Happiest Kid Ever to Find Two Spiders Living in his Ear

This morning on the TV news there was some kid from Oregon who found two spiders living in his ear. One living and one dead, actually. Apparently there isn't enough spider sustenance in a nine-year old ear to sustain the lives of two spiders. In retrospect they should have each taken an ear to themselves. Look at the pictures of this kid, though--Seattlest has never seen anyone happier to have two bugs hauled out of his ear. That is one healthy child.

In the Midwest where we came up there's a beast called an earwig, and in popular mythology an earwig either burrows into the ear canal, lays eggs in the inner ear, eats the brain thereby zombifying the host or some combination of all of those. It's called an earwig, afterall. Of course it burrows into your ear while you sleep. Also, it looks particularly awful. Also, they are everywhere. I once ingested an unknown number or earwigs via a snorkel that had been sitting around outside. Asphyxiation/drowning/infestation nightmares continue to this day, despite the fact that I was 18 or so at the time of the earwig consumption. Childhood myths die hard, and if you had taken my picture following this event I wouldn't have been smiling and giving a thumbs-up.

Snopes.com offers this anecdote while refuting the eggs in the ear myth:

John Hanning Speke, remembered for tracking down the source of the Nile River, recorded that the interior of his tent "became covered with a host of small black beetles, evidently attracted by the glimmer of the candle." Exhausted, Speke went to sleep with them crawling over his person, only to be awakened by one of the "horrid little insects" struggling into his ear. Trying to remove the beetle only pushed it in further. The beetle continued into Speke's ear as far as possible, and then "he began with exceeding vigour like a rabbit in a hole, to dig violently away at my tympanum. The queer sensation this amusing measure excited in me is past description . . . What to do I knew not." After trying to flush the critter out with melted butter, Speke tried to dig it out with his penknife, succeeding only in killing it and increasing the damage to his ear. Infection followed, distorting his face and causing boils. "For many months the tumour made me almost deaf, and ate a hole between the ear and the nose, so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed. Six or seven months after this accident happened, bits of the beetle — a leg, a wing, or parts of the body — came away in the wax." (Quotes are from Speke's journals, as referred to in Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton by Edward Rice, 1990, Scribner's, New York.)

Speke obviously survived his ordeal, and just as obviously, the beetle didn't burrow through to the other side. The incident was given a fairly prominent place in the movie Mountains of the Moon. I know the legend predates the movie, so I'm not suggesting it as a source. The story was probably better-known to Speke's contemporaries, because of the explorer's popularity. This may have been a source for at least part of the legend.