The Bot Fly and other modern ghost stories (0)
Posted 23 July, 2007 in what is she on about?
Stories about bot fly infestations are everywhere these days. Recently, I’ve read and heard several tales of people going on exotic vacations and coming back with larvae riding shotgun in their scalps or arms: see here, for example. It’s a classic scary tale - something creepy-crawly enters your body without your knowledge and causes you terrible pain until the doctors finally realize what it is, and then they gouge it, squirming, out of you. See also: bugs in ears, giant worm in abdomen that has to be wrapped around a stick and slowly pulled out of a hole in your side, various genital larvae infestations, ad nauseam. (Serious nauseam.)
When I was a kid, my friends and I scared ourselves with ghost stories. There was the one about the taxi driver picking up the girl who then vanished from the back of his cab. Asking around later, he found out that a girl had died several years ago at the very spot he’d picked up his passenger. There were also poltergeist stories, and tales of vengeful spirits who’d come back to settle old scores. Bloody Mary or the Candyman could be summoned by saying their names three times while looking in a mirror; none of my friends ever got beyond saying the name twice before shrieking and running away. Finally, there were nasties that TV and movies had put into our heads, like Freddy Krueger and exorcisms.
Now I’m an adult, my friends and I rarely tell ghost stories. We’ve replaced them with real-life horror. We talk about Morgellan’s syndrome, the weird and possibly psychosomatic disease in which mysterious inorganic fibers poke their way out of sores in your skin. We talk about waterboarding and bugs in ears, and getting shot on the freeway, and the little fish that swims up inside your urethra and clings on with its spikes. We talk about the bot fly.
Maybe we’ve abandoned ghost stories because we’ve learned that reality contains an almost infinite variety of hideous things, most of which are much more terrifying than ectoplasmic figures that drift by us and vanish. I’ll take a headless horseman over a subcutaneous parasite any day. Perhaps it’s also because, as my friends and I have gotten older, our religious beliefs have changed or vanished. The Devil seemed a lot scarier when I was eight than he does now that I’m thirty-two. Ghosts aren’t quite as frightening to me now that I’m no longer sure I believe in an afterlife, or in a limbo stage in between life and death. The adult Catholics I know aren’t big believers in exorcisms. Also, as I’ve grown up, I’ve seen some religious artifacts become increasingly commodified, which makes them much less scary, and sometimes even funny; Pentagrams can’t really be taken seriously as a demonic symbol when you can buy them on necklaces at Hot Topic.
Bot flies, however, will always scare the bejesus out of me.