Your Halloween Scary Story......
Oct. 30th, 2002 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
senoritafishSomething I posted at {fray} in response to the story I mentioned earlier:
I've never been afraid of spiders. On Girl Scout camping trips, I was always the one everyone woke up at 3 AM to get a spider out of someone's tent. I would use a paper cup and a piece of cardboard, gently remove the offending critter and let it go a safe distance away. One time it was a chicken.
After college, I spent a year as an exchange student in Brisbane, Australia. After the school year was over, I wanted to travel. Tasmania, the island off the south coast of Oz had always sounded fascinating to me, and so it was. I bought a week's bus pass, stayed in hostels, camped, and even hitchhiked once when I missed a bus, something I would have never dared to do at home in Southern California. I stayed overnight in a campground near Strahan, a beautiful spot next to a stream. I was tired, so I set up my tent and crawled into my sleeping bag, lulled to sleep by the stream.
Later, I was awakened by what I thought was water dripping on my face, right on my eye. I thought water had condensed on the inside of the tent and was dripping on me, a common occurrence in tents, especially when it's cool. I wiped off my face with my hand and thought nothing more of it, starting to fall asleep again almost immediately.
A few minutes later I was jerked into wakefulness. Something on the fingers of my outstretched hand, the one I had rubbed my face with, was wiggling! I jerked my hand to fling off anything clinging to it, sat up and seized my flashlight, heart pounding. I swept the beam around, searching for what had awakened me, and there next to my sleeping bag was something gleaming and stretching. It was a leech, hunching itself up like an inchworm, and searching again for the meal it had been deprived of. It was gray with darker black streaks, inching along using the suckers at either end of its body. Shuddering with revulsion, I seized a scrap of newspaper, scrunched it up and threw it outside the tent as far as I could. If I hadn't felt that thing land on me, I would have woken up in the morning with an eyefull of blood - leech bites continue to bleed long after the leech has had it's fill and left.
It was a small leech, and if it had been daylight, it probably wouldn't have bothered me at all, but being woken out of a sound sleep realizing something is after your your blood is damn creepy.
I don't camp by streams anymore, and I am very grateful we don't have leeches in Southern California.
I've never been afraid of spiders. On Girl Scout camping trips, I was always the one everyone woke up at 3 AM to get a spider out of someone's tent. I would use a paper cup and a piece of cardboard, gently remove the offending critter and let it go a safe distance away. One time it was a chicken.
After college, I spent a year as an exchange student in Brisbane, Australia. After the school year was over, I wanted to travel. Tasmania, the island off the south coast of Oz had always sounded fascinating to me, and so it was. I bought a week's bus pass, stayed in hostels, camped, and even hitchhiked once when I missed a bus, something I would have never dared to do at home in Southern California. I stayed overnight in a campground near Strahan, a beautiful spot next to a stream. I was tired, so I set up my tent and crawled into my sleeping bag, lulled to sleep by the stream.
Later, I was awakened by what I thought was water dripping on my face, right on my eye. I thought water had condensed on the inside of the tent and was dripping on me, a common occurrence in tents, especially when it's cool. I wiped off my face with my hand and thought nothing more of it, starting to fall asleep again almost immediately.
A few minutes later I was jerked into wakefulness. Something on the fingers of my outstretched hand, the one I had rubbed my face with, was wiggling! I jerked my hand to fling off anything clinging to it, sat up and seized my flashlight, heart pounding. I swept the beam around, searching for what had awakened me, and there next to my sleeping bag was something gleaming and stretching. It was a leech, hunching itself up like an inchworm, and searching again for the meal it had been deprived of. It was gray with darker black streaks, inching along using the suckers at either end of its body. Shuddering with revulsion, I seized a scrap of newspaper, scrunched it up and threw it outside the tent as far as I could. If I hadn't felt that thing land on me, I would have woken up in the morning with an eyefull of blood - leech bites continue to bleed long after the leech has had it's fill and left.
It was a small leech, and if it had been daylight, it probably wouldn't have bothered me at all, but being woken out of a sound sleep realizing something is after your your blood is damn creepy.
I don't camp by streams anymore, and I am very grateful we don't have leeches in Southern California.
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Leeches
Date: 2002-10-30 01:38 pm (UTC)The lead operator for the show decided it would be nifty to have some of the guns mounted in the lake, so he waded out and started setting those up. When he was finished, his hip waders had leeches all over them! We spent a good 20 minutes just knocking those things off of him...
And he still had to go back in to take down the guns...
Re: Leeches
Shades of "African Queen." I remember going to Lion Country Safari when I was a kid, but I never knew they had leeches.
(Heh, my fingers keep wanting to type "Leach" - as in Robin, and I keep having to go back and correct it)