Some people are afraid of ghosts, ghouls and goblins, but everyone is afraid of creepy crawlies. Just in time for Halloween, here are our top spooky pests.
Termites
It can take months or even years before you ever become aware that your house has been infested with termites. They crawl within your walls literally feasting on your home for years and years without you even catching a glimpse of one. It’s like in scary movies where the characters don’t know that they are being stalked until a good chunk into the film. Termites don't infest due to someone accidentally bringing them in, they just sort of show up to feed upon the homes of the unsuspecting. You don't deserve that!
Termites have that spooky hive mind intelligence. They all work together to satiate their destructive appetites, chipping away at your property to the point of becoming a health risk. I picture termites as being like Ridley Scott's Aliens with their swarm intelligence and destructive tendencies, except infinitely less violent and dangerous. When termites finally decide to let you know that they're infesting, they do so with the stuff of nightmares. They swarm. It's scary stuff
Bed Bugs
Arguably the most frightening thing about bed bugs is the amount of effort it take to get rid of them. In very few instances are victims able to knock the problem out on their own, wasting plenty of their own time and money before finally deciding to hire a company. Even throwing away the mattress often isn’t enough to solve the problem. Eliminated a bed bugs infestation is a team effort. The pest control guys have to kill the suckers, but you’ve got to make sure not to bring them back in! Seriously, we HATE bed bugs.
Spiders
Arguably the most common spooky pest out there, spiders go mostly unnoticed until you feel one skitter across the back of your neck or from under your couch. Luckily, most spiders are relatively harmless, but that doesn’t stop people like me from being petrified by mere sight of them. Ironically, we have a red-haired tarantula right here in the office. Her and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship, but for the most part I hate her.
Say hello, Winona.
Arachnophobia seems to be one of the most common fears out there and for the most part that’s reasonable, they’re pretty spooky. Though most spiders are harmless, black widows are among the more common species spotted here in Southern California. They love dark, dry secluded areas, including under old stairs, benches, garage doors and those small crevices on your side yard that always keep you from taking out the trash barefoot. What’s worse is that black widows actually produce a venom that is harmful to humans. Though most black widows bites aren’t fatal, victims may experience chills, fever, severe abdominal pain, and vomiting/nausea. Man that’s awful.
Cockroaches
You wake up in the middle of the night with your typical late-night craving. After rubbing your eyes and letting out an agitated sigh at the thought of going to work in less than 4 hours, you stumble out of bed. Dazed and half asleep, you waddle to the kitchen grasping lazily for the light switch, your only objective being that leftover Chipotle in the fridge. As you finally find the switch and flick on the lights, you notice a black spot skittering on the counter tops through your blurred vision. Your spine tingles and your back grows tense when you feel not one but two bugs skitter across your hand. You’ve got roaches!
Spooked? Awesome. Maybe that was a little over-dramatic but hey, it’s Halloween. Staying with the theme of spooky, Halloweeny pests, I would say that cockroaches are like the ghosts of the pest world. They really only show up at night or in the darker areas of your home, they really aren’t all that harmful physically, and you nearly need a medium to purge their presence from your home. In a lot of movies, ghosts often haunt people who stumbled upon an ancient artifact or heirloom that they tampered with or took home for some moronic reason. Being source-based, cockroaches are brought in from something external. Someone scored a box of hand-me-downs at a garage sale and didn’t think to check it, maybe they squashed a cockroach that was bearing eggs and got some stuck on their shoe, either way those roaches are a tough nut to crack.
Happy Halloween!