The Centipedes Are Taking Over The World
You know how it's a terrible-no-good idea to ask Dr. Google for an explanation about anything involving more than six legs? THAT.
Don't Google "centipede invasion." Doing so will lead to a lifetime of trauma.
It took me a few minutes to recognize the HUGE mistake that I had made when I Googled that unfortunate phrase earlier today. I bailed once I realized I was about to throw up all over my computer, but now I'm left with a problem. I STILL NEED TO KNOW WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON.
Ahem.
Let me just set the scene for y'all. Alexis and I spent the day running around. We managed to get home about half an hour before the husband, and we spent that entire half hour in our backyard. So ... the house was empty all day. All of the dogs and cats were in the basement, leaving the upstairs vacant. When Mr. Husband pulled into the driveway, Alexis and I hurriedly started making dinner as he went upstairs to change clothes.
That's when I heard it. The strange sound.
He was vacuuming upstairs.
OK, so that in and of itself isn't really that odd. The fact that he kept vacuuming and kept vacuuming and kept vacuuming was, though. I could hear him working his way across the entire upstairs of the house. WHO DOES THAT? Who vacuums the entire upstairs of a house right after getting home from work?
A man who kept finding centipedes creeping and crawling all over the floor, that's who.
I didn't see the worst of it (THANK GOODNESS), but rumor has it there were hundreds of centipedes all over the upstairs of our house. But it didn't stop there! Oh, no! The centipedes were also on the first floor of our house AND IN THE BASEMENT. All three floors of our house. Centipedes. Everywhere.
I'm a nice lady, so I'm not going to post a photo of the kind of centipedes we're talking about here. I'll just tell you that they are the ones that you find under rocks and such outside. They are common garden centipedes which DON'T GO IN HOUSES. Or so Google says. Obviously, Google is a liar-liar-pants-on-fire because I had to stop typing this paragraph so that I could send another one to its death.
You guys, the husband vacuumed every single square inch of this house and yet I have managed to find 16 more of the little douchewad bugs since. Even crazier, six were in the master bathroom, one was in the hallway upstairs, one was in Alexis' room, two were in the dining room, three were in the family room, two were in the kitchen, and one was near the basement door. That means the freakin' centipedes are spread out over a span of well over 4000 square feet.
WHERE THE HELL ARE THEY COMING FROM?
I want very badly to blame the dogs for this Centipede Invasion. Both of the pups are fluffy foofernutters who stick their noses where they don't belong (ESPECIALLY the fluffier of the foofernutters). One of them had to be a carrier, right? RIGHT? PLEASE TELL ME I'M RIGHT.
The only problem with my theory is that I gave both of the foofernutters baths and didn't see any evidence that either of them had ever had a centipede on them. Also, there is the matter of the quantitiy of creepy crawlies we're talking about. I'm not sure that both dogs together could have carried in that many centipedes without me noticing.
So, uh, internet? If you could make up a reasonably plausible explanation, I sure would appreciate it. Make sure it has a happy ending, though. I can't deal with any suggestions that I might still be dealing with the Centipede Invasion tomorrow.
(Please convince me it's the foofernutter's fault. PLEASE.)
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Reader Comments (17)
I'm sorry you have to burn your house down, it was lovely though...
I should have known better than to read this. I'm not going to be ale to sleep. Good luck with this.
I found a bunch of little black milipedes in my house today and I swear I've never seen one indoors. No idea where they came from, but they're WAY less gross than centipedes. Gag.
So grossed out right now. How on earth are you going to sleep tonight? Thank you so much for not posting any pictures. Are you on some type of centipede nest? Do they have nets? I have no idea. I do know that I have heard bugs are super bad all across the country due to the warm winter, and overly warm spring everyone seemed to have. Maybe that has something to do with it. I know I'd be speed dialing an exterminator for the house and the lawn.
I agree with Magda, it really was such a lovely house.
Story to distract you with (not even close) disgustingness. Sunday morning, we left the house. I walked down our stairs and out the door and nothing was wrong. Five hours later, we came home. I came in, took off my shoes and headed up the stairs, directly into the middle of a ginormous spiderweb which spanned the entire width and height of the stair well. Like, abandoned house kind of spiderweb. Fat, huge, glowering spider sat in the middle of it. We almost moved out that night.
Seriously though, do you have heating ducts? If there was a nest somewhere near one, they could be spreading through that, especially if you can't connect them easily from one spot to the next.
Nature sucks sometimes.
@Amy--The kicker is that we already did the pesticide-all-over-the-lawn thing, as did our neighbors. We all treated for ticks and fleas, BUT STILL. I expect centipedes to die as well, dammit! (Even if they are so-called beneficial bugs.)
@Jayna--I started checking every vent in the house because that was the first thing I thought. Turns out garden centipedes can't stand dry air, though. The air conditioning practically zaps them, so they aren't spreading through the vents.
I don't have an answer. But I am going to KISS my pest control dude when he comes over next time. Maybe I should warn him...Want his number? He's goooood. And much cheaper than anyone else I've dealt with. And he's in your (relative) area.
I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to a few bugs ...hundreds of them is another story. I'm on a fancy charter bus and I'm pulling my free up off the floor. Ew. I agree, how dis you sleep?
How did you sleep? One bug in my bedroom and I am a mess. We have had multiple house centipedes in our house....those suckers move too fast to vacuum. Just when you think they are gone.....
Look on the bright side...it isn't cockroaches (I didn't sleep the entire time we lived in Florida bc of those "palmetto bugs"
Childhood terror that hasn't gone away.
Centipedes eat other bugs, so if you have a damp area near a doorway, window, or vent and there are other bugs near it that may have attracted them. We had a stinkbug nest inside our bathroom wall and an ant problem in our bathroom at my old apartment. The landlord ripped everything up because he said they could attract centipedes.
Ugh, I'm so sorry. I thought my ant invasion was bad but I'm not sure I could handle hundreds of centipedes.
It's not the furry people that live in your house. This is from Yahoo answers and I think it will help. No pictures.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110503051419AAdQ2aU
Yuck. We get house centipedes in our unfinished basement but they don't make their way upstairs. Have you added mulch to your garden? If so y guess is they were in the mulch or nested in the mulch and if it was near your foundation, came in that way. I would treat your entire foundation with pesticide. They also seek out moisture so you might need to worry about a leak in your wall.
Oh my word, that sounds awful! According to the University of Minnesota (they have a great how-to-get-rid-of-creepycrawlies website), you want to lay down traps inside where they hide, and put down a liquid insecticide outside. They also said that if they keep coming, that means there is an abundance of food inside for them, so you may want to try and figure out what it is that they're eating and kill them as well.
The website is: http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/housingandclothing/dk1023.html, although be warned they do have pictures of the bugs there.
WHOA! Please confirm whether you mean the nasty, creepy, crawly centipede with a thousand legs that die an evil, hot water death if I catch one in the tub AND like the dead one I found in my cats' water dish this morning OR the thin, black ones, I saw twice in my sister's new house??? (pick her, pick her!!!)
This winter, we had carpet bugs (which kinda look like clear centipedes when they are babies). These bugs were EVERYWHERE and my husband wanted to rip up all the carpet and burn the house down. It was just plain scary to think that these bugs were under the carpet...their eggs...crawling on the floor shivers I'm so glad that nightmare is over! I hope that these centipedes know what's good for them and stay away from your house!!!