As you can imagine, pest control professionals receive strange calls regularly. For example, it is not uncommon for a pest control professional to be called to a home in order to eradicate small insects. However, these “small insects” turn out to be hallucinations more often than you would believe. Apparently, it is not necessarily rare for people to hallucinate bugs crawling all over their bodies. In another case, a pest control professional was called to a restaurant in order to discreetly handle a minor roach presence, but this “minor” presence involved removing thousands of roaches that had been roasted to death under the kitchen grill for months. Back in 2016, a pest control officer was in disbelief after receiving a call from a man who claimed to have been attacked and stung by a scorpion from the Virgin Islands. This claim may not sound odd, but the call was made by a man who lived in the same Pennsylvania town as the pest control professional. Considering the fact that wild scorpions don’t exist within the state, this man’s claim seemed dubious. The pest control professional also did not understand how a man in Pennsylvania could have been attacked by an exotic scorpion that is native to the Caribbean. It turned out that the man had unknowingly transported the dangerous scorpion species back to his home from his vacation spot in the Virgin Islands.

The man had reached into his backpack in order to retrieve his laptop when he suddenly felt a sting. A second later, the man was shocked to learn that the perpetrator was a scorpion that had been in his backpack during his long flight home. The scorpion quickly took refuge within the man’s bedroom before he called pest control professionals for assistance. Considering that the scorpion was found within the man’s bedding, it was a good thing he called the pest control professional before he went to bed that night. The scorpion was captured and the man’s injury was successfully treated at a nearby hospital. Amazingly, just two years prior to this incident, another Pennsylvania resident sustained a scorpion sting after handling a shipment of bananas from Honduras.

Do you fear exotic insect or arachnid encounters when purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables in the grocery store?