Get ready to have the heebie-jeebies. Feel that creepy-crawly sensation on the back of your neck? Hopefully not - if you do, it's time to call the exterminator. We asked people to share their stories of the worst bug infestations they've ever encountered. Now, we kind of regret asking. Roaches, termites, spiders - you name it, these brave souls have done battle with the most tenacious insect invasions you can imagine.
29. It's not raining men in this house.
I'm an exterminator and got called out to a house that had a roach problem. So I walk in the house and you could barely see the color of the walls and ceiling for all the roaches. It was literally raining roaches from the ceiling. The people inside just sitting around like its just a normal Monday and laughing about catching roaches falling from the ceiling. Without a doubt the most disgusting thing I've encountered.
Wikicommons
28. Now they've got allies.
On a routine termite inspection job, I pulled back insulation in a crawlspace to track termite damage. About 100 cotton mouths came out from where the dryer vent wasn't hooked up properly keeping them nice and warm and moist in the insulation as fall approached. I'm only a termite exterminator. Got out that crawlspace quicker than lightning. To this day I'm sure the termites and snakes are living under there happily ever after.
27. Well-seasoned.
Moths. One flew in my house and I didn't have the heart to kill it. Apparently it nested in my cabinet and laid eggs in all of my spices and flour. I didn't realize it until I put sesame seeds on ramen and my boyfriend asked why they were wiggling. The larve had hatched into small worms. I had already taken a bite.
26. They're in your dreams.
I spent 2 months in Guatemala during my first year of college. My roommate from school was rooming with another girl in the program for a couple weeks. After like 3 weeks, the girl my roommate was rooming with pointed out that my roommates bed/frame was infested with termites. My roommate freaked out (she didn't like bugs). The other girl was asked how long she'd known about the bugs. She had known since the second day and didn't say anything.
Image by Roy Buri from Pixabay
25. The welcome home party.
FLEAS. The family and I went away for two weeks to visit relatives in Florida. We get back and it's in the middle of July in North Carolina. We are all hot and cranky and dragging our luggage into the house when I hear my Mom scream. I go running inside, and her legs and arms are COVERED in fleas.
I just stand there looking stupid and then they are all over me. Every room was infested. They were in my eyes and ears and hair. It was total chaos.
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
24. Stay inside and do a puzzle.
My friend and I took a walk through some scrub brush near our family cottage. It was only about a 10 minute walk, and as we were exiting we met another friend of ours.
After about 3 or 4 minutes talking to her, we suddenly realized that both our lower bodies were covered in THOUSANDS OF WOODTICKS. I cannot stress just how many woodticks there were. Every minuscule fold of denim (thankfully, we were both wearing jeans) had 20 or 30 ticks hiding.
That day, we had no embarrassment in stripping down in front of the Queen, let alone our friend. Though they didn't seem to get very high on our bodies originally, it was about 8 hours before I picked the last bloodsucker off me, and about 24 hours after that before the extremely heightened sense of AHHH WOODTICK CRAWLING ON ME went away.
After more than a decade I still hate thinking about it.
Image by Catkin from Pixabay
23. No visitors allowed in the dorms.
Senior year of college, I've just moved into my new dorm room. With the heat outside, the ants begin coming in. At first, it's just a regular trail, winding around the edges of my room. It's a dense trail but it's orderly. On the fold advice of a friend, however, I decide to draw a line at my doorstep with detergent as he said it would keep them out. Well, it worked... for a while.
Soon, the ants were coming in again. except the detergent messed up their heads or something. Once they crossed the threshold, they went nuts. No more orderly trails or anything. They just swarmed aimlessly. Within hours my entire floor was covered in a carpet of ants. I could not step anywhere without stepping in ants and from a distance, my floor was moving, alive. Eventually, I got some maintenance people to come take a look and as soon as they saw it their mouths just dropped. All he said was, "Oh... that's not normal..." An exterminator showed up that afternoon and the problem was dealt with.
22. Good reason to take the day off from work.
I had a customer in Birmingham, Alabama. My boss and I traveled to see him in an lovely old renovated house he was using as his office. While we were there, one of his office staff complained that they were hearing some bizarre noise coming from the hall closet. My customer says he'll come investigate it after our meeting is done.
We're on our way out and pass by the aforementioned hall closet. My customer opens the door and the inside of the closet is covered with termites. A section of the ceiling inside the closet was collapsed and you all you could see were termites crawling in through the hole. Thousands of them.
Turns out the place had severe structural damage from the termites. If I remember correctly the landlord brought in an exterminator, but the structure simply wasn't safe anymore and my customer had to find a new office before his old one collapsed.
21. Watery death for black widows.
So during the summer I work at a Jewish camp that's placed in a community center. It has a pool playground and all that fun stuff for the kids. So one day I get called over by one of my co-workers while I was exiting the restroom to a sewage drain in our outside eating area. I come over and he tells me that a black widow was in the drain and along with it an egg, and since the kids wee watching are 3-8 year olds, this won't stand. We spray the spider down with Raid, but this makes the egg hatch and smaller spiders are now crawling up the pipe. We whip out the hose and blast it with water for 20 minutes as to make sure there are no survivors. Jobs done right? No, one of the campers comes up and tells us they saw another black widow near the pool. Now our pool area has a wall with holes in them that are used to drain water out of the other side of the wall, well the spider was in one of those holes. We go over with the Raid and spray it down until we find that every hole had spiders and eggs, some with roaches that spilled out, finding more and more spiders as we go. We ended up closing that area off for the swim meet later that day because we didn't know what other areas these spiders where in. I don't know what happened after that, we told the director and we never saw an exterminator come by or anything, but we now know better than to go near that pool.
Pixabay
20. Sounds like a delicious problem to have.
I do bee removals for a living. The most honey I've pulled out of a house was about 250 lbs (110 kilos). That's about 21gallons of honey. I had to leave halfway through to go to Home Depot, because I only had 3 5-gallon buckets with me.
People sometimes try and kill hives with Raid. While it may be effective in some cases (no one is going to call me when it works), in other cases it backfires spectacularly. For most of her life, the queen is fat to lay eggs. She can fly, but only short distances. So sometimes when you spray a hive, you'll annoy the bees enough for them to abandon the hive and try to start a new one, but the queen is too fat, so they'll only move to another spot in the same house. The workers at the old hive will raise a new queen, and now you have two hives. I removed 7 different hives at the same house because the guy never caught on to what he was doing and kept spraying the bees.
19. Moving walls are an architectural feature.
I'm an exterminator and I once walked into a house for a roach startup. The walls moved. They were in the dressers, beds, closets, furniture- not to mention common areas like the kitchen and baths. They were IN the walls! The place was an old, run-down 5000+ sq/ft nightmare that I had to clear out singlehandedly. 3 months of weekly 2 hour services and I got things under control. Then the rat problem started... I wasn't too heartbroken when the service was canceled for non-payment.
18. Once they learn how to fly, it's over.
So, when I was living in a tropical country, my boyfriend's apartment got a termite/ant colony nesting in his kitchen. Since he never really used the kitchen, and there was a language barrier with the landlord (not good excuses in my opinion, but hey, he knew what I thought and it's not my house) he never got round to getting something done about it.
Then, one night early in summer, we have the first major rains of the season. We're out with our dog, and as we come back to the apartment building we notice a huge cloud of insects out the front. Weird, but not that weird, this is the tropics.
So we get to his apartment, open the door, the scene that met us made my skin instantly just want to crawl off me. The air is so thick with winged termites we can't see across his livingroom. Thick. Cloud. Of insects. Just from opening the door we've both got a face full of them, they're in our hair.....
My boyfriend slams the door shut and pretty much panics. I can't say I blame him for that, but I was simultaneously furious and sympathetic to him. I called our friend to act as an emergency translator, and she called the landlord and explained. Landlord paid for us to stay in a hotel for the night, and was ultimately way more accomodating than necesary.
Next day exterminators came to clear out the nest, and all the critters had gone, and shed their wings all over the apartment. We were still finding them right up till he moved.
Gross.
Image by weeraponn from Pixabay
17. An outpouring of nope.
I worked at a gas station on overnights, and asked my manager to do something about the spider infestation. I hate spiders, and it was so bad customers started going to other places because these big spiders would build webs over the door in the span of 40 minutes between customers, plus the entire awning and overhang was just a mess of webs and hanging spider nests.
So my manager goes out and buys some spray, and it barely does anything. So she goes and buys a bunch of spray, and is standing outside one day just spraying the awnings and overhang, the doors, air pump, etc. Anyways, there was this large crack in the siding, so she stuck the spray nozzle inside and started spraying.
What followed was so bad, I probably should have died from terror. It was as if someone turned a great big faucet on. Hundreds of spiders just came pouring out like water. Must have been a ton of nests inside there.
16. Challenge not accepted.
They're called Bed Bugs for a reason choosing to live in the tufts/fold/seems of your bed to be close the the blood meal (you) while you sleep. In high infestations they'll resort to adjacent furniture furthermore the window sill, ceiling, baseboards, closet. Not ideal places to hide, but they will when the ideal areas are overcrowded. I visited an apartment unit for an inspection and the lady opens the door, from the doorway I see Bed Bugs around the door frame, ceiling, and crawling on her blouse and neck. She's oblivious to the problem due to mental health issues in low income housing. I told the landlord this would be a challenge to say the least.
15. A unique solution.
We had a horrible infestation of gypsy moth caterpillars last year. It was like walking into a horror movie every time I was outside of the house. We couldn't use the patio because it would just be covered with the things, and as we walked, we'd be squishing them underfoot. The memory of that squishy pop combo under my heel is never going to go away. They stripped the trees of leaves but thankfully didn't kill any.
I then started raising muscovy ducks again (had them a few years back) who eat anything that moves, so even though my neighbors are infested, my yard is gypsy moth caterpillar free.
Image by Mabel Amber, still incognito... from Pixabay
14. A winged harbinger of gross.
Bought an old house to fix up. Got most things done but the kitchen as it was the least old and crappy part of the house. Move in and all our food in the pantry immediately gets these weird worms in webs inside sealed packaging. Clean it all out, scrub really well, have a man in to spray the entire place. Says he's never seen anything like it.
No problem for a few weeks and they're back again. Call a different guy, clean, etc and same result.
Finally we gut kitchen. Find the same weird web stuff in the wall spaces in the pantry. Clean it all out and spray down the areas. Still no idea what is the thing causing this.
Guy who comes to do the floor hears about all this and asks do we have a lot of small moths. Hmm, how did you know? Guy pulls up a website on his phone and sure enough we've got an infestation of some sort of kitchen moth. These things get inside the walls and so although we'd been spraying it has a tough time getting back into the wall spaces.
Coated the wall spaces with a crystal product that kills by scraping insects up at his suggestion before insulating. Add drywall and carefully seal anywhere there are cracks in it before tape, mud, texture, and paint. Haven't seen another since and it has been over ten years now. Thank goodness because that was so nasty.
Image by Andreas Lischka from Pixabay
13. Meet your neighbours, the Roaches.
Lived in an apartment in a fairly nice area when my wife and I were first married. We had just left a rental house with the worst landlord so we were excited to be back in an apartment with maintenance and whatnot.
We live in a two bedroom apartment with our dogs and an occasional roommate. (A friend who was in her last year of college). Soon after moving in we start noticing some roaches. Living in Texas, you get used to the big ones coming in from the outside occasionally, but these were babies. I know babies mean infestation so I'm not happy at all.
The complex has an exterminator come out every Friday and all you have to do is put your name on the list and they will come out and spray. We have our name on the list for two straight months. Still getting roaches. We buy those plug in things that are supposed to bother pests into leaving. Still getting roaches. We spray with stuff ourselves. STILL getting roaches. I even bug bombed the apartment with way more poison than it says to use for the size of the apartment and when I come home, all the baby roaches are all over the wall right above the poison line.
Finally, about 6 months after moving in, the family of 5 that live in the apartment above us moves out. The complex cleans and sprays upstairs and we see maybe one more roach the rest of our stay there. It just makes me wonder what kind of horrid condition that apartment was in.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
12. It haunts your drain.
I was a property manager for low income housing and senior living buildings for a year and a half. I once had a lady call up saying she had a spider trapped under a house fan in her bedroom and asked me to come kill it. I told her I couldn't come out and kill a insect in her apartment. (If I did it for one person but then didn't for another I guess that opens the door for a discrimination lawsuit.) Anyway she tells me her kitchen sink is also clogged. Well, that I agree to come up and fix. I finish up some paperwork and head over to her apartment. Her sink is draining slowly but it's a pretty quick fix and she begs me to come deal with the spider. I agree thinking it's been an hour, there is no way that spiders still "trapped" under this fan. I WAS WRONG. This spider was the size of my hand. 4 years of Marine Corps infantry training and a small wad of paper towels was not enough to handle this monster. Luckily I have two kids and I knew if I didn't survive it would be coming for them next. I managed to get it into the toilet and flush it. It's the city's problem now.
Pixabay
11. This calls for more than napalm.
I had a really bad flea problem a few months ago. It's like, fleas, what's the big deal, right? No. I had been gone a couple days and the cat was the only living creature in the house, but I walked inside and the white carpet was black. I thought some disaster had ruined the carpet, but the moment I stepped on it I realized just how wrong I was. The carpet was COVERED in fleas. They were jumping everywhere. In the kitchen the counters were filled with their dead, and the floors had an estimated millions. I came back with jugs of bug spray, lots of salt and a vacuum I could burn once I was finished. It's been 3 months and I still find the occasional flea, but safe to say most of them did not survive the napalm assault.
Pixabay
10. No. Just no.
Last year, about this time of year, we are sitting in the lounge watching telly, doing the evening wind down. I notice a white dot on the carpet near my dog. It's a maggot. In the centre of my living room. I get rid of it and no sooner had I removed it, I saw another. And another. There's a few steady streams of maggots coming from my patio door. Must've been about 200 or so by the time I'd cleared most of them.
I gingery opened both patio doors to find the worst maggot infestation I'd ever seen. For reasons unknown, they were emerging from the damp ground and up through the patio cracks. I'm still convinced something died under my house and they made their way to the surface. There was literally thousands.
I'm pouring bleach, white vinegar, boiling water and salt. They just keep coming. I'm sweeping the carcasses into a dust pan and dispensing into the drain to try and stem the tide of swarming maggot armies from getting to my house. I eventually must have got them all as they stopped hatching from beneath the patio.
Seriously disgusting. Ever popped maggots in your fingers trying to pick them out of your carpet? I have.
Image by avocado876 from Pixabay
9. The wasp colony.
I was about 8 and we were planning to leave on vacation. My grandma would be house-sitting for us and had arrived a few days earlier. She was staying in our guest room. For about three nights she complained about this buzzing sound in the guest room at night. We couldn't hear it during the day. Right before we were supposed to leave, she noticed a wasp in the guest room. She tried to shoo it outside, but it was super angry and stung her. She went to retrieve a fly swatter and when she opened the door to the guest room there were now about 10 wasps buzzing around. After getting stung a few more times she decided this wasn't a battle she'd win. Thankfully, she had the where with all to close the door and put a wet towel up against the crack.
When my mom and I got home, the window to the guest room was black with the mass of wasps. We had over 10,000 in the house, all confined to that room. There was a nest about 4'x4' inside the ceiling and they had broken through the ceiling in search of more space. Seeing the black window and hearing loud buzzing from inside the door knowing they were out for blood was something I'll never forget. I'm only thankful it happened a few days before we went on our trip and not during the vacation!
Pixabay
8. They're eating your house.
Termite treater here. I have a couple but the ones that really come to the top of my head is one house that the floor had literally collapsed to the ground. The client says, "Yeah the floor sags a bit," so I called the boss up and he rushed out with the pretty new inspector and had him change that contract immediately. Another time we were treating a basement with foam insulation on the on the ceiling (so if you were in the basement and look up that's that I'm talking about) and the termites don't eat that stuff but they can move through it really easy so they basically turn them into highways and this ceiling was a mega highway it was actually really cool to see but after talking to this customer turns out he thought it was cool too..... so he let it stay there... for years... he also didn't know they were termites.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
7. Arachnophobia trigger warning.
My husband and his first wife had a spider infestation in their backyard one summer. It started with spiders in their cedar hedges, a few. They knew they were in trouble when the entire hedge turned white from the webs. My husband goes to the hardware store and gets some mathalion, dons a hazmat suit and goes outside to start spraying.
As he sprays the cedars start to shake, the entire 6' high hedge is shaking, spiders start dropping on him, and he drops the mathalion and runs. A week later all the grass is now white too. He calls two different exterminators, who say, "no thanks," but also tell him to call the ministry of natural resources. Resource officer comes out, looks, explains what the spiders are, I don't recall the species but they were big, and apparently the eggs can lay in gestation for decades, waiting for exactly the right environment. Apparently they like to lay nests in wood. Being the ministry of natural resources they don't offer to kill the spiders, of course.
He is out of options, and has to wait until the frost kills all of them. In Canada, frost comes usually October-ish. So frost comes, never has he been so thrilled to greet a Canadian winter. Next spring he calls his buddy, kind of a rough neck, to help him dismantle the wood shed in the back of the yard, which is assumed to be the nesting grounds. As my husband and his then-wife cower inside, they watch out the kitchen door as buddy tears down to the shed to burn at his farm. The shed's rafters are covered in what looks like pillows, clouds, foam, all the rafters are positively bathed in spider eggs. Buddy dismantles the shed, puts it in his trailer and takes all the wood, the nests, to the farm for cremation. Buddy also has a terrific time going up to the window and taunting them with the rafters.
As an epilogue, just when they think this nightmare is over, one spring day they have a nice bath, and as they get out of the tub there is a large spider, the same species, on the outside of the tub. He crushes it with a CD case; it is so large it made a crunch.
That must have been the last one, as they never returned.
Pixabay
6. Squiggly, wiggly, horror.
My dad and stepmom held their wedding at our house. They wanted something small, close family and close friends only. Basically like an average get together with cake and a ceremony. They got Italian food catered and it was overall an amazing time!
Fast forward to maybe two or three days after, I was cleaning up the last of the mess from the party and I go to take the garbage out. There are a handful of flies around the garbage but I think nothing of it because, well, it is trash, after all. I had two bags of garbage in my hands so I kinda have to kick the garbage can open. I kick it open, it flings open, and there is a sea of maggots. We're talking in the tens of thousands at the very least. So thick, I couldn't see any garbage beneath them.
I had kicked it open with such force that many of them had flung out and onto me. Some actually flew up the leg of my pants from the kick and onto my bare feet. I dropped everything and screamed as loud as I've ever screamed before. I went into the driveway to dryheave, shake out my shorts, and I even started crying a bit. I have an incredible fear of maggots and this experience had made it ten times as horrible to me.
My dad and stepmom got home from a movie as I was having my little meltdown in the driveway. He asked what was wrong and I told him. He went to go see for himself, I heard a scream, and he ran back to the garage. I went inside to cool down a bit. He came back in 15 minutes visibly shaken. I asked him what he ended up doing and he said, "I just went to the garage, got all the wasp, ant, spider, and snake killing chemicals as I could, opened up the garbage with my eyes closed, and unloaded every single can."
What had happened was that we had so much meat left oveer from the catering order (chicken parmesan, Italian sausage, etc) that we had to throw it all away. In the garbage. This was during July in Texas so the meat had been rotting in the dry 103 degree heat for an entire day or two.
Image by Pere Serrat from Pixabay
5. The pest-riddled death trap.
Went to an old women's trailer for a routine pest control job. While I'm spraying the outside, she comes out of the house and exclaims she has roaches, so I go in and immediately I smell German roach infestation. I look around and see all of these glue boards with 50-100 roaches on them. I pull out the fridge and there have to be at least 300 on the walls.
I turn and look at this old lady and ask, "How long have you had these?" She told me she's had them for 3 years. When I walked around to inspect the rest of the house, it only got worse. Very heavy termite damage in the roof. When I ask her how long she's had the termites and she responds, "Since I moved in." I ask her how long ago did she move in she replies, "22 years ago."
I also found a family of possums living in the corner of the house. The place is basically a death trap so I told her we need to fumigate the house to will kill the roaches and termites in one go. She told me she is treating the termites herself with some junk she bought at Walmart. My manager and I have been going back every few weeks for the last five months, still haven't cleared out all the bugs.
4. Once more into the breach, bug friends.
My apartment's got an indoor trash chute under the kitchen sink. It has a habit of falling open by itself, and pests crawl up and into our house from it. Roaches, the works. We'd been fighting them for weeks. Eventually 17-year-old me comes up with the brilliant plan of doing a seal. I use trash bags and some strong tape to make an airtight seal around the offending chute. I do 3 layers of magick - the barrier works, the roaches couldn't cross into our realm from theirs.
3 years later we start finding small dead roaches in the kitchen, maybe 1 in the toilet. I've forgotten all about the dark forces I banished years ago, and I'm mystified. The bodies start getting bigger as the weeks pass. Eventually we start finding live specimens and they're pretty large. I finally twig that perhaps the ancient seal has been breached.
I get on down to the compartment under the sink and open it up. Horror. The roaches had slowly bitten(?) through the seals and ended up breeding within the layers of the seal. Eventually they got through the final seal, and as the breach grew wider, larger and more vicious bugs got through. I could see them roiling and seething in a bunch within the plastic. I realised what a huge mistake I made all those years ago, and now the evil was back for me.
I ended up bringing in some industrial strength pesticide and fighting through the outer guard to get to the breach - I couldn't let any survivors past me, or it would get into the house. I pushed a tube into the breach and made a temporary seal around it with more tape, and let loose with the pesticide. I could hear the roaches scrambling in the plastic, getting more hectic as they started to die. Fighting continued as I was still rounding up survivors who escaped and putting them down while the pesticide did it work. Once I heard nothing from the seal I tore it down. It was carnage. Beyond disgusting.
That motivated us to get a new, roach-proof chute installed. And I got an idea for a fantasy setting for my creative work.
Image by Megan McBride-Kennedy from Pixabay
3. The sky is falling.
We have a problem with Japanese beetles. Like, a big one. I bought a trap after seeing ten or twenty hanging out on my roses. But then the trap was completely full within an hour, we're talking thousands of beetles caught in just an hour. I go investigate. Surely they didn't all come from my roses, right? So I start checking my trees. A few here and there until I get to this crepe myrtle at the very edge of the yard. It was literally covered in beetles. Hundreds of thousands of beetles. My dad decided the thing to do was to shake the tree and scare them off.
That was the worst idea.
Beetles rained from the heavens. The sky was dark and swirling with beetles. They covered me (even though I had retreated to a safe distance), sticking in my hair, crawling in my clothes... dad stopped, dropped, and rolled. As these beetles were stirred into action, so were all of the beetles from all of the trees beyond. It was Armageddon. I was not convinced I would survive this.
A few days later, dad (dressed in a makeshift hazmat suit) went out and doused every tree with the most toxic bug killer he could find. Even now, weeks later, we have to pick the stiff corpses of beetles out of our dogs fur whenever he comes inside. I still have nightmares.
Image by wal_172619 from Pixabay
2. This landlord was irrep-roach-able.
I work for a pest control company in Florida, but I work in the office so I never see anything first hand - the stories are bad enough. However I do have a horror story of my own from before I even worked there.
A year before almost to the date of me working there, I moved into my first apartment on my own with a friend. We were both excited to get out of our parents houses and it was a beautiful unit, right next to a nice pond that you can see from the porch. When we moved in, we saw a roach or two but figured it wasn't a big deal and we'd get the apartments pest company to come out and take care of it.
Well, the roach issue progressively got worse. I will never forget the time that my roommate was cleaning the apartment. There was a square end table that was underneath the breakfast bar on the other side of the kitchen. He moved it in order to vacuum that space to see a literal square of roaches the same shape as the end table hiding out. He vacuumed them all up rather quickly, but we immediately called the office.
From there is was just a blame game of the office saying that it was our fault, telling other units when they had roaches that it was because we gave it to them, and told us we owed a thousand dollars to them for the condition we left the unit in. Needless to say we fought that. We ended up throwing away most of our art (they nested in the frames) and furniture for fear of bringing them with us. I started working for the pest company around the time we moved out and got a monthly service immediately. One of the perks of the job. We never saw one again.
Pixabay
1. Merciless, but effective.
The first apartment I ever got after college was a total cesspool. I should have known when I discovered, upon move-in, the dishwasher turned out to be "just for show" and inoperable.
It was at street level and people kept trying to break in. The basement was filled with abandoned construction supplies. To the brim. As in - old paint and wood and screws toppling out of the crawlspace. I knew it was a cesspool. I knew pests probably lived there. I figured raccoons, and decided to get on the lookout for a new apartment.
The DAY OF MOVEOUT, the day I need to pack all my stuff, I'm showering in the 2x2' shower stall, and something touches my feet. It's red, with long crooked antennas. But it's small.
Just as I kick it off, three more appear - baby german cockroaches have hatched in the drain of my shower stall. They're crawling up through the drain and onto my feet, up my legs, up the walls. Within seconds they're EVERYWHERE.
I ran out of the bathroom, still wet and soapy, and slammed the door - except the place was so badly built, no door fits its frame. The cockroaches come bursting out through the crack underneath it.
I run to the bedroom, shampoo in my hair, my body wetting the whole floor behind me, and shake my boyfriend awake. Before I can even tell him what's happening there's a "mew, mew!" down the hall. My cat had been in the bathroom while I showered, and was now stuck in there, with the roaches.
I run back, will myself to open the bathroom door, where roaches are still scampering under the cracks and desperate "mew! mew!" sounds are emanating. I open it. The roaches are climbing the mirror, they're in the shower curtain. I find my cat, a baby roach on his side, one in his whiskers, and flick them off, grabbing him and carrying him outside.
So there we sat. Outside our apartment. The three of us trying to figure out what to do at this point. All we want is to get out of there, and now every item we own is infested.
So we googled what to do. We put everything we owned in an XXL black double-thick garbage bag meant for yard work from Home Depot. We filled each bag with pesticide. We moved the bags to our new apartment, and let them sit out on the patio for 2 days.
We slept on wood floors. We bought all new groceries. We bought 2 new towels. 2 days pass. We open the bags, and nothing moves. We wash all the clothes/linens. I haven't seen a cockroach since.
Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay
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