animals: creepy crawlies

When I was 5, I somehow came under the impression that when a caterpillar went into a cocoon, that meant it was dead. This made for a slightly traumatic experience when I caught one and was convinced I had killed it a few hours later.

When I was little, I was playing with my brother and I saw an earwig crawl across the floor. My brother said it was called an earwig because it would go into your ear while you were sleeping and lay eggs. It freaked me out, I was so scared to go to sleep.

I used to believe that if you killed a spider, for example stepping on it and crushing it, that in the final second before it died it sent out signals calling all other spiders within a certain range to the spot. So I was always careful, after killing a spider, to leave the immediate vicinity to avoid being swarmed by thousands of spiders!

I used to love catching fireflies in jars as a youngster. I thought we could solve the planet's electricity problems by just filling rooms full of jars full of lightning bugs so that we would have constant light without electricity forever.

I used to honestly believe that flies were tiny monsters. Unfortunately, my mother never deterred me from that belief, and to this day I still harbor a small fear (and great hatered) of flies.

Once when I was about 9 or 10, I thought I had maggots in my mouth. I went up to my teacher and said to her 'I've got maggots in my mouth' and the whole class burst out laughting. I'm now 30 and can't for the life of me remember what made me think I had maggots in my mouth.

When I was little, I got stung by a wasp on my foot. I was resting my foot inside, sad because I was missing out on a beautiful summer day, and I told my older brother what happened. He said, "Oh, that sucks, now all of your toes will disappear!"
When my toes didn't disappear, I just thought I was extremely luck. I believed him until I was 11 or 12

i did not understand the differences between snakes and worms. I distinctly remember being startled by a 2 inch long twig, fearing that it was a snake and that it would bite me.

I used to believe butterflies made butter.

I used to believe there were intelligent people until I saw a whole section devoted to "OMG I used to believe that earwigs crawled into people's ears! LIKE O.M.G!!"

Except... earwigs HAVE been known to crawl into ears before, and it's very painful when it happens. Maybe they don't have nasty intentions and eat your brains like the old tales you might have heard, but if you're not careful they can crawl into your ear!

I used to be terribly afraid of getting bitten by a mosquito because I thought that was how you caught Meningiococcal disease.

I used to (and still do) think that spiders have big colonies hidden somewhere near the center of the earth. Whenver you kill or step on one, they use their dying moments when they're still alive and trying to crawl away but their legs are broken and they're all squished up to scream and call to their family members at the inner core. I think this because whenever I find a spider, I'll kill it, and then in the next week, I'll kill like fifty bajillion spiders in my bedroom. And yeah, I'm weird.

i had a dream when i was really little about 3 huge bees and they were talking- saying that they were going to sting me if i didnt love them... my mom woke me up out of this dream telling me i was talking in my sleep saying "i love you! please dont sting me!" i never once thought: "WHOA TALKING BEES!" i just listened to them and to this day i never got stung by a bee! i swear! and i dont kill any bugs either... just in case.

When we first learned about pollination back in Primary School, I asked the teacher why that didn't lead to stuff like flowers that were half dandelion and half violet. She answered that on each trip from the hive, a bee would visit only one species of flower, so a bee who'd collected nectar and pollen on violets would bring it home to the hive before visiting any other kind of flower.

I believed that for years, and am still disgruntled when I think about a techer telling us silly stories.

From the age of 2 or 3 I was afraid of fuzz. Lint on a sweater was horrifying, you can only imagine. I was pretty sure fuzz balls were actualy spiders sleeping in little balls of web, and if you touched it, the spider would come out...and it wouldn't be happy. This resulted in me running screaming, "Piece of Fuzzzzz!!!! Ahhhhhhh!!!", on a regular basis until the neighbors asked if I had special needs.

We lived out in the country where there were a lot of ticks. Whenever I found one crawling on me or stuck to me I would take it off and save it in a tiny bottle of perfume. I thought collecting them in this way and keeping the dead ticks in captivity was somehow getting them back for biting me.