In news that will make you cringe, or scream, or perhaps pee your pants, a tiny spider crawled into some lady’s earhole in China and made himself a cozy little nest for five days. She only discovered it after going to the hospital with an “itchy” ear, and after doctors took some terrifying X-rays, they swished some saline solution in there and essentially waterboarded him. Only, if it had been a truly successful waterboarding, they would have gotten him to talk about why spiders are so unequivocally sneaky and grodie. And don’t drag out that old chestnut about spiders being good for wiping out other annoying bugs, or remind me that Charlotte was sweet and intelligent. You don’t need that many legs to kill other bugs, and swinging around from webs over my head is just unnecessary. Also, Charlotte wasn’t real. Even if I did cry over her.

As someone who has harbored a deep-seeded fear of spiders since childhood, this story makes me want to seal up all my orifices while I sleep. Breathing? Who gives a crap about breathing? There are spiders crawling into people’s earholes. That’s only a few inches away from the mouth. Breathing can wait until I’m not lying prone and can arm myself with a spatula and some high-powered insect poison.

At any rate, no one has reported yet on how the lady in China feels about all this, but at least the spider didn’t inseminate her, like this squid did to a woman in South Korea.

Image credit: Rednet/Weibo