The Gaming Den

Background things to know: I currently live at my fathers house, and I have an unnatural hatred and fear of bats. Bats live in the roof.

So, I am sitting at my computer surfing the web as I often do. I see a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I look over and see nothing. I dismiss it as my imagination, or possibly the light from a lamp hitting the rotating fan, or the mirror in a weird way. I go back to the computer. A few minutes later it happens again. I start to think that my eyes are becoming strained or something. I go back to my computer. Now might be a good time to mention that I am only wearing shorts.

A minute later, I see the flash again. Only this time, it decides not to fly out the room immediately. (Side-note, I actually shuddered while writing this part) The bat starts circling my room in tight, low circles. Apparently it has lost track of the doorway, and can't find its way out. This forces it to make tight passes near me, one or two feet away, every second. Shirtless, I imagine it landing on my naked skin and biting/defecating/crawling all over me. I pick up a shirt to shield myself, too afraid of taking my eyes off of the bat to put it on. I try to encourage the bat towards the door by barking unintelligible sounds and obscenities at it.

Either it tired of terrifying me, or it found the door again. In any case it flew out of my room into the rest of the house. I jumped up and slammed the door shut. (Side-note: I try to be a responsible energy user, so I turn lights off when I am not in the room.)

It is nighttime, so now the bat is flying throughout a pitch black house. I decide against trying to hunt for the flying bat in lightless rooms, searching and fumbling for light-switches. I think it must be tiring for the bat to continue to fly in tight circles, so I decide to wait an hour or so, so that he will hopefully land. I wait, get my policeman-style Mag-lite, and open the door a crack. I don't see it. I open it a little more. I don't see it. I examine the door frame above my doorway, the ceiling, and other hidden places in the immediate vicinity. I don't see it. I look in the next room. I see it.

It is hanging on a prized antique of my father's, on a shelf out of reach near the ceiling. I go back to my room, get a cardboard box, and use it as cover while I circle around, turning on all the lights. It doesn't move. I get closer, peer over the edge of the box, and examine it. I left my glasses in the other room, but it appears to be breathing quickly, and have a small gash on its side. The ceiling fan is on.

At this point I imagine the bat flying into the ceiling fan and subsequently spraying me with viscera. I turn the fan off. I consider opening the windows and chasing it outside. I choose not to. I don't want to herd a flying bat into the wilderness, just so it can find its way back inside the roof, only to terrorize me again at a later date. I gather random things in order to combat this vile thing. An open umbrella, the trusty box, paper towels, a disposable tupperware container, a dusting broom.

I use the umbrella as cover, and bravely nudge it with the soft dusting broom. I hope it will latch on, and I can put it in the container. It doesn't. I rears its head up, opens its mouth, and chitters at me. Then it climbs all over the antique and ends its trip out of reach, out of sight, right in the corner of the ceiling on the shelf. I can't reach it to sweep it off the shelf because of the antique. I could get a stool, reach up and take the antique off first, but then the bat could jump on me, make me fall off the stool, break the antique, and then bite/defecate/crawl all over me.

I get some window cleaner with ammonia in it. I spray it up at the bat, hoping to force it to fly to a more accessible area. It doesn't like this. It chitters its hatred at me. Now its pissed off and knows to attack the nearest living thing that approaches it. It stays up there. I get a broom, and use the handle to poke at its general area. It chitters. I leave the room to find something that I can use to move the antique at arms length. I don't find anything. I go back into the room.

I don't hear it chittering, and it is out of sight, so I get a stool to look at its hiding place. It isn't there. I look around and see it on the opposite wall, near the ceiling, in plain view. I hate this thing. I decide not to fuck around anymore. A new option has become available now that I won't damage the antique. I get a pellet gun.

I aim, and fire. Did I hit it? It doesn't move. I decide to be sure, and shoot at it again. I approach, and berate it. I hope it is dead. There is a shelf underneath the bat, with stuff on it. I replace the stuff with the disposable tupperware container. I get my reaching broom and poke it. It falls off the wall and into the container. The container falls off the shelf. The tupperware container falls on all the intervening furniture on its way to the floor, protecting and weighted by the bat like some tiny bloody sled.

I get the top, and firmly attach it to the container. I shake and insult the loathsome thing in relative safety. I put it in the garbage bag, and take the garbage outside to the garbage bin.

I come back inside and check for any cohorts. I look around for any bats, I don't see any. I listen for chittering. I don't hear any. I go back into my room and write this. The door is closed.

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Do you have any stories of perilous adventures with loathsome creatures?

Poor thing.

And I mean the bat.

You should really get the roof fixed. It's not hard.

-Crissa

Extreme and often odd phobias, like fear of grasshoppers, run in my family.

I also work in a family business. Now I'm afraid of caterpillars (yes, that's why it's unreasoning fear) and my cousin who I work with is terrified of spiders (and yes, we work in the wrong industry all things considered).

One day only me and my cousin were on the work site and there I was digging this hole.

There are a lot of weird bugs in the world, and the one I unearthed looked like a cross between a caterpillar and a spider.

And it was angry.

I said, "We are totally unequipped to deal with this."

edit: also that critter got away alive, well, unless a bird ate it or something, we called morning tea on that problem. Killing a bat, that's just plain wrong. It's like the crazy old lady who used to landlord for my parents and had her poor husband go and poor boiling water on frogs whenever she heard or saw them near her house.

I used to have phobias involving earwigs and centipedes, but I trained myself to not have them anymore.

My landlord has arachnophobia, and won't enter the room where I keep my tarantulas.

I like bats, and I can only sympathize with the one you had issues with.

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However, I can sympathize with the unreasonable terror of relatively benign creatures. For me, it's house centipedes. These horrors are shorter than the "typical" centipede, but with thousands of long, hideous, hairlike legs. They have a poisonous bite, but it's supposed to be no worse than a wasp sting. I have no serious problem with wasps. It's not the potential danger of the little beasties; it's the sheer, atavistic horror of their alien forms.

I live in the country, in an old (built in the 40's) farmhouse, and consequently, I occasionally have various uninvited visitors. Once it a while, I glance at the wall to see a house centipede lurking there. Ick. I collect a broom and some paper towels and begin stalking my vile prey.

You have to be careful with these buggers. They're practically blind, but their countless legs all act as antennae, and if they hear/feel movement near them they simply drop off the wall (usually behind a piece of furniture).

Anyway, I get within striking range. Sometimes I'm lucky and turn the thing into a brownish smear on the wall. Other times I swing a bit to slow, and the centipede falls behind a couch. In a mild panic, I yank the couch away from the wall and the centipede takes off running.

I give chase, and eventually manage to whack it with the broom. It's dead. Now comes the true horror.

I use some paper towels to pick up its corpse, which is still moving. All the thousands of long, hairlike legs are still frantically twitching and flexing. The ones that were knocked loose from the force of the broom-impact still twitch.

This freaks me out more than I can adequately describe. Shuddering, I wad the monster up in far too many paper towels and cram the whole mass down deep into the trash can.

Here's a picture of one, in case you wish to be creeped out as well. I could hardly stand to look at the monitor when looking this up.

I used to be scared shitless of those things. I'm cool with them now that I realize they eat cockroaches. I don't have a roach phobia, but cockroaches are disgusting little buggers.

Heights. I'm cool with everything, but heights get me down. I don't climb ladders, don't go onto balconies, don't lean out of windows in high places.

I currently live on the 4th floor. I haven't approached the windows in over a year that i live there.

Mice.

Field mice, to be specific, in rental apartments for college rooming.

They piss in and on EVERYTHING.
If you leave any food out, even dust, they will leap out the SECOND you are out of the room to poop on the exact spot that they last ate upon.
Dumb little shits.

Every time I used the stove, it smelled like heated urine.
The traps were no use; there were always more in that old complex of at least 30 years in age (it was demolished the semester after I moved out).
When I moved out, beneath the stovetop there was a caking layer of mouse shit. It (my most frequent mouse The Squeeker), or the Mouse Horde, had been buisy licking the inside space beneath all 3 stove grills and replacing it with shit.

Exterminators sprayed foam and chemicals in plenty of rooms in the property but the mice chewed through new barriers.
I should have sued for such literally shitty conditions for $800 (split with a roommate) but the company sold the property to the campus I went to, packed up, and either pursued other shady ventures or dispersed.


It's strange that anyone would have amphibiphobia. I own 2 American green tree frogs, gift from my girlfriend last winter.
They're some of the most harmless things you'll ever see.
Perhaps the old [EDITED] was on a witch hunt for familiars.

House centipedes are freaky cool looking. Don't get those over here.

Don't get those over here where?

I'm not scared of house centipedes, but my friend is. He freaked out on Saturday when he saw one.

Funnily enough, I'm phobia-free, although I do have a healthy respect for most forms of danger.

I do tend to cringe a bit when I run into a spiderweb, though.

Draco_Argentum wrote:House centipedes are freaky cool looking. Don't get those over here.

I'll catch a couple and send them to you if you send me a funnel web.

Spiders rock. One of the coolest memories of my childhood was when I found a black widow locked in mortal combat with a bumblebee. (the spider won)

Lots of funnel-webs as well. I used to poke the web gently with a stick to trick the spider into coming out.

My dad's a woodworker, and he has shop-spiders in his workshop. They're big, hairy wolf spiders and grass spiders that look like emaciated tarantulas. Some are bigger than my spread fingers. My dad sometimes pets them, and they just sit there and let him.

Spiders were cool... before I was bitten by a Black Widow. You can't get me near one without cringing (sometimes screaming) now.

And in general, I'm not a big fan of things that creepeth. Including people.

I used to have a terrible fear of heights, or, more specifically, ladders, stairs, and ledges; I overcame it though. It used to be so bad I'd have to sit down to get off of the tailgate of a pickup truck. After working as a night stocker for a grocery store where my freight was often on huge shelves fifteen of twenty feet off the ground and sometimes inaccessible to the pole I ended up throwing off the phobia by necessity(I couldn't keep asking my busy co-workers for help forever after all). These days I enjoy climbing.

Friend of mine developed a fear of spiders after being bitten in the calf by a Brown Recluse)(ended up with an egg sized lump of necrotic flesh on the back of his leg, but no serious systemic problems). Also developed a fear of dogs after a similar experience, apparently nature hates his legs.

My spouse carries a colony of brown widows or false widows whereever she moves to.

She believes they help defend her from roaches.

-Crissa

Also developed a fear of dogs after a similar experience

Your friend has a lump of necrotic flesh significantly larger than a DOG on the back of his leg after being bitten by one?

Crissa wrote:My spouse carries a colony of brown widows or false widows whereever she moves to.

She believes they help defend her from roaches.

-Crissa

Latrodectus geometricus seems a bit too small to want to eat most common American species of roaches.

The term "false widow" refers to 122 different species of spiders, it's entirely possible that one or more of those eat roaches.

Then again, if your spouse isn't an arachnologist or have a reliant supplier, she probably doesn't know what spiders she's lugging around, you can't identify most species of spiders by how they look.

Any spider is large enough to eat roaches, because roaches start out very, very small. And yes, common names tend to be inaccurate, hence I gave you two common names.

It doesn't really matter the name of the spiders, since they're the same ones she's been carrying around for more than a decade. (though we may have actually lost them in this last move)

-Crissa

And I'm saying that the effects on your roach population is going to be low, since they can maybe eat roach nymphs, but not the adult roaches themselves, and also that most spiders eat maybe once or twice a week, and that web spiders tend to not go out and seek them out. Which means they are unlikely to even encouter roach nymphs, who tend to not leave their hidey-holes unless there's dire need.

You'd be better off catching some Scutigera coleoptrata and letting those guys loose, they seek out and destroy even adults.

I'm thinking of getting a Scolopendra heros for my own amusement. Maybe get a colony of Blaptica dubia, because the cricket bills are starting to get high, and I'd like to breed my own food if possible. (Plus, dubias taste like shrimp when grilled with a little old bay. Yum!)

Count_Arioch_the_28th wrote:I'm thinking of getting a Scolopendra heros for my own amusement. Maybe get a colony of Blaptica dubia, because the cricket bills are starting to get high, and I'd like to breed my own food if possible. (Plus, dubias taste like shrimp when grilled with a little old bay. Yum!)

The thread title is "Loathesome Things," not "Tasty Things."

Although, since I'm a vegetarian, I don't find eating bugs to be much more repulsive than eating chunks of cow flesh.

Never got the aversion to eating bugs myself. People eat seafood, that's like eating sea bugs.

I'd eat cooked bugs if I happened to be somewhere that served them.

It is eating sea bugs.

But the spiders are placed in cabinets where colonies of roaches might land, and the spiders like it drier than the roaches, so yes, the roaches don't make it into the house generally, because we have things on guard. Spiders in the cabinets, powder in the baseboard, and diatomic earth under the furniture. As that we generally run with a negative air pressure in the house instead of positive, and so we don't have roaches though our neighbors are horribly infested. It's disgusting, but as long as they stay outside...

-Crissa