Last summer I had this thing on my ceiling. Somehow it looked about the size of a large dog when it was on the ceiling, but when sucked into the vacuum cleaner it managed to shrink to about 3cm long.

There's just something freaky about bugs on the ceiling, isn't there? Especially the ones that tend to lose their footing and fall on you. Yeesh.

Wow, my wife would have freaked. She's ok with bugs when we're camping, but not in the house . . .

*get these bugs off me* WHY did I look at picture!?

I am NOT looking at those links! Camel crickets are disgusting and make my skin crawl and my neck shrink.

Warning, really gross story follows.

The Guy & I used to live in a little WWII cottage that housed whole colonies of camel crickets every spring to my unending wiggins.

One morning, I got up, set up the ironing board, turned the iron on and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Guy comes in a few minutes later, wanting to know what that horrible odor of seared flesh is and am I okay.

Two camel crickets, seared to the surface of the iron. Took about a month to get the smell out of the house. I never ironed again. Never.

See, that's what I hate about camel crickets... they seem to just jump around randomly, with no control over where they're going. How any bug dumb enough to jump onto a hot iron managed to survive evolution this long is beyond me.

Never heard of 'em. Wonder what's their geographic range.

Are camel crickets fairly new? I remember not seeing them until I was in my twenties or so.

They may have migrated to your area later, like armadillos and Canada geese did here in Georgia (I never saw either of those until I was in my late twenties or early thirties), but we've had camel crickets since I can remember.

Well thanks for them, they're lovely.

We call them spider crickets, and they are terrifying bastards. Quick moving and jumpy. Gives the regular house cricket a bad name.

Creepy bug alert.
We get Mediterranean House Centipedes a lot. We've always killed them because they are so creepy. Turns out they are good guys eating roaches, ants, termites and all manor of other crawly bugs. Still gaaaa!
Fixed for those of delicate sensibilities.

WHOA, I've never seen one of those, arse! Even creepier than the camel cricket. At least they don't jump at you, I assume. I hope.

No jumping but they can run across the ceiling just as fast as a floor. At least they are sure footed and don't fall. They start with 2 pair of legs and grew a new set each year.

They start with 2 pair of legs and grew a new set each year.

*has complete heebie-jeebie attack*

Crickets are good luck, BP. A camel cricket must be doubly so.

That 'grow a new pair every year' would make sense. We had a centipede just like that in our house recently, but with fewer legs. Still I have trouble believing it...that would make the one in the picture like 10 years old. Do any insects live that long?

No, Pips... like rainbaby said, they give real crickets a bad name. (I think they're not actually crickets in the scientific sense. More like some hell-spawned impostor.)

If I had seen that on the ceiling above me, y'all would have heard my shrieks no matter how far away you were.

On preview: that's a fucking nightmare, arse_hat. Someone should put a warning on the front page. Yes, I'm serious. I just about lost my breakfast.

I saw them for the first time when I lived in Indiana. There were troops of them at my boyfriend's house. We used to call them landshrimps.

Actually dano these can live 18 years or so.

I remeber distinctly the first time I saw a Mediterranean House Centipede. GAH! I was inspired to write an essay about it, which I did, and send it to McSweeneys to see if they'd publish it in their letters section, which they did.

I am a bug lover, until it comes to House Centipedes. They freak the shit out of me. They are fast, twitchy, and can bite you in your bed at night. Yes, they eat roaches, but we don't have those. They also eat spiders, which I like a lot. So if I see one... it's dead. I saw one on our deck once and, according to the BF, had my shoe in my hand and smacked the hell out of it within a tenth of a second. Also, if you plan on killing one, they can leave a brown smudge on white walls. And they don't die easy... smash them a lot in a tissue then flush them down the toilet. Twice.

hell-spawned impostor

Gregor's brother?

My worst bug story:

Many years ago, a boyfriend and I were on holiday just outside Cape Sounion, near Athens (digression: Taz, visit Sounion, it's fab). A fairly basic hotel, in a quiet village.

One day after breakfast we went back up to the room and as we opened the door something very large scuttled across the room. It looked like a giant woodlouse, only many, many times the size (woodlice are normally about 1cm long, and this one was probably 3" long).

I screamed, refused to go in the room and made the b/f hunt it, with a view to its imminent death. He searched high and low, but couldn't find it. We had to go, as the coach had turned up to take us out on a day trip.

When we got back, I stood outside and made him go in and look for it. Eventually he found the creature, on its back, dead, in the bottom of the wardrobe. He scooped it up on a newspaper and flushed it down the toilet. He dumped a load of bleach down the loo to make sure all trace of the thing was eradicated.

Half an hour later, as I'm relaxing in the bath, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Two twitching antennae appearing over the edge of the toilet, as the creature came back from the dead (bleached a few shades lighter) and crawled, like the girl in the Ring, out of its pit of doom.

Let me tell you, people, there is nothing on earth scarier than being stuck in a room, naked, with a huge bug, and the bug is between you and the door. I swear I ran across that floor without my feet touching it.