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If you are terrified or even mildly afraid of spiders this story is not going put you at any ease. You have probably heard before that while we sleep bugs or spiders crawl about and often times we ingest these little buggers without having known it. I was once told that we ingest up to 2 lbs of bugs per year through sleep or perhaps just through the allowable FDA limits of bugs we eat or rodent fecal matter, but that is another story all together.
There have been several accounts documented over the last several years (one account dates over 140 years ago) of bugs, or even worse, spiders climbing into an unsuspecting person’s ear and making a warm home there; in some cases for many days. Perhaps this makes you think of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan… you know the one where Spock and Dr. McCoy do the vulcan make out session? Anyway, on to the details…
Account #1: Greek woman finds spider in ear
A woman went to her doctor complaining of headaches – and was told there was a spider living her ear.
The arachnid had even spun a web in the woman’s ear canal during its brief stay.
The 33-year-old, from Athens, felt a sharp pain in her ear while out riding a motorbike.
She went to her doctor who after a brief examination broke the astonishing news, Dr Evangelos Gollas said: “When I examined the patient, I was surprised to find a spider’s web and then, I saw there was movement.
“The spider found itself in her ear, and because the temperature is ideal there, it stayed.”
Account #2: Moth lives in woman’s ear for 4 days
A woman who complained of hearing a loud buzzing noise was horrified when a nurse removed a moth from inside her ear.
The insect had crawled into Patricia Macleod’s ear as she lay in bed at her home in Bilston, Midlothian.
Mrs Macleod thought she was suffering from tinnitus after a horrendous noise and fluttering feeling developed in her ear which lasted for more than four hours.
But it was only when she was having her ears syringed four days later the shocked nurse found the insect.
Account #3: UK woman terrified after finding spider in her ear
The woman, who’s scared of spiders, went to her doctor after suffering from itching and strange noises in her ear.
The doc examined the woman – and found a spider crawling around inside her.
To make matters worse, the doc was spooked by spiders too. He told the woman to put ice water in her ear, then the scared pair watched it crawl out.
It turned out that the spider had been inside the woman’s ear for more than 12 hours.
Account #4: John Hanning Speke has beetle crawl into ear, results in infection and boils
John Hanning Speke, remembered for tracking down the source of the Nile River, recorded that the interior of his tent “became covered with a host of small black beetles, evidently attracted by the glimmer of the candle.”
Exhausted, Speke went to sleep with them crawling over his person, only to be awakened by one of the “horrid little insects” struggling into his ear. Trying to remove the beetle only pushed it in further. The beetle continued into Speke’s ear as far as possible, and then “he began with exceeding vigour like a rabbit in a hole, to dig violently away at my tympanum. The queer sensation this amusing measure excited in me is past description . . . What to do I knew not.” After trying to flush the critter out with melted butter, Speke tried to dig it out with his penknife, succeeding only in killing it and increasing the damage to his ear. Infection followed, distorting his face and causing boils. “For many months the tumour made me almost deaf, and ate a hole between the ear and the nose, so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed. Six or seven months after this accident happened, bits of the beetle — a leg, a wing, or parts of the body — came away in the wax.”
Common?
This apparently is not that common of an occurrence, but does happen from time to time. It is recommended that if a bug crawls about in your ear to fill the ear canal with mineral oil to suffocate the bug or spider and then if it can be easily removed to do so or to have it removed by a doctor. Avoid removing the pest with a penknife.
Sweet Dreams.
Sources:
SkyNews — Spider in woman’s ear
Edinberg Evening News – Moth in woman’s ear for 4 days
BBC News – Spider crawls in woman’s ear
Snopes.com – Bugs in the Ear
BBC Historic Figures — John Hanning Speke
MedicineNet — Objects or insects in the ear
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While I was reading this post I was having the urge to scratch my ear…..ugh….bugs and ears dont go togheter.
If your house is over run with bugs you have a problem. If you are sleeping on the ground outside you could be in for problems as well. Size wise though the bug will have to be a fairly small one to fit inside your ear. Typical first response would be death by cutip swab. Second response would be tweezers to yank the dead carcuss out. Best response would be liquid flush out. There are all kinds of stories out there including tiny scorpions lodging themselves in peoples ears. For the most part I think urban legend but hey, anything is possible.
A friend of mine actually had this happen t0 him. A small roach crawled in his ear while he was asleep and he ended up going to the emergency room to have it removed.
The first time I took my partner to visit the parents (they live on a property out bush) was almost the last visit.
We slept most of the night in a shed that was infested with enormous Huntsmen spiders. That wasn’t too bad as a mob of little Antichinus (miniature Bandicoots with a truly disconcertingly evil chuckle) were scuttling about munching on all the spiders (luckily the carpet snake that I’m told eats the Antichinus didn’t appear that night).
However sometime after midnight she began complaining of a tickling sensation in her left ear, that quickly spiralled towards pain and other unpleasant sensations.
We grabbed torches and tweezers thinking it could well be a tick, but were unable to see anything.
When we got to the local hospital (small town, limited facilities) they could see that a large Shellback Tick had attached to the eardrum of her left ear. As a violinist she started freaking over losing hearing in her left ear, while the attending doctor (looking extremely “tired and emotional” as they say) was arguing with the head nurse over what to do (“metho”, “no flyspray”, “just let it fall out when it’s finished eating”).
At that point they gave my partner some valium to calm her down and sent us off to drive over an hour through the middle of the night to a larger district hospital.
It took a while for the ear-nose-throat specialist to arrive, but once he was setup it was a couple of moments work to whip it out and stick it in a jar (she still has its dehydrated body at home).
Apparently this is a quite common occurrence in the area where I grew up, although it is not common for the to attach to the eardrum itself as there is generally better blood flow nearby.
At least the usual arachnids are generally easily flushed with oil – ticks suck (pun).
Q.
I HAVE PERSONALLY HAD AN INSECT LIVING IN MY EAR. Over the course of a month, I slowly lost the majority of the hearing in my left ear. I also had a very uncompfortable feeling in that ear [which I now know why].
This went on for 3 months, as everyone around me assured me that this was a natrual part of aging [degridation of hearing].
Well, September 1st of this year, I awoke to something very disturbing next to me on my pillow, it was a creamy white maggoty shaped thing with a huge blood sack, wriggling next to me on my pillow. As I shreaked like a little girl, I could hear myself, yes, my hearing was back!
I immediately went to a [sp] eitomologist [with the bug in hand]. Appearently, this is a very common occurance [he sees a similar case at least once a week, but people rarely talk about it, hence why people think that this is uncommon]. Most cases are during the winter from people that live in large cities [according to the doc].
Anyways, my case was different as it wasnt a spider or earwig, it is actually a tick relative [based on its leg configuration]. If anyone can point me in the right direction for getting an exact classification, I would really appreciate it.
[and as a side note, I have a fond attachment to my ear bug, we shared some great times together… namely 3 blissfull months of unemployment… I really want to mount him on the wall]
Saw this on Discovery Channel – one of the ER episodes. A girl had a roach in her ear. It was harder to watch than surgeries.
Yeah, I’ve had an earwig try to dig its way into my ear before. It felt like it was trying to spin its way down into my brain. It was a very strange sensation, almost as if I was climbing in altitude. My ear wouldn’t stop popping. The loud scratching noise wouldn’t stop for hours, so I finally tried to see what was wrong. Finally, I dug it out and the little (HUGE) bugger fell into the sink. That was so frightening, seeing it bathed in my ear wax… squirming around… I killed it, and I was happy afterwards. After reading this article and comments, I guess I’m pretty lucky that I was able to get it out without having to go to a hospital. This is something I would never like to experience ever again… my ear itches
Reminds me of an old episode of “Night Gallery”. Anyone remember that? Spin-off of “Twilight Zone”. Great Horror weekly. One in particular when a man wanted to off someone. Set in a tropical place, the man found a type of insect that crawls in ones ear and lays it’s eggs and the larva feed off the brain until the human goes insane and dies. Turns out the cabin boy, who was suppose to leave the insect in the room the night before had made the mistake and left it in the perpetrators room! OUCH. Great memory of a shocking episode really brought me back.
affnan said: “Reminds me of an old episode of “Night Gallery”. Anyone remember that? Spin-off of “Twilight Zone”. Great Horror weekly. One in particular when a man wanted to off someone. Set in a tropical place, the man found a type of insect that crawls in ones ear and lays it’s eggs and the larva feed off the brain until the human goes insane and dies. Turns out the cabin boy, who was suppose to leave the insect in the room the night before had made the mistake and left it in the perpetrators room! OUCH. Great memory of a shocking episode really brought me back.”
I do remember this. I loved all those shows. Night Gallery, Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond. They were great scary short stories. They have not been able to duplicate these shows since, outside of the X-Files which was, as we all know, an entire series.
As an ex-watersportsman suffering of a slight condition of surfer’s ear i can assure you that the q-tip is a very bad solution to remove anything from your ear (including wax) as the result usually is opposite to the one intended.
As for this damn interesting page, it’s the grossest i have seen to date.
I enjoy the new Outer Limits. It can get fairly creepy when it wants to.
After the obvious Star Trek reference, surprised noone’s mentioned the Babelfish yet..;) Could be worse tho..What are those fish called in South America that like to swim up…more personal places?
And more seriously. Do we already have bugs in our ears? I’ve heard there is a mite that lives on the base of our eyelashes, keeping them clean. Is there a similar critter that helps keep grandpa’s ear-hair clean?
As of last night, I have become part of this story. Sometime after 2:30 AM, I began to be conscious of the sound of water trickling and gurgling sporadically in my right ear. At 3:30 AM, I couldn’t take it any more and woke myself up for real to try to fix it. I went into the bathroom and stuck a Q-Tip in gently, as far as I could, to try to wick out the moisture. Got some loose ear wax out but the problem was still there. Then I tried method 2, Swimmer’s Ear, an over-the-counter preparation of alcohol and glycerine designed to remove trapped water. After the first squirt, I could feel it penetrating down to where the problem was; after the second squirt I could feel it was ready to pour out so I tilted my ear down over the sink. The water and alcohol solution came rushing out, but to my surprise what landed in the sink was not water but a 3/4 inch long click beetle that must have crawled in when I was sleeping. I killed it immediately – partly a sudden urge of revenge, partly to keep it around for further examination. Though dead, it was intact; its bottom third had ear waxy residue on it.
My ear is still sore inside this morning (maybe more from my attempts to fix the problem than the bug itself) but I slept a lot better after it was out. I also did some research on the web and my conclusion is that it was trapped there accidentally rather than on a parasitic egg-laying mission. I’ll still have that Night Gallery episode in the back of my mind for the next few months, though.
For the interested out there, here’s a picture of a sibling of my little friend: http://www.ent.iastate.edu/imagegal/coleoptera/click/3936.12clickbeetle.html
i hate you shad
and all this time i thought the cotton from the cotton bud getting stuck in the ear was a big deal…
man! have i been deceived!
I have been doing research on this subject through the night and this morning. Last night, I had fallen asleep while watching T. V. from my bed. I was quickly awoken by the sudden loss of hearing, as if water covered my eardrum. I jumped from my bed and rushed to the down stairs bathroom where a waiting Q-tip could be grabbed and quickly inserted to clear my ear. As I reached the bathroom, I could fill this obstruction in my ear crawling around. At first, it was just un-comfortable. I hollered for my wife to come down and see if she could see anything; she couldn’t. In a matter of minutes, the pain of this thing trying to seemingly dig through my ear into my brain was becoming unbearable. I screamed for my wife to call emergency. It seemed as if it took forever for them to get here. Being a dedicated Star Trek fan, the first thing that came to mind was the episode of Khan!….I began to panic and was trying to put pressure from the bottom side of my ear into the canal to stop the movement. I could hear it making a chirping sound insided my head. It hurt really badly and was scaring the hell out of me. When the paramedics arrived, they couldn’t do anything but take me to the hospita. On the ride there, I hurt even more. When we got to the emergency room, the attending b*@ch at the front desk told me I needed to go into the lobby to fill out paper work. Then with the pain, I screamed out and she insisted that I control myself. I told her to put the damn thing in her ear and see how it feels!…..the hospital police and a physician came in to try and calm me. The lady who saw me first looked into my ear and said there was nothing in there. Then they continued to badger me for the type of drug I was hallucinating from. Then I kinda got peeved. Another man came in and I had to practically beg him to take another look in my ear. He did and found a “palmeto bug”. For those of you not familar with this insect, it looks like a giant cockroach. They live in the trees down here in the deep south of North America, they are everywhere. They grow to about 2 and a half inches and can fly. He tried several things and then poured mineral oil in my ear. The bug, which was over an inch long, loosened up it’s grip and the physician was able to grab and gently tug it out with forceps. He continued to cling to my ear (drum) with his barbed legs and it was painful for me till it was finally removed. I think the experience with the hospital, who thought I was on drugs and didn’t believe I had something in my ear was worse than the bug in there. Well, maybe not, but it was an experience I couldn’t wish on anyone. If you ever get a bug in your ear, pour mineral oil in it to help kill the bug. Don’t put hydrogen perioxide in there, the doctor told me that it can burn your eardrum.
1982: Kid has ear infection, Dr. finds cockroach in there, kid given Demerol, kid is alergic to Demerol, Mom and kid both now in hysterics, bug was finialy removed ,antibiotics administered, both Mom and kid sent home with small prescription of Valium.
Dr. visit in ER:$175.00
Valium Prescription:$28.00
Decon’s Pestcontrol exterminator next-day-service: Priceless!
Seriously, this is part of the reasaon I always sleep with earplugs
Makes ones ear start to tingle a bit, does it not. Ear aches are bad enough let alone a bug getting comfy.
Anyone else suddenly realize just how great earplugs are?
I will put something in your ear and it’s not going to be a bug
oh my god, this have got me worrying like mad, I have been having many problems with my ear (itchiness, soreness etc.) Think I’ll have to make a trip to the doctors soon.