Scutigeraphobia

I have never screamed in church, except for that one Sunday years ago when I was about nine. We had arrived late and were forced to take a seat in the very last row of the sanctuary, under the overhang of the choir loft. We sat, stood, sang, sat and stood with dull regularity until the quiet moment of prayer directly before the start of the sermon. I remember standing there, eyes closed and head bowed, when I felt something funny on the bare back of my right forearm. I opened my eyes and twisted my arm around to have a look; something you should never, ever do if you have the least suspicion that something might be crawling on you, which, indeed, it was. I gave a little scream – okay, maybe more of a swallowed yelp – and brushed frantically at the little centipede that had climbed up my arm from who knows where. A few heads turned to watch me do a mini tarantella in my pew. Embarrassed, I brought my electrified nerves in check and managed to stop thrashing. The prayer ended and we all sat down, though I frantically investigated in every direction before reluctantly seating myself as far to the left of my original spot as space would allow.

Thirty years later, I was sitting in a small circle during our adult education hour at church. Suddenly I saw a dark shape, like a pocket-sized Pekingese, whip out from under one of the chairs. My husband, sitting next to me, quickly and instinctively slapped out his left foot. I audibly sucked in air and sat bolt upright. Linda, whose chair was next to mine, noticed my reaction and heard me whisper, “Was that a centipede?” She reached out, put her hand on my shoulder in comfort and answered, “Yes, but he got it.” I lifted my feet up and rested them on the side of my husband’s chair for about twenty minutes afterwards, like the stereotypical housewife after glimpsing a mouse. Mice do not frighten me.

I glanced nervously at the floor before reaching down into my backpack to get my rubber stress ball. I kneaded it purposefully and concentrated on deep breathing. I had had a cup of coffee before church, which did nothing to attenuate the rush of anxiety I could feel coursing through my veins. For quite a while afterwards I could sense a vibration in my entire body, so high-pitched and nearly audible. If a dog had wandered into the room at this point, he would surely have begun to howl in pain at the sound of my nerves reaching a frequency that only his ears could hear.

I will not try to reconcile my spiritual history with the demonic sensibilities that this little beast can conjure in my soul, but I do find it peculiar that I have had more than one highly disturbing centipede encounter while in church. After all, who made the centipede? But I digress.

I can remember individual centipedes encountered over the years: the one that came around a corner as I sat on the floor of Merrill Hall waiting for my journalism class to start 20 years ago, the enormous one on a stack of books in our spare bedroom when we lived in our first apartment, the one in our bathroom last year, and the one that fell off the wall before my very eyes this past Easter Sunday morning. The knowledge that something with that many legs can still fall off of a wall did not do anything good for my already overdeveloped fear of centipedes.

I know my fear is not rational. I love most other bugs and am fascinated by them. Last year we had a pet katydid. This year we raised a praying mantis from a tiny half-inch long hatchling to a fully formed adult. I held them. I photographed them. I played with them and even named them. But centipedes? I have what must be a biological, pathological fear of these speedy, multi-ped monsters that goes beyond my own understanding.

After all, the common house centipede is a helpful, honest predator and certainly not looking to disturb me, personally, except maybe to hide under my clothing were I to lie on the basement floor, at night, in the dark. Centipedes enjoy damp, dim, and cramped places and will hunt down and kill small spiders and insects, including silverfish and cockroaches, that are also found in our homes. Centipedes, often lazily lumped in with spiders or bugs, are true arthropods and neither insects nor spiders. A house centipede, Scutigera coleoptrata, will have one pair of legs per body segment, translating to between 30 and 100 legs, depending on the species. The last pair of legs is much longer than the others and is used to lasso and hold prey while the hunter’s venom takes effect. They do not commonly bite humans, unless provoked, but they can and some quite painfully. The larger the bug, the worse the bite. The dead, slightly crumpled carcass that I found in an abandoned bucket in our basement last week had only the minimally requisite 30 legs. My relief is almost palpable.

House centipedes lay 50 to 100 or more eggs in the late spring or early summer and the young hatch with four pairs of legs. They go through several larval stages marked by an increasing number of pairs of legs until reaching maturity after five or more molts. They can live up to six years. I feel ill. Is there no safe harbor, not even church? A centipede went through the wash machine recently and I found it dead on our comforter in the evening after making our bed. It wasn’t squished, like they usually are when I make them die, so I gingerly picked it up with a tissue and held the creepy body and examined it. It had an almost likeable little face, which surprised me, seeing as how a live one can terrify me more than anything else I know of native to southeastern Wisconsin.

A 26-year old man living near Bangkok recently earned admittance into the Guinness Book of World Records after spending 28 days eating and sleeping with 1,000 centipedes inside a 12 square meter glass room. An Internet photo showed him with a ridiculously enormous centipede crawling over his chin and up onto his lips. I counted at least 40 legs on this five-inch long fright before I had to navigate away from the web page, clear my computer cache, turn off the machine entirely and take a little walk around the block with my six-year old son to remove the image from my brain. If I ever were found to have information some international enemy wanted, all they would have to do is put me in that room. I’d talk. I’d tell them whatever they wanted to know – my age, my weight, my checking account information, my social security number, highly classified American anti-terrorist machinations – just don’t bring on the centipedes.

I want to know where this fear comes from, and why some folks have it and others don’t. Nine out of ten people I ask about centipedes are completely grossed out or afraid of them. I happily married one of the few, the proud, the non-Scutigeraphobic. I call upon his anomalistic indifference to do the dirty act of killing whenever necessary, whenever he is available. If I am home alone and I spy one of these accursed apparitions on wall or floor, my terror alone gives it a better chance of survival. Poor little guys. They can’t know how frightened I am of them. They can’t know how my stomach runs for cover behind my uvula at the sight of them. Why, they’re almost heroes, considering all the good work they do around my house. My first instinct remains murderous, but entomologist Eric Grissell gives this advice instead: "In my house, I never kill these creatures, but when I see them I do what any right-thinking person would do – faint. When I wake up, they are gone."



Quote source: Grissell, Eric. Insects and Gardens. 26.