An insurance agent in Farmington, Missouri, is taking steps to ensure she never again has the shocking experience she had a few weeks ago: finding out there’s a giant spider living in her ear.
Desirae Kelly’s “eerie” experience happened Oct. 18 when she woke up at 5 a.m. feeling a strange “fluttering” sensation in her right ear, according to People.
At first, Kelly thought the feeling was caused by a tassel on her bed’s comforter, and went to back to sleep. When she awakened again, she considered going to a local urgent care. She said she “almost talked myself out of going because I was like, ‘Oh, it’s all in my head. It was 5 a.m. I was tired.’”
But after her fiancé begged her to have her ear checked, Kelly went to the clinic.
“I’m sitting in the waiting room, and that’s when I felt it move again. It was painful. It felt like something was at the base of my eardrum. In that moment, I was convinced it was wax,” Kelly said. “And then I started crying, one, because it was uncomfortable, but two, I felt embarrassed that now they’re going to look in my ear, tell me it’s wax, tell me to clean my ear out, send me home, and I’m going to get a bill in the mail.”
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, a nurse noticed something in Kelly’s right ear and told her it definitely wasn’t a moth.
“I didn’t even think about it being a moth!” Kelly said. “And [the nurse] goes, ‘It’s curled up in the back.’ And that’s when the fear started to set in.”
The nurse treated Kelly’s ear by irrigating it with water and letting it drain in a bowl under her ear.
“We’re dumping the bowl and we’re dumping, we probably dumped it three times,” Kelly said. “And then she goes over to the sink to refill the water. And while she’s refilling the water bottle, I feel it moving at the back of my ear. And she’s rushing back over and telling me, ‘Put the bowl up to your ear!’”
Kelly said she saw a black object fall out of her ear onto her sweater, which made the nurse step back for a second. Then the nurse started to grab at Kelly’s hoodie.
“I watch something jump from my shoulder to the ground. And then I watch it crawl. And that is when I realized it was a spider and that it was alive,” Kelly said. “I was looking at a live spider, and it wasn’t small. I would say it was about the size of a nickel.”
A video of Kelly’s reaction to the incident quickly went viral on TikTok.
Kelly said the incident was so traumatic that the nurses “had to give me a bag to throw up in because I was gagging.”
Luckily for Kelly, there was no damage to her eardrum and no medication was needed to stop an infection. In addition, her ear was free of spider parts and eggs, or, as she told Fox News, “extra buddies.”
In a follow-up TikTok, Kelly said the invader was a jumping spider, which are fairly common ― but the experience has affected her in an uncommon way, she told Fox News.
“Every night since that night, I have had earplugs in my ears. I don’t think I could ever sleep without earplugs again,” she said. “That is the most uneasy, violating feeling ever to quite literally feel a spider crawl out of your ear.”
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