I’ll start. Apt next door is having a cockroach infected. 4 days ago, I was playing sims on my laptop, wearing my eyeglasses. Right lens got blurry, took off, huge cockroach was crawling across inside of lens. While I was wearing them. Freak out ensued.
First time in Singapore I saw a cockroach sitting on the floor, I went to kill it and then discovered there are flying roaches. Hilariousness of course ensued as a fled out of the apartment, screaming like a terrified little boy.
I was 7’ish, living in Florida and spotted something shiny in my black bean bag. Reached down, grabbed it with my hand then screamed as it wiggled its way out. I am almost 50 and still traumatized by it. Mind you this is ginormous Florida cockroach /palmetto bug bigger than my child size hand.
I was going to reply to OP with “They aren’t cockroaches, they’re palmetto bugs.”
Like, I absolutely get that these things exist and will be a part of life in Florida. But when we’re staying in your fancy hotel and complain about the bugs scurrying away from the light in the bathroom, you have to do a little better than argue semantics with me.
A really cheap and effective way of getting rid of roaches, without even using poison…
Get a medium to large metal coffee can, or any old metal can I guess. Make sure it’s cleaned out and dry to start with, and is not rusty.
Then get some spray cooking oil and a few scraps of bread. Spray the inside of the can with cooking oil, then drop some bread scraps in there.
Now you have a roach trap, set it near where the roaches are generally at their worst, and they’ll crawl out of the walls and into the can to get their munch on, but won’t be able to crawl back out.
Check it every couple or few days or so, eventually the roaches will start piling up and most of them that have been in there for a bit will end up dying because they’re covered in the cooking oil and apparently can’t absorb oxygen.
Take the trap as necessary and either dump it in the toilet and flush them away, or if you have access to a bonfire burn pile, bag the little demons up and burn them. Then clean the can out and reset the trap as necessary.
Even with the worst infestations I’ve ever seen, this tends to eliminate over 99% of them within about two weeks, if not less.
A few thoughts about the different approaches between my trap vs poison…
If you poison them, then they just go back into your walls and die, further stinking the place up, is more dangerous to people and pets, and honestly isn’t even nearly as effective as people would hope.
But roaches are simple and stupid. They’re really easy to trap, and why the hell would I want them going back into the walls in the first place? Especially when I can just flush them instead?
Thank you for passing through to read my advice. By all means please share the advice to anyone that happens to need it…
I also read your post, and I can fully agree from the Gulf Coast of the USA, that swamps can be rather nasty and have lots of weird bugs and slimeys, but usually not quite as bad as you described.
Maybe lay off the shrooms and smoke some green instead? 😂🤣
Haha shrooms just need space, and I didnt get the meaning of “setting” back then. Living in a tight space with parents downstairs and a very hot night is simply not a good idea
The whole method of operation of the trap is to make sure the roaches can’t crawl back out after they get in. So you need a totally smooth surface plus the cooking oil so they can’t climb back out.
If by chance you were to use a rusty can, that would give them a textured surface to grip onto and likely manage to crawl back out, which would defeat the trap.
Edit: It probably won’t hurt if the can happens to have only a couple or few small spots of rust, as long as it’s not so rusted as to give them a brown brick road to crawl back up and out. Any which way, the goal is to make sure that once they get in, they can’t get out.
In Cienfuegos in Cuba the lady was showing us around the room we were staying in at her house. After she left my girlfriend came up to me cringing and said there was a huge cockroach on her leg. No sooner had she finished telling me this that the lady came out of the opposite room stamping her feet on the floor chasing this monster cockroach. I swear she stamped on it three times before it stopped running.
When I discovered my old apartment had cockroaches I was very high and just saw a small blurr out of the corner of my eye. Not exactly a horror but it was camouflaged against my hardwood floor and I spent the rest of the night ripping away furniture from my walls trying to find it.
New neighbour moved in earlier this year and brought them with them, and they’re just little German cockroaches, but seeing them at all freaks me out. I’d probably die in your case.
Landlord’s done a full “move all the furniture” spray treatment, and bi-weekly gel treatment, and they just keep coming. Mostly babies, but no matter how clean the kitchen counter top is I still find them scurrying about on it.
Ok. First off, the precipitous decline of insect populations scares me more than any other climate related catastrophe, but oh my God if I never again see a mating swarm of palmetto bugs, it will be too soon. That is something that hopelessly scarred me for life.
Yeah most of the cockroach species in my part of the world are harmless beings who just want to process dead wood for us and don't actually live in the house.
When American cockroaches turn up and fly around that scares me though.
How do you call a group of cockroaches? ChatGPT insists it is “intrusion”. So imagine a sound a dense intrusion of cockroaches makes when it separates from a wall and falls to the floor. I heard it once in my life when I moved a piece of furniture from the wall in a student dormitory, long time ago. I am still disgusted.
Was playing FFXIV and my headset at the time had the mute button on the cable which usually rested on my chest. At some point a cockroach crawled up the cable and sat where the button normally is before i noticed the dark spot on my chest stopped being plastic and grew antennae. The worst part was that I was already paranoid about literally this exact thing happening.
Two horror stories - I’ll write them as two separate posts
Story one: we had a mouse in our house once. My mum is petrified of mice so we were told to buy an old fashioned mouse trap with a spring trap. We put it in an area where the mouse was seen and went to sleep. We heard the trap go in the middle of the night so thought our troubles were over. Next morning we checked the trap and under the spring was a HUGE cockroach. Not the size of a mouse but bloody close. So my brother takes the trap, pull open the spring to throw the cockroach away and the damn thing is still alive. It dropped out of the trap and just scurried away under a cabinet. I’m not sure if it survived or not but that thing had no right to be alive after getting caught full force by a mouse trap.
A few years ago my partner and I lived in a slumlord-owned apartment above a crack dealer. We had a storage unit in the basement. For some reason, the only light switch was at the end of a really long and creepy hallway.
When a hurricane hit the area, the whole neighborhood flooded horrifically. The sewers were backed up with trash so nothing drained. There were cars floating down the street. The basement oozed with mildewy dampness for the next few days.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever watched Cloverfield? Do you know that scene where they go down into the subways and turn on the camera’s night vision, only to see a wave of alien creatures rushing at them?
Well, the next time we went down into the basement was exactly like that. That moment felt like a Lovecraftian nightmare as we ran past at least a dozen cockroaches crawling on the cold concrete walls, each one the size of my palm, all lit by the glow of our phone flashlights. Their antennae were like toothpicks. These were the single largest roaches I had ever seen. It was unreal. I have had nightmares about that moment.
Story two. Our neighbours were disgusting. House full of trash, garden like a jungle and just complete neglect of their property. The landlord kicks them out and has to do a complete refurb of the house top to bottom. It turns out that the thousands of cockroaches that lived in that house suddenly had to up sticks and find a new house. That house was my house. After a few months we had cockroaches everywhere. In the toilet, bathroom, kitchen. Just everywhere. Daily occurrences: switch on the kitchen light and be greeted by hundreds of cockroaches running off. Open a cupboard and cockroaches would drop out of it onto my feet. Shoes with cockroaches in them.
We called up an exterminator and after describing the shape, size and color of these things he told us they were an invasive species and there was very little we could do. He said if we could find the place where they were breeding we could have a chance of getting rid if them. My dad and I knew the kitchen was there base so we started to pull cabinets up and see what was going on behind them. We pulled up a large cabinet and saw a few signs that there had been cockroaches on the back of the cabinet. But once we turned the cabinet upside down we saw near rows of thousands of cockroach eggs. And I mean thousands. All ready to hatch and send even more cockroaches into our house. It was something out of an alien movie. I can still those eggs to this day (this all happened in the 90’s)
I was laying in bed and trying to get to sleep. I kept hearing this tapping, or scuttling, noise coming from somewhere in my room, but I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Decided it was just old house noises and tried to ignore it. Then something fell from the ceiling and landed on my face. Shouted, slapped at my face, and heard something fall on the floor. Flipped on the light and saw the roach trying to scurry away. Hit it with a book until it was dead. Maybe not the most horrifying, but it was one of the worst experience I've had with a roach, so far at least.
I’m sorry, I’m going to one up you. Look away now if squeamish.
I woke up with one climbing into my ear. I ran to the bathroom, bashing into furniture and walls because feeling it wriggle around in my ear threw my sense of balance off so badly. And also, you know, panic. I jumped into the bathtub fully clothed, dropped to hands and knees to put my head under the faucet, and turned the water on full force to flush it out.
This was during college years, during a gap between semesters and I didn’t have an apartment. I was couch surfing at a friends. After that night, I left and lived in my car for a couple of days instead. There was no way I would be able to fall asleep again in that place.
If you get a roach crawl into your ear, you can kill it almost instantly by pouring rubbing alcohol into your ear. Now getting it out is a different story, but at least the little demon is dead and gives you time to go see a doctor without it trying to chew through your eardrum.
From my understanding, roaches cannot crawl backwards, so when trapped in such a way they’ll try chewing their way forward…
Don’t ask how I know this, but yeah rubbing alcohol apparently kills them instantly.
The only thing that kept me from trying to claw it out of my head was the fear of the roach tunneling harder as it died. Oof, not sure I would be able to pour alcohol in, worrying death would be any less than instantaneous. And I hope I never have to figure it out.
Allz I can really say, without getting into a rather disturbing story, is that indeed rubbing alcohol will kill roaches practically instantly, when drowned in it anyways.
Only warning I’d tack onto that is that if you happen to already have a hole in your eardrum, then rubbing alcohol probably isn’t going to feel too good. But then again, neither is a roach burrowing into your head, so choose your battles wisely.
For real though, as long as your eardrum is still intact and doesn’t happen to have a hole for whatever reason, rubbing alcohol in the ear doesn’t hurt a bit and will kill a roach in a matter of like 3 seconds or less.
Wise choice though, I wouldn’t want to sleep in a roach infested place either. Have you read through the rest of the comments for my Life Pro Tip on how to get rid of the demons cheaply and without poison?
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