Would you like to share your scariest insect story?

I have two both of which are horrible.

When I lived in Seattle, there was a hige evergreen in our front yard. One day I turned to go back in the house and there was a very large spider hanging from a web right at eye level of my face!

Another time we lived in Gig harbor WA in a little cabin in the woods, which was filled with wolf spiders. There was a hole in the ceiling over the bed where once a chimney had gone through the roof. I lived in fear of a spider falling out of that hole. One night it happened. A large wolf spider plummeted out of the hole, bouned on the covers of the bed right next to my face, and dropped to the floor (where I killed it). Bombed by a spider!

Haha..sorry, however I happen to be a complete nature nut and love insects.
I have all kinds of strange insects around here and used to live on a major tarantula migration path, which takes place this month in October. Dozens of them marching by every day.
We have giant longhorn beetles with half inch mandibles that can draw blood, wind scorpions that I have found in clothes in my closet, root borer beetles that swarm at the first rains and are huge, walnut sized with brown furry bellies.

We also have huge Millipedes that slither along on their gazillions of legs.
I absolutely adore preying mantises and am much more likely to capture something to share with my daughter who is a major bug nut than I am to kill it.
Baboon spiders sounds exotic, I will have to look them up.
The only insects I loathe are ticks!

Gah, nasty things they are!
My worst insect experience was having a tick burrow into my shoulder once. Shudder!

I have one that makes me feel dumb.

I’m not afraid of insects at all, but when a large red spider started crawling across my apartment floor I ran for some paper towels. I placed them on top of my guest and “crushed” it. However, when I lifted the towels it fell out and proceeded to chase me a few feet before I managed to cover it with the paper towels again.

I am not proud of what happened next.

I proceed to karate kick the floor. I’m punching, kneeing, kicking, anything I can do to make sure the monster is dead. After about a minute of this I backed off, but I left the paper towels there for a good hour before I was brave enough to clean it up.

@RocketSquid LOL..a friend of mines husband jumped off the toilet with his pants around his ankles and ran screaming like a little girl from the bathroom when a spider dropped down beside him. hahaha

Can’t say I have any. While I was living in Honduras I had a tarantula that I’d find in my room every morning, that was kinda cool.

Lately I’ve been getting these insanely big wasps near my house. A bit off putting when one flies near your head but they’re not aggressive so its not really a problem.

Probably the scariest for most though is this little gal I found in my garage a couple days ago. But I decided to keep her :)

I’ve had flying cockroaches land on my face.

@Coloma do ticks have lymes disease out there? Thats the only real issue I have with ticks here in NJ. I thinkits kinda a requirement to live in this state. Either have or know someone who’s had lymes disease lol

I generally deal with spiders with a vacuum because I’m too much of a baby to even squish them. I’m trying to learn to be a nice person and catch them under a cup and take them outside, but man, I just can’t switch the heeby-jeebies off even though I want to.

I don’t have any particularly horrifying stories, but I can relay one of my mom’s. She had a huge spider pop out from under her pillow in a hotel, eek! She’s never quite been able to relax in hotels since.

I do have a nifty photo though – just a few weeks ago when I was home on break we saw this guy on our door (fortunately on the outside). For scale, he’s about two inches long. I honestly think he’s way cooler looking than he is gross, but man, we were a little freaked out when we managed to identify him because he’s a wheel bug and apparently their bites can take months to heal. So glad my dad wasn’t bitten while taking that photo!

Once when we were on Guam, I was parking my car in front of my house. My four year old son was in his booster seat in the back. As I turned from looking out the back window, I saw a spider about the size of my hand on the windshield, just about eye level and a bit to the left of where I look out. My window was open and my brain started spinning without catching on anything for several seconds before I could galvanize myself into powering that window up.
I could see individual hairs on its thick legs and squishy body. He was definitely looking in at me.
Security happened up the road just then and I frantically waved my arms to get his attention. He looked puzzled until he focused on the spider and I could visibly see his whole demeanor change. He was drawing his stick as he got out of his car, and he had to chase the damn thing as it skittled along the side of the car and around back. I had a few bad seconds imaginig it getting into the trunk and then into the back seat, but then I saw his arm just repeatedly pumping up and down in the rearview mirror.
His hand was still shaking from his surge of adrenaline as he knocked on my window and said “You can get out now, ma’am.”
I told him that I intended to take the spider into work to see if one of the Preventive Med Techs could tell me what kind of spider it was. He laughed and shook his head as he got back into his car.
I went around back of my car and there was literaly nothing but a big, wet smear and a couple of icky looking legs.

@uberbatman Yes, they can, but it is not as bad in the western states as it is back east.
It is the deer ticks that most often carry lyme disease but other species do not.
Maybe I should share a little tube of advantage I use on the cats between my shoulder blades. lol

@Coloma yea, thats the annoying bit, deer ticks are sooo friggin tiny. When I was a kid, a friend of mine went through a nest of them while we were in the woods. He woke up the next morning paralzyed down the left side of his body. He ended up getting bit 27 times (yeaa 27 little bullseyes down his left side) He’s ok now but his stomach was pretty fucked up for a while. I luckily only got it once and caught it before I got sick

@bookish1 I hated it when the cockroaches got to flying in Florida.

@uberbatman Eee…evil little things, and yes, they are SO tiny, easy to not see them until it’s too late.

True story.
Once, years ago when I lived in San Diego I caught a HUGE cockroach in my apartment. It was at least 2 inches long. I had never seen one before in my life.

I put it in a dixie cup and drowned it in Raid, it was literally floating in bug killer. After about 20 minutes I scooped it out and put it in a matchbox to show my ex husband when he came home.
3 hours later when I opened the matchbox it was ALIVE and jumped out at me!
Amazing!

No wonder they will inherit the earth. lol

I went to a Christian outdoorsey camp once. Somewhere in Mississippi. I have a lurid fear of stinging insects. Guess what kinda bug ruled that place?? Stinging and biting insects.

BILLIONS

IT WASN’T EVEN FUNNY

Yellow Jackets and horseflies (or whatever the hell bites) and hornets. EVERYWHERE

Every trash bin and corner of a building housed at least 5, the YJs in particular. I’d ask for someone else to throw my food away.

One particular asshole in my cabin told me that the bugs were attracted to sweat and bugspray. I believed him.

Not even the pool was safe. Go in the day when the insects are active, and every time you stick your head out of the water, a horsefly tries to dock with your scalp. WITH PAINFUL TINY INSECT TEETH OF DEATH

I got in trouble for trying to beat the living shit out of a guy who beat me in a pool tournament (this was back when I was a violent pre-teen) and the counselor tried to talk to me on a porch. Outside. Within maybe 10 feet of a trash can. FULL OF THEM. One of them. Landed. On. My. Leg. FREAK THE FUCK OUT and likely almost kill the counselor with my spasm.

A group I was in tried walking around the lake the camp sat against. HORSEFLIESHORSEFLIESHORSEFLIESEVERYWHERE and they would not stop CHASING me, I SWEAR they were hunting me down. I had a huge cursing and crying and screaming breakdown right in front of everybody. On the final leg, I was sprinting to my cabin just to get away.

God obviously was not with me at that camp.

Recently my best friend had a Lyme tick embed itself under his chin. My friend tried to remove it but only half succeeded (he thought). So he dropped by, tweezers in hand, to have me remove the remaining legs.

While he shrieked, I pulled out several small, thin black things.It turns out that they were whiskers.

And yes, I am frightened only of the small ticks.

I lived in Japan, the land of Gokiburi – large cockroaches.
One day I came home from work and noticed a trail of tiny black dots spaced about 1–2 meters apart running across the living carpet. Gokiburi poop! Most likely a big one. I vacuumed everything and kept looking for the trails. Every day after work I’d see another trail as it walked around the house either while I was sleeping or away. It became my goal to kill that critter. One day a found a trail under my bed! That made it personal – and the gloves were off! Engineers will appreciate the rest of the story. I devoted 3 hours setting up my new invention: the ALRGK automatic long range gokiburi killer. I used parts I had in stock – a HeNe laser, two mirrors, a light sensitive alarm system, and a fully automatic air soft battery operated MP5 machine gun. I set the beam diagonally across the hallway with the laser just kissing the top of the carpet. If the beam was broken the machine gun would fire a stream of 6mm plastic BBs at a rate of 300 rounds per minute about 12 meters. The setup was sensitive enough detect a rolling BB and the MP5 was strong enough to cut an aluminum can in half. A gokiburi wouldn’t have a chance.
I spent 2 days gingerly stepping over that beam without success. One day on the way to work I picked up my shoe on the way out of the house and there he was! Bam! Splattered.
I left the beam up for about a week but it was never used. Too bad. I was actually looking forward to seeing gokiburi bits and goo spread across the carpet.

Oh man..I forgot about horse flies. Being an avid ex horse person I can tell you, nothing like your horse taking a flying leap into the sky when a horsefly bites it. Hang on, it’s a wild buckaroo moment! lol

At the dump yesterday, I threw my glass and plastic recyclables over the edge of the bin while holding on to the cardboard container I had carried them in.

At the bottom of the container, I saw this. Reflexively I let out a ladylike but loud shriek. The guy next to me ID’d it as Acheda Domestica, the house cricket.

One time I took a shower, got in my towel, and then got dressed. After I had gotten dressed and my towel was on the ground waiting for me to hang it up again, I saw that there was a live silverfish that had been in my towel the whole time! It was seriously one of the scariest, grossest things I’ve ever experienced. I always shake out my towel to check for bugs ever since that happened, I’m still paranoid about it!

This one time I was in a remote island in Mozambique and suddenly, when I was about to use the toilet, a humongous tarantula comes crawling from under the toilet seat! I was so glad my bottom wasn’t near that!

WASPS!! That’s scary enough for me, fully fledged coward that I surely am.

@RocketSquid Oh my I am in hysterics with laughter!!

Oh sure, send me the insect qyestion. :)
I had what I thought was a moth land on me one night this summer when I was outside in shorts. The bastard took a chunk of of my leg the size of a dimple on a golfball. It started getting red and the red spread to about 4 inches across. It stopped spreading so I didn’t worry about it. Bad mistake. The next day I woke up feeling a little off. I started to hurt all over, so I called the Dr for a visit. It got worse. The pain increased and I had increasing trouble breathing. It got to the point I was debating between calling my g/f to take me to the ER or calling 911. Fortunately right then I got violently ill. I never had a chance to move, just bent over my garbage can. That cleared my throat though. I got to the Dr’s office and by that time it hurt my butt too much to sit and the bottom of me feet hurt when I stood. The Dr touched the bite site and immediately ordered a steroid shot. That took care of the symptoms but I was sore for about a week and not quite right for another couple of weeks. Friggin bugs.

Years ago, my co-worker Nestor, who is from Nicaragua, was working in a manhole a block away from one I was in. Now, manholes are just small rooms underground, connected by small conduit pipes, that cables are pulled thru. Often, rats or cockroaches will use these conduits as a subway tunnel to get from one place to another, and in this lead cockroaches traveled routinely every day at a certain time. We are talking THOUSANDS of cockroaches suddenly spilling out of one conduit, walking across the manhole, and climbing into the next conduit in the lead. It was so bad, you had to tape your pant-legs closed, or they would climb up your legs inside your pants. Just disgusting.
Anyway, Nestor is working in the manhole, when suddenly all these cockroaches pour in. He freaks out, climbs up the ladder, and grabs the bug spray. He jumps back down, and sprays all the cockroaches orange. He grabbed the wrong can, and got the fluorescent paint by mistake.
So I am a block away, and suddenly all these fluorescent orange cockroaches come pouring into the manhole. I freak out, wondering if they are radioactive or some shit, jump out of the manhole, and run down to Nestor.
Out of breath and yelling down the hole to him, I notice the orange floor.
People in my job have heard this story, and they all think it is some made up legend. Nope. Really happened to me and my buddy Nestor.

@filmfann Oh man that’s funny.

When I was about 10 or 11, I was in my little sister’s room with my mom. I was sitting on the floor and she was standing on my right, right next to me. I just remember looking over and seeing a HUGE centipede on her upper thigh. and watching her use her hand to move it (thinking it was a hair or just something else). I just looked up at her, pointed to it and said, “Uhh mom…” She smacked it off and we both bolted out of the room yelling for my dad! I guess it was pretty funny now that I think about it!

@Adirondackwannabe So you never figured out what it was? Wow..that’s crazy, glad you were okay.

@filmfann Excelent story, I enjoyed that very much!
The truth is stranger than fiction. Neon orange cockroaches, haha.

Coming out of the Kingshouse Hotel bar in Glencoe one evening just as it was getting dark we encountered a huge thick cloud of midgies. I have never seen such a dense mass of flying insects before or since. They seemed to be attracted to the hotel door and were just waiting for people to leave. The car wasn’t far away and we ran to it our heads enveloped in a cloud of insects all the way. It was hellish. We got into the car and managed to get the door shut but several billion tiny midgies had come in with us. We spent about half an hour killing them and clearing them out leaving black smears everywhere before driving off our faces stinging with bites.

@Coloma Never figured out what it was. I’m careful now. I carry an EpiPen everywhere.

@Adirondackwannabe I so knew you would tell us that one loll.

@Shippy The weird thing is I have been bitten by just about every insect known to man. Oh well. I’m way to predictable aren’t I?

One night, in our new home (at that time). I went to the bathroom. I never put lights on… I was sitting there, and I hear *tick tick tick…tick tick scurry… upon the tiled floors. In the shadowy gloom, I see what looking like a MASSIVE spider walking sideways. Oh hell!

I switched on the light, to see it was a crab loll.

It was walking sideways of course, it was long legged tall odd one. We had a lake on our grounds!!

@uberbatman Those giant non-aggressive wasps sound like cicada hunters. They dig holes, find cicadas, sting them, and carry and drag them back. Then they, put them in the holes, and lay an egg on each cicada. They create separate “cells” in their hole, one to a cicada, so in general the wasp only has to keep enlarging the same hole.

Your black widow type spider looks like a male because of the pedipalps which are actually sexual organs (I knew you’d like that)! Here’s a link. http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/homehort/pest/hoboID.htm

@snowberry yup, thats them. And I agree with the pedipalps thing but the size alone tells me its got to be a female. She’s pretty big.

Edit: actually looks like they’re not cicada killers, they look a lot more like European Hornets

OMG! These stories are creeping me out. As anyone who knows me, know that I am not bug friendly.

Anyway, just this week, my daughter who drives for a major bus company had a very horrific encounter with roaches. She told me that she had taken a bus from the garage and was on her way to pick up passengers when hundreds of roaches started coming out of everywhere. She immediately abandoned the bus on the side of the road and called the company for someone to pick her up, as she was in no way going to drive that bus. I asked her if she felt like she was in the Twilight Zone.

Seriously, if she’s anything like me, it was probably only two roaches. tehehehe

@Adirondackwannabe What the heck is an EpiPen?
Maybe you need to start wearing a whistle around your neck too….curmudgeons need all the help they can get. It’s a wild, wild world. lol

I just did some serious dust busting over here. Furniture, everything.
I am grossed out by the thought of breathing dust mites and my allergies suck this week. Dust be gone and all the gross little micro particles of whatever, dust mite poo and corpses, gah! haha

@Coloma It’s a big assed syringe filled with epinephrine. If I get bit and suffer a reaction I get to jam it in my leg and hope for the best. But, a side benefit, if someone else gets stung or bit by something they’re allergic to I can help them out.

Back in the day before cordless phones I got up during the night to answer the phone which was in the kitchen. Didn’t put my glasses on, didn’t turn on any lights. Halfway there I felt something under my instep. I figured it was a slug, the apartment was surrounded by ivy and we had lots of slugs. After the call I got my glasses, turned on the lights, and went looking. It was a potato bug, still alive and creeping along. Ugh!

Like @LuckyGuy my story comes from Japan.

When I was 15 years old I lived in Okinawa, Japan. It’s tropical there and they have SUPER large flying cockroaches (gokiburi). They also have geckos. The geckos are seen as a good thing to find skittering around on your ceiling or walls because they eat the gokiburi.

One night I was woken from a sound sleep by a strange sound. I laid there for a bit trying to figure out what had woken me and eventually flipped on the overhead light. When I looked back over the wall by my bed I found a massive gokiburi that was feasting on a (baby?) gecko. Yes, the cockroach was far larger and was EATING the gecko. Major heebeejeebies.. I gave up on trying to sleep in my bedroom and went to the couch. Apparently I fell asleep sitting up because that’s where I was found (sleeping sitting up on the couch) in the morning by my aunt & uncle.

If you want to see what flying cockroaches look like in Okinawa I found a fairly representative video.

@geeky_mama Screams!

I would say that spiders are my biggest physical fear. Whenever I see one I turn into a sissy four-year-old girl. I once camped out with some people, and we slept in one of those tents that are one a wooden platform. Well, we noticed an abundance of hairy, brown spiders (possibly wolf spiders, but I don’t want to google it because I’m eating). One night while sleeping, I noticed one staring me down with its ugly eight eyes on top of my netting. Contrary to my heart, my body stood still, keeping a close eye on it as they’re scariest when you lose sight of them. We soon realized that there was a “nest” of them underneath the wooden platform.

I woke up one morning and my lips felt tingly. When I came round I realises it was because there was a spider on my lips.

@Crumpet Bummer, it’s still messing with you’re typing.

@Adirondackwannabe
I’m typing on an iPad, in bed and I’m tired.
Sorry for not being perfect.

@Crumpet Sorry about that. I don’t really take things that seriously. I just have fun with it. I owe you a crumpet.

^^^: Remember that the pot should not be calling the kettle black, right? (your)

@gailcalled Bite me. But guilty as charged. I guess that’s two crumpets.

^^^I need to chew on that before responding. (How’s the weather? We’re still holding our breath here)

@gailcalled I’m not looking forward to this. It’s still quiet. We’re set in for days and days without power.

I quite fancy a crumpet for my supper now actually.
With far too much butter on it.

But back on topic, I’ve also been stung by a wasp, on my ear.
That was pretty horrible.

And the other day a fly went up my nose when I was riding my bike.

@Crumpet The fly up the nose is gross, I hope she didn’t lay eggs. Want to stay on topic?

@Adirondackwannabe it’s not too bad, just cover the other nostril, blow hard and fire the bastard out like a pea shooter.
I ride my bike through parks and woods quite fast, I’m always getting insects in my face, mostly in my eyes, then mouth, and now twice in my nose.
I’ve even had a dragonfly hit me in the forehead.

@Crumpet Yeah but the eggs could have a hold.

^^^ LOL..that’s descriptive, points for creative writing. haha

@Adirondackwannabe Yikes…self injection.
@geeky mama
Once there was a preying mantis eating a tree frog on my porch, and I have heard of them catching hummingbirds!

Funny enough I just took a shower and there was a millipede in the shower. I scooped him up with a comb and tossed him over my deck into the weeds. Right now the crickets are chirping, a warm night here and the house is still open at 8pm.

The spider on the windscreen thing, when I was driving down a steep narrow road, with my babies in their capsules. In Australia, it was as big as a man’s hand. ewwww @Shippy I feel your pain but you are leaving and I am going back!

Not ’‘scary’’ per se, but it disturbed me. :/
When I was little I loved insects, and they were a passion of mine. I read books about them, drew pictures, and of course, I went out and caught them. One of my favorite things to do was to catch caterpillars and have them turn into butterflies. I’d use a salad bowl, fill it with dirt and put in leaves that whatever caterpillar I captured ate, if I managed to locate them. (although most caterpilars won’t eat withering leaves) Then you put a noodle strainer on top so they can’t escape. This particular incident included the Mourning Cloack butterfly, but the caterpillars never hung out on any plant. They were always on buildings and stuff. Still, it worked, and they often turned into butterflies. The transformation takes about a week and a half…but sometimes I got caterpillars that some predatory insect got to first, so instead of a butterfly, I got a shitload of small fly like bugs, or a wasp.

But the worse thing was…I usually had more than one Mourning Cloak caterpillar in the salad bowl. Once, two caterpillars made their cocoon next to one another. So close that both cocoons were like merged together, forming one big fucked up cocoon. When the butterflies emerged, they were stuck together, like a Siamese twin. It was freaky, it had like five wings, malformed antennas and like nine legs and the body was really fat. After it was done drying its wings, I let it go as was my custom, but the damn thing flew all crooked, smacked into a wall and fell. It couldn’t really do anything, and I remember feeling pretty disturbed. It flew around a little bit but always just kind of tumbled to the ground. I killed it, and not that it was gonna do better out in nature, anyway.

A friend and I also got attacked by a wasp’s nest, but that’s another story.

I had a friend who had a degree in Educational Psychology (meaning she was smart enough to know better). She called me up and said, “Could you please come over? AAaaahh! I need you to EEEeeee! Help me figure out Unnnnn! What I have!”

I ran right over, thinking she was in severe distress. Turns out she had picked up a few coffee table size books of spiders, and she was trying to figure if any of the spiders in her house were poisonous. Every time she turned a page she shrieked. ROFLOL!

I just woke up about 30 minutes ago and the first thing I saw was a giant spider on the ceiling over my bed. Must have stirred him up with my deep cleaning mission yesterday. I will have to get him after I have a couple more cups of coffee. Gotta ease those reflexes into shape first and be prepared to move fast. lol

Speaking now for the benignity of most insects, I just rescued a large carpenter bee inside my kitchen window and shooed him outside. In return, he will pollinate for me.

@gailcalled Yay! I think we should always save whatever little critters we can, after all, who are we to determine the value of anothers being? :-)

When my then-husband was finishing our basement, he had installed the baseboard but not the carpet, so there was a little space between the bottom of the trim and the cement floor, and pieces of shoe molding laying around all over the place. I went down there to do laundry or something, and a huge hairy wolf spider took a run at me. I grabbed a piece of shoe molding to smash that scary thing, and it took off and hid in that little space. I stuck the little piece of wood in there, and stabbed at it. Suddenly, a kajillion teeny tiny baby spiders spurt out of it, swarming the floor around me. I screamed and screamed until I was rescued. Had a pretty bad spider phobia for a good while after that.

@augustlan Your wolf spider must have been a mother with babies. A wolf spider is an unusually good mother, and tote all her babies around on her back. It sounds like when you pushed that wood in there, you might have killed the mother, and the babies escaped.

@augustlan‘s story reminds me of another one of mine. My older sister and her friend were leaving the house, and so my dad and I were on the inside of the door and they were on the porch out front. All of a sudden, we see this giant wolf spider on the porch! My dad steps on it, and about a zillion and one baby spiders come running out. It was one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen in my life.

When I was a little kid I found a neon orange caterpillar. Like this thing was so bright it looked to be straight out of a cartoon. So naturally being a little boy, I had to catch it. So I found a jar and put my cool little caterpillar in there. Well about 20 minutes later I found this awesome looking wolf spider and well I wanted to catch that too but I only had one jar. So I decided to put the spider in the jar with the caterpillar (I was too young at the time to realize what was about to happen). Well about a kagillion baby spiders came leaping off the wolf spiders back and were attacking the caterpillar. I freaked out cause I really liked the caterpillar and didnt want it to die so I got the spider out of the jar and got all the babies that I could out as well. Caterpillar surprisingly ended up living and turned into a beautiful blue butterfly :)

@uberbatman Haha..you sound like my daughter. She used to collect bug eggs and cocoons and put them in dixie cups with foil tops with holes poked in them, in her dresser drawer. Once, when she was about 5 I opened her drawer to put some laundry away and about a dozen wasps flew out. Hatching wasps in her undie drawer. Not a good combo. lol

@Coloma HAH thats awesome.

This is my scary ‘insect’ story.

@geeky_mama You know Gokiburi and you most likely know about the battery operated Air Soft MP5 machine guns. I’m sure you can picture the whole setup. It was very effective. Disgusting, but, effective. Unless someone has seen a gokiburi they only have the image of a regular cockroach. These are huge. I never saw one eat a gecko but I have followed their poop trails in the house. Gross.

This probably isn’t even that bad compared to other comments, but here goes:

I was a little pre-teen camping with my family. We were in the trailer after a good day playing in the trails.. Something on my head was itching, so I scratched around and felt what I thought was a dead, dried leaf. I was pretty drained from the day, so I absent minded-ly crumpled this “leaf” around my hair for a few seconds, apparently relishing in how crunchy it was..(maybe I was just a strange child ok?). After awhile my brain clicked and I was all “what the f*ck, this isn’t a leaf!?”

It was a spruce bug, and I was traumatized. Thank god the sucker didn’t bite me.