible to anything but being smashed directly with a heavy object. I once tried to crush one with a dustpan, and at the end I was bleeding and my dustpan broken, but the cockroach was still alive.
I used to wrap law school casebooks (hardcover, many hundred pages) in plastic bags and then drop them from standing height onto cockroaches. Worked pretty well!
Cockroaches are the thing I just can’t deal with. Even when they’re dead. I will go through elaborate rituals, up to and including avoiding the bathroom for as long as I can, to pretend that I haven’t seen a dead cockroach so a roommate will have to be the one to deal with it.
This exactly. My level of can’t deal means that I can’t even kill them because it requires being too close and acknowledging their existence. We moved into a place that came preloaded with them and I made bf eat most of our meals out sitting in the car and I cried outside a lot.
Once in that same apartment, there was a giant cockroach that kept coming out to harass us and then retreating into the air vents. At one point, my partner and I fled the apartment and huddled together on the exterior stairs, and we seriously considered just living outside until the cockroach moved on. This was in the bad part of town, so there was like a 40% chance that we would get stabbed, but there was a 100% chance that if we went back inside there would be a cockroach waiting for us, SO…
Too many dead cockroaches are actually not-dead, though, and have a nasty habit of wandering off the moment you take your eye off them.
Exactly! So even if they look dead you have to squash them before attempting to dispose of the body, knowing while you set up your squashing system that at any moment they could start moving, and I caaaan’t.
I woke up once in my grad school apartment in Indiana and THERE WAS A COCKROACH SITTING RIGHT ON TOP OF MY CHEST. There was screaming and flurries of blankets. My usual way of dealing with them was to trap them with tupperware and then leave them there until they dehydrated to death. Once I came home and found a partially trapped one being eaten by another one. Cannibalistic fuckers.
You threw away the Tupperware though, right? You didn’t just pour leftovers into them after a cockroach died all over them, right?
Nope, washed them and used them again because I was Hard Core and Poor. In fact, I still have all that tupperware!! Don’t tell my husband…
Basically I deal with bugs by pretending I’m in Starship Troopers, but only the movie version.
Oh but I love moths!! They are the superior cousins of butterflies, being that they are giant AND furry AND usually in lovely earth tones, I really think they’re super neat and while as a knitter I have Concerns about their Intent and while as a human who dislikes surprises I would not like to be surprised by one, overall my sentiment on months is 😀
I had to physically restrain myself from pushing the Report button on this gif. Now I can’t stop watching it. God have mercy.
Your post seems like the only safe place to share this photo, in a section full of people terrified of moths. This beauty was in the community garden last year and I was delighted:
The fuzzy legs!!
YOU ARE SO LUCKY
It’s so pretty!! Yes please moth appreciation thread!
ooosie so precious pretty little monster! *kiss kiss kiss* i give you kisses on your face!
AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH IN A MOTH PHOBIA THREAD WHY DID YOU POST THIS???? NOW I HAVE TO GO SCRUB MY SKIN OFF
That is SO MEAN, I can’t believe you posted that on a moth phobia thread. I just screamed out loud and almost peed my pants. Nonononononono.
One time, I found a live moth in a bag of spinach. Bagged spinach: never again.
Same! Except mine was dead. It was almost as big as the one pictured above, too, which freaked the hell out of me. I’ll still buy bagged spinach, but it gets washed like it’s being prepped for surgery.
I can tell you from experience as someone who grew up in the Mojave Desert that not only did we have flying bugs, we had SWARMS OF GIANT MUTANT DEATH-MOTHS (for a couple of years). I don’t know where they came from or why they were there, but two summers in a row, we got swarmed by moths with minimum four-inch wingspans. I was already intensely disgusted by moths and butterflies, so these were like being attacked by Actual Mothra Right There On My Front Porch.
The worst part was that my cat, an accomplished hunter, brought one to my bedroom door unnoticed by whoever let her in the house. She dropped its twitching, fluttering body right at my feet. I slammed my bedroom door in her face and didn’t even feel bad about it. I guess she took the hint, though, because she never brought one in again. Instead, she just eviscerated a couple dozen of them on the porch. Thanks, Kitty…I guess.
But Mallory, haven’t you ever been IN a cinema where there has been a giant moth, fluttering erratically around the light of the projector? And you can’t leave in the middle of the film because that would be stupid and there are people on either side of you, so you are stuck in a dark room with a sometimes-visible giant moth which you keep looking for every time it flaps out of sight?
I HAVE.
Great stuff on the moths though. And I second all the anti-butterfly comments.
When Arachnaphobia came out my dad talked a lot about going to the pet store and getting a bunch of crickets to release in the theater. As far as I know he never did it, but…?
Desert bugs are the smallest and deadliest, but still better than the monstrous, mostly-harmless bugs of everywhere else.
what about those giant camel spider bug things that there are a billion youtube videos of posted by US soldiers in afghanistan tho
i know my syntax is for shit but just thinking about those videos shuts my brain down hard
Hwelllll ::adjusts folklorist badge:: There are camel spiders, but they are not as big or as dangerous as viral images have made them appear. <a href=”http://(http://www.snopes.com/photos/bugs/camelspider.asp)” target=”_blank”>(http://www.snopes.com/photos/bugs/camelspider.asp) A colleague of mine wrote a paper about how stories about the camel spiders are really stories about insurgents– the spiders seem small (relative to a person, at least) but are almost supernaturally fast and clever.
oh huh, I had not actually seen these stories/descriptions, though it makes perfect sense that they would be fearmongery support-our-troops stuff! That’s interesting. I think I was just thinking of pics/videos of the normal sized camel spiders (mentioned in the snopes article)? A 6″ leg span and 10 mph sounds plenty scary to me…!
However, this IS pretty much how I feel about house centipedes. GHHGAGGHGHGHGHHH WORST. WORST WORST WORST they are like someone taped roughly 40 largeish spiders together and then lacquered them so as to give them impenetrable armor????
The first time I ever saw one it was roughly 3″ long and I made my roommate try to kill it so I had time to take a picture for later identification. However a. she was not the resident bug killer, and b. it had no intention of being lightly squashed within a paper towel, and its rather spirited writhing when she tried to do so promptly startled her into dropping it. Whereupon it immediately scuttled towards the pillows on my bed and disappeared, never to be seen again except in the nightmares I had about waking up with it crawling into one of my ears for the next month or so.
aaaaa!!! i love your description of centipedes. lacquered! delight!
This is 100% accurate. One ran across my bed this past weekend as I was sorting laundry. My first instinct was to burn the house down. I ran away and made my husband kill it, then made him show me the dead parts because I was concerned he just SAID he killed it to placate me but it could still be out there, waiting. Always waiting. Even having seen its squashed legs (on my sweatpants, thanks honey) I’m still not 100% convinced it really died, but after that at least I could go back in the room.
AAUGH NO
You are to be commended for ever sleeping in, or for that matter touching, that bed again
YES THIS. The other night I was brushing my teeth in our large bathroom and saw something in the mirror behind me. It was one of these horrorbugs, about four feet behind me on the floor, moving so big and fast that it CAUGHT MY EYE IN THE MOTHER-SCRATCHING MIRROR. I leapt into the adjacent closet, got my husband’s heaviest shoe, and–in a feat of bravery I hope will be told at my funeral–leapt AT THE CREATURE, absolutely SLAMMING the shoe down on it, while (and they can leave this part out at the funeral) emitting a horrible strangled fear-cry. The combo was loud enough that my husband came thundering down the stairs to make sure I was okay. After he heard my Tale of Immense Bravery he patted my arm and went to clean the guts off his dress shoe.
YES. The one in my story above – earlier that day the upstairs neighbors had seen a mouse, and my bedroom was off the living room, and we were sitting in the living room watching TV and out of the corner of my eye in the half-light from the living room I saw something move in my bedroom so big that we went to go see if we had a mouse too. SPOILER ALERT IT WAS IN NO WAY A MOUSE.
(I have had some apartments with Terrible Mouse Things too, but “mouse-sized centipede” was definitely not something I thought I was signing up for.)
The centipedes in Hawaii are huge. Like I never saw one less than four inches. When they’d appear in the bathroom you’d hear them skittering on the tile before you’d see it in the shadows. Thankfully they didn’t come inside terribly often. When I was on crutches and could not put any weight whatsoever on one leg, the biggest centipede I’ve seen in my entire life, including zoos, ran across the floor and hid behind the toilet while I was getting ready for bed. It was at least ten inches long. Its leg span was close to two inches. There was no hope of killing it in my incapacitated state, and they usually head for the kitchen anyway, so I decided to not freak out and just went to bed.
Naturally I woke up in horrible pain in the middle of the night because it crawled into my bed and bit my neck like a fucking vampire. Couldn’t turn my head to the left for a few days, needed a couple weeks of antibiotics (because they’re carnivorous scavengers so like a Komodo dragon their jaws are seething with bacteria), and the urgent care doctor said she’d never seen such a wide bite.
Moths are still worse though.
That is entirely horrifying.
That is the worst thing I have ever read in my life. To the extent that I want to invent a time machine just so I can go back to a time before I had that mental image in my head. The mental image of a TEN-INCH-LONG HOUSE CENTIPEDE BITING SOMEONE’S NECK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT SO HARD THAT THEY NEEDED URGENT CARE AHHHHHHHH PLEASE GOD NO WHY GOD WHY.
Excuse me while I go scrub my brain with bleach in an attempt to wash that thought from my mind forever
Too many legs. House centipedes can scuttle off to HELL.
Once I was sleeping at a guy’s house and his little dog hopped up onto the bed, settled down between us and curled into a ball, and her tail brushed around to complete the curl.
And then the brushing feeling continued right over my face because a house centipede had apparently hitched a ride into the bed and wanted to ensure that I would never sleep well there again.
116% agree that these fuckers are CREEPY (nothing should ever be able to move that fast, and it doesn’t look like it’s running so much as creating a wave with its legs, and NONONO) but I did feel much better about them and stopped killing them when I realized that their main purpose in life is not to crawl in my bed or my ear, but to eat other bugs. I mean, it still gives me the willies, but my brain is doing a fair-to-middling job of overruling the willies with logic. Mmmmaybe this will help someone else? Or it’s just another variation on the spider issue, which as someone pointed out above is not necessarily a valid argument in the first place.
My dad likes to proudly tell the story of the time he put a giant moth in the sleeping bag of a friend who was terrified of them as a teenage. I think the poor kid probably tried to do most the things on that list once he got in and realised!
Me, I love moths! If I were a witch, I’d want the power to summon them in a giant cloud, like with the bees in Jupiter Ascending, and they would be my familiars and do my bidding.
Generally speaking, I have no quarrel with moths. However, I found a tobacco hornworm/Carolina Sphinx moth larva on my tomato plant last year, and am still shuddering from that interaction. The damned thing was more than 3 inches long and as big around as my thumb. Horrifying.
Oh my god that’s so giant and green it’s kind of awesome??? It looks like a cartoon caterpillar.
The hornworm was so large that even now thinking back, part of me thinks it must have been animatronic or something. It just didn’t even make sense to me as a real thing.
Also, its horrible, horrible mouth.
About three years ago, there were some of those on my herbs.
Enough that you could HEAR THEM CHEWING as they ate the cilantro, the dill, the basil, the thyme, the oregano, mint, and bee balm, and the catnip.
oh hey nope not growing tomatoes this summer sorry stomach
OH NOOO! Please don’t let this green monstrosity put you off growing tomatoes!
Look at these beauties we got in spite of this jerk showing up on our plant:
Look at those amazing stripey speckled romans toward the bottom left! Totally worth it, nasty caterpillars and all.
Awwww, I think sphinx moths are lovely. I had one sipping at my geraniums last summer, while I sat on the front porch at dusk watching the fireflies.
I found one of those on a pepper plant once and it had started to pupate. I was trying to get it off with a stick and managed to disrngage rhe top part, which commenced waving around and moving its leg stumps trying to reattach to the stem of the plant. I was horrified and made a bunch of screamy wuhuhuhuh noises until I felt less dirtied by the experience. My neighbor thought it was hilarious.
Bogong moths, y’all. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australas…
If you happen to get caught in their migration, it is DEEPLY upsetting even if you’re not especially anti-moth. The air gets THICK with them. They are everywhere – including in houses, on trains, and at the Australian Open most years.
Fun fact: Indigenous Australians eat them as part of their traditional diet because the moths are very fatty and their traditional diet doesn’t include much fat (not much fat on the local fauna), but even as someone who craves fatty things mmmmm almost always, I can’t imagine that they’d taste very good. So damn dusty.
Oh. Well. Yeah ok NOPE.
OF COURSE THAT’S IN AUSTRALIA.
Yeah, I almost left that detail out figuring that it would be obvious.
Once when I was driving (still on my learners permit at the time) a moth got into the car, and somehow insinuated itself BETWEEN MY SANDAL AND THE SOLE OF MY FOOT. I died, and remain dead to this day.
I periodically have a small spider descend from the sun visor right into my eyeline while I’m driving. Spiders love my car. LOVE. The feeling isn’t mutual. Spiders are fine, just not in my face.
And after the apocalypse, we will all eat crickets and ants and be glad for them because they’re delicious. Just like billions of people already do. And you will think “who was that chiffony person who was afraid of moths? That wasn’t me.”
I worry that this will happen, and then I’ll starve to death because if you are allergic to shellfish, you might also be allergic to crickets and similar insects. And that makes sense because shellfish are the insects of the sea.
You’ll become powerful in your group for trading all your yucky crickets away and making delicacies out of soft-bodies caterpillars.
I guess if I can come around on brussels sprouts, I can learn to like caterpillars.
Oh my. I love moths, and am obsessed with the giant ones. They are lovely and delicate and live for days just to mate, lay eggs and die, the saddest story on earth. I could no more kill a moth than a cat, unless they are those pesky pantry moths. Otherwise I rescue moths like my best friend rescues cats or my sister rescues dogs. My blog header and about me page might give you nightmares. Your writing is hilarious, and I would insert the word spider or slug in this post to make it work for me.
Pantry moths!!! Ugh!!! May never eat quinoa again…
If a moth ever got in, my roommate and I used to a) scream for at least a couple of hours and b) trap it against the wall with a large bowl (cups get you too close) and then tape the bowl to the wall until we could get someone else to deal with it.
We once had a bowl taped to the wall for the better part of a month, with a sign on it reading “DO NOT REMOVE – MOTH INSIDE”
I ONCE TRIED TO REMOVE A BAT USING THIS TECHNIQUE it ended with both of us rolling around on the floor trying to stay away from each other
Yes, but for junebugs. With their terrible clutching, grasping feet and horrifying exoskeletons and unjustifiable existence.
AND DEAFENINGLY LOUD BUZZING
Once when I was in high school there was this itchy feeling in my shirt that I thought was a tag or a piece of tape somehow, and I reached behind me and extracted a LIVE JUNEBUG which HISSED AT ME AND FLEW AWAY.
I take deep, DEEP satisfaction flicking my finger against the window screen to which they cling during the summer and sending them careening through space.
I was afraid of moths as a child, so my sister told me that all moths were actually one moth, nicknamed “Mothy” who was my friend and would talk to me. I now have a debilitating fear of most crawly things: spiders, cockroaches and silverfish are all up there and I had to kill a silverfish last night with my own hand OH GOD WHHHY. But moths and I are cool, even though uponadulthood I realized we must have had a moth infestation for years to explain the long relationship I had with Mothy.
After moving to Alabama and seeing my first cockroach chilling in my bathroom, I a) sprayed an entire can of bug spray while it continued moving b) covered with with shaving cream before disposing of it because I refused to look at it, causing me to only grab chunks of it at a time and c) spent the remainder of the night in a 24 hour Waffle House, which while probably infested with cockroaches, they were at least not my problem to kill. I also slept under a mosquito net for the remaining three years living there.
See me re: worms. My only actual phobia I have, I think. I do not like other insects, and generally do not want them touching me, but if I even see a worm on the sidewalk I feel like I am going to have a heart attack.
The diorama of a giant fucking worm that’s in the NYC Museum of Natural History almost gave me a panic attack once. Now I know precisely when to turn my head and walk quickly to avoid it, though.
Oh man, that feeling when you’re walking down the street after a long rain and the worms are everywhere? FULL BODY SHUDDER.
MY PEOPLE.
I am okay with most insects (although I am not fond of cockroaches) but anything worm-y, like caterpillars and millipedes and general larvae, needs to GO AWAAAAAAY.
YES YES YES! Worms are the absolute worst. I am learning Danish and we had to write about what we did and didn’t like and so of course I wrote ‘I hate worms’ and the teacher corrected it to ‘I hate snakes’! Um, no, I one hundred percent meant worms.
My main problem with them is they are so unevolved and unaware of their surroundings that they wouldn’t try and get off you once they are on you.
Basically the whole Annelida family can die in a fire as far as I am concerned, ecosystems be damned.
This whole comment section is terrifying why can’t I stop reading whyyyyyyyyy.
I can deal with moths, mostly because they make my cat fling himself around the room in hunt mode. I don’t mind spiders in the least.
But…
If there is a daddy longlegs anywhere in my proximity I utterly lose my shit.
Be a spider, be a fly, but don’t be some haphazard creeptastic drunkenly looping hybrid of the two.
Ahhhh, I am having horror neck prickles even typing this out.
BRB, taking a Silkwood shower.
horror neck prickles? spot on
Be a spider, be a fly, but don’t be some haphazard creeptastic drunkenly looping hybrid of the two.
YES THIS.
One summer night, I was driving along a deserted road when all of a sudden, I was accosted by a wayward moth. I screamed and almost drove off the fucking road in sheer panic, because I couldn’t even SEE it to predict if it would assault me again.
I felt no remorse when twenty years later, my cat ate a moth in its entirety in front of me.
No no no no no no no moths. Whatever is supposed to eat them in large quantities, please could you be doing that more quickly.
I’ll just be over here, hiding under my desk in case a fleet of moths suddenly crashes through my office window. Maybe I should go look at Mallory’s nice owl post from a while back, instead.
I was staying in the Maine woods last Thursday and I accidentally picked up a roach I thought was an acorn and I am still screaming, even now.
No.
These are my actual feelings about inchworms, caterpillars, maggots, and their nightmarish ilk. Especially “just shudder until I die.”
I have a friend who is very afraid of spiders. Once she saw a spider on the (inside) roof of her car as she was driving up a small mountain/large hill. She ended up swerving off the road (while flailing at the spider), through the guard rail, and falling (in the car) backwards off a cliff. She survived (somehow, although she was pretty injured), and is super casual about it now because she had worse experiences both working on a farm and playing rugby.
She still hates spiders though.
Sort of related: I had a cockroach infestation one time in my ancient Savannah apartment, but I though I was winning the war. I sometimes drank coffee and stayed up all night to murder them, so you might question my sanity, but I thought I was winning. The side effect of my war was that I had the unfortunate opportunity to learn what a pregnant cockroach looks like – she drags around a horrid long egg sack until it bursts, releasing teeny cockroaches who scatter into all corners of the home.
One night when I was sleeping and not up murdering cockroaches, I awoke and something compelled me to turn on the light. (God? A guardian spirit? Cockroach noises reaching me through my sleep?) There, on my MOTHERFUCKING PILLOW, was a pregnant cockroach. I am not sure I slept again until every cockroach in Savannah was dead.
Relatedly, I have good “wake up just in time” fu, apparently, because I once woke up with a live tick pinched between my fingers.
Giving quiet thanks for LA and its desert climes.
Thanks for the nightmares! 😉
I bought a book in Oxford, MS once and took it to a restaurant and opened it and a huge cockroach crawled out and into my soup. The south and their cockroaches. The. Worst.
The most horrifying insect in the world is the Jerusalem Cricket. We had them in the part of California where I grew up, and had I ever touched one I would have summarily lit my entire body on fire.
I’m OK with moths but cockroaches are another story. I once had one fly at me just after I had gotten out of the shower and was still naked and vulnerable, and that is NOT a state in which one is prepared to do battle with horrifying insects. I am still scarred.
Oh my god I just looked up Jerusalem Crickets to remind myself of the horror and have just learned that in Australia (because OF COURSE) there is a thing called a weta which is in the same superfamily and the biggest species of wetas can get up to 8 inches/200mm long and now I’ll never stop screaming.
Done. Done forever. Done with this planet, done with Jerusalem crickets, done with pseudoscorpions, done with fucking Wetas, done with whatever else you can come up with.
I’ll be shooting myself into space on a one-way-only trajectory.
This is my husband but with butterflies.
I can’t sleep in a room with a moth. They fly to your mouth and suck your soul.
or actually fly inside your ear, apparently that is a real thing, commenter Annie told the story D:
Hmm, well, that explains a few things about me I guess.
until recently I lived in this previously-only-occasionally-occupied home in a little mountain community outside of town and when it’d been vacant for a few months at a time at certain times of year you’d go up and find that there was more or less a carpet of dead moths scattered around the place
When I was house-shopping the realtor and I went into the basement of one place and in the corner was a pile of dead ladybugs that was at least a foot hight.
Side note: you know you have a good realtor when she snaps on the basement light and says, “I’ll go first in case it’s creepy.”
hnghhhh
Two words: House Centipedes! The creepiness and speed of these things puts spiders to shame. They are difficult to catch, go everywhere in the house, and leave a mess of legs and guts (try getting that out of the carpet) anywhere they are squashed! And the legs, MY GOD the long, chitinous legs! I’ll take a moth in my bedroom ANY DAY OF THE WEEK over this spawn from Hell! Excuse me while I go vomit in the corner!
when spending a semester in a university in Nanjing there was this hideous, HIDEOUS infestation of these gigantic centipedes on campus (this looks about right: https://goo.gl/ywZGxc and in my memory they were longer than my middle finger). the campus was very, uh…elemental? “indoors” and “outdoors” were less distinct concepts than you’d expect on a US or EU campus. so they were all over inside, too. my strongest memory maybe of that entire period was of suddenly feeling a sharp pinch on my hand in class and looking down to see one of these beasts sitting on me, to shriek, leap to my feet and fling it away. and the teacher was too polite/awkward even to comment on this having happened! butyes. fuck centipedes. creatures should not generally have more than four limbs. I’ll give octopuses an octopass. and starfish. but nothing else.
I went to Sonic one time and got a deep-fried moth in place of half my fries.
Never again, a moth. Not on my watch.
You should get free Sonic for life! If you ever eat it again.
I have a moth tattooed on me, but this list is what would happen if a frog ever touched me. Frogs are cute so long as they are not near me in any way.
I couldn’t stop myself from reading all of these comments. I am equal parts horrified/disgusted and somehow delighted by these tales? Coming from the PNW and spending lots of time outside, I’m pretty chill with most critters- but we don’t really have that many horrific creepy crawlers. Cockroaches? Palmetto bugs? Big scary things? eegads!!
Although this has now made me really nervous for an upcoming visit to NYC where we’re staying with my partner’s bff who is rumored to not be the tidiest housekeeper. Which is fine, you do you, etc etc. Except that now I am irrationally convinced his kitchen will be full of cockroaches in the middle of the night.
Not totally irrational unfortunately.
But what we do have is. . . ticks. Ahh, my skin is crawling just thinking about it.
This, but spiders.
I like that this became an OMG BUGS! thread because once I put on a tshirt from a clothesline and something was itching my left shoulder, near my neck (yknow the front part of the shoulder) so I flipped the collar inside out to look and THERE WAS A HUGE COCKROACH in my shirt.
I was never the same.
True story: My family has a (very rustic) lake cabin in the Midwest and my aunts were visiting one week during the summer when I was younger. Being outdoorsy people and (reasonably) not wanting to sleep in 30-year-old bunk beds, they decided to pitch their tent and sleep outside. My one aunt woke up in the morning with an itchy, uncomfortable feeling in her ear and had my mom (an audiologist) look at it. And my mom–to everyone’s horror (and fascination)–pulls out A DEAD MOTH. Only almost as bad as the time I had to get my entire body salted down due to the plethora of leeches that had decided I was the feast of the day. *shudder*
This is me with wasps. Do I need to move to a permanent land of winter to avoid them?
More than once, around a campfire or lantern or other camp-y low-lighting situation, a moth has flown full-on into my face.
I am very pale. I assume that’s part of their confusion?
OMG, this hit the spot at our house. My 16 year old daughter has a severe moth phobia (it can really feel like no one else in the world has this)…this made us laugh and laugh. Her favorite one was “remove all of my skin.” 🙂
Ha ha ho, I read this with amusement and some cringing about an hour ago and then set out to prepare some sesame-teriyaki mixed greens to round out my dinner. Veg chopped and piled in the pan, I looked into the bag and noticed it was…animated. Moving here and there. OK, fairly teeming with some kind of small green very much alive things. Freaked out, threw it back in the fridge. Re-freaked out, took it all outside and debugged it. Washed, washed and REwashed the greens I had cut up. But it’s definitely going to be a delicious and thoughtfully prepared Stephen King nightmare that I chow down on later, in no small part because I ate the same greens in an omelet for breakfast and a smoothie for lunch. Yay protein?!
Small Person #2’s approach to moths is Shriek At Them Until They Go Away. In case any Toasties need a new way to deal with moths.
My wife sent me this link and I looked at the url and decided I was done with the Internet forever. She said “did you get that link I sent you” and I said “no I want a divorce and then to stop breathing”
Also: Butterflies are just colored moths.
Before 3D films were really A Thing I went to a “under the sea” type 3D film at the IMAX in Waterloo with my then-boyfriend. One of the trailers – in 3D – was for a documentary about a valley filled with butterflies. Hundreds of thousands of 3D high-definition butterflies flew out of the screen into my face and I screamed and threw my coat over my head.
Butterflies are just moths with good PR.
Here is the thing about me and moths. I am, like most of you, completely on board with the rest of you in my GET AWAY OH GOD WHERE IS IT???!! attitude about moths. I have been that way since forever, even as a (perfectly sensible because moths are horrific) kid.
But when I was a teenager in the 1970s, I went to stay with cousins in their summer home in upstate New York on Lake Oskawana and there was, at the time, a Gypsy Moth infestation that was destroying the forest–it was kinda famous, you could probably find news reports about this vast infestation and the devastation of the forests in the north east by Gypsy Moth caterpillars if you did some research. My cousins were boys and it was the only time in my life that I hung out with boys my age as a kid and did typical boy things. And I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve never been so brave–they never said “Ha, she’s a girl and can’t do things”, they just assumed I was one of them and on board with doing boy things. It makes me so angry about societal expectations of women to be scared and quiet and sit in the corner and don’t make a fuss and BE NICE all the time, which as a 1970s female-type teenager I was expected to be. I basically got to be a boy for a summer in a forest on a lake and I wish I could have just moved in with my relatives because the freedom was incredible. I wonder who I’d have grown up to be if I hadn’t had to go back to behaving like a girl. BE NICE.
So the boy thing we liked to do other than jumping off rocks into the lake in an insane full-body plunge and riding dirt bikes in incredibly dangerous ways was KILL GYPSY MOTHS by the handful, literally grabbing fistfuls of moths and throwing them and their egg cases into the fire. They were in the mating-and-laying-vast-numbers-of-eggs stage, so any we killed didn’t get to reproduce. The egg cases popped like popcorn. I don’t know if we made a dent in the devastation, but for one summer, I was completely unafraid of moths.
This is why I’m completely unimpressed with idiots who think girls behave THIS way and boys behave THAT way and it’s inbred, because it’s genetic and just natural for men and women to be different. It’s not, it’s societal and it’s gender-based expectations, I’m telling you. Psychology, huh?
We lived in East Africa when I was a child, and on our first night there the house was invaded by army ants. Every bug encounter since then has been anticlimactic.
Hello friend, you forgot pee and ppop yourself while screaming and running as far as you can. I had one fly out of my jeans that I just brought in from the clothes line( didn’t really do the first to, but definitely the scream N run) also had a HUGE cecropia moth on my mom’s porch N I refused to o get out of the car
My (very sweet, very cuddly) cat just gently nuzzled my bare elbow while I am reading these horror stories and I nearly peed my pants and/or jumped out of my skin because it was THE EXACT same feeling as a bug crawling on you.
This is the most wonderful post I have ever read on any website in the history of the Internet, dating back to the Internet being a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye. And THANK YOU for not including photos of those fluttering balls of fuckery. Otherwise, I would be cleaning vomit off of my laptop instead of writing this comment.
Right as a baby one flutters about me… *shudder*
Once, a moth flew near my face. I smashed my face into my car door and aquired the 3rd scar on my face.
So when I was eleven, my mom and I were at home alone. She was making breakfast when she noticed this huge “bat” (that’s what she called it until we closely examined it and realized it was a black moth the size of a bird). She called me over to see if we could catch it and release it instead of killing it, even though she kept telling me that it was venomous and could kill you if it touched you (I was a young, what did I know). I gave her a box and I got a bag, and we managed to corner it by the window. The plan was on the count of three, she’d open the bottom of the box and it’d fly into the bag. Unfortunately, my mother was counting at the speed of light and I wasn’t ready for when she released the bat from hell straight into my face. Let me tell you, if I could run in an Olympic race as fast as I did that day straight into my room, you wouldn’t know who Usain Bolt is. I left my mother to her own fate as pay back for the hateful crime she had committed. I’m also pretty sure I was screaming for my life the entire way to my room (I can’t exactly remember since everything after seeing that thing in my face is a blur). Since then, every moth I see I just kill. Why even risk it.
P.S. We just ended killing that little fucker. We didn’t need him polluting the world with anymore evil.
So when I was eleven, my mom and I were at home alone. She was making breakfast when she noticed this huge “bat” (that’s what she called it until we closely examined it and realized it was a black moth the size of a bird). She called me over to see if we could catch it and release it instead of killing it, even though she kept telling me that it was venomous and could kill you if it touched you (I was a young, what did I know). I gave her a box and I got a bag, and we managed to corner it by the window. The plan was on the count of three, she’d open the bottom of the box and it’d fly into the bag. Unfortunately, my mother was counting at the speed of light and I wasn’t ready for when she released the bat from hell straight into my face. Let me tell you, if I could run in an Olympic race as fast as I did that day straight into my room, you wouldn’t know who Usain Bolt is. I left my mother to her own fate as pay back for the hateful crime she had committed. I’m also pretty sure I was screaming for my life the entire way to my room (I can’t exactly remember since everything after seeing that thing in my face is a blur). Since then, every moth I see I just kill. Why even risk it.
P.S. We just ended up killing the moth. We didn’t need satans spawn polluting the work with more evil.
YES YES YES! Worms are the absolute worst. I am learning Danish and we had to write about what we did and didn't like and so of course I wrote 'I hate worms' and the teacher corrected it to 'I hate snakes'! Um, no, I one hundred percent meant worms.
My main problem with them is they are so unevolved and unaware of their surroundings that they wouldn't try and get off you once they are on you.
Basically the whole Annelida family can die in a fire as far as I am concerned, ecosystems be damned.
This is better than the Lord of the rings
Im so proud of myself for getting that Poe reference
June bugs. JUNE BUGS. June bugs.