Man Accidentally Unleashes 250 Crickets In His House And People Are In Tears With Laughter
When I was a child growing up in rural Australia, there was one summer that was particularly memorable. A biblical plague of insects took over our small town, at one stage swarming so busily that a single air-swipe with a tennis racket left the strings oozing with smelly cricket carcasses. My friend and I would catch as many as we could and feed them to the blue-tongued lizards living around our houses, hoping that if we fed them enough we could make them grow into Godzilla-like creatures that we could take to school and scare our classmates with.
Sadly, they simply got fat and lazy. But boy did they love eating those crickets! So when Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham and his family adopted a young bearded dragon lizard recently, the first thing he did was make a bulk order for live crickets. The crickets soon arrived by FedEx, and a mixture of Christopher’s naivety and inexperience combined to unleash his own personal plague on the family house, leaving his wife in despair and his Twitter followers in tears of laughter. Scroll down below to read the chaotic cricket catastrophe below, and let us know what you think in the comments!
Image credits: jalexartis
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: _cingraham
“This was a conundrum. There was no immediate way for me to transfer 250 clearly active and ravenously hungry crickets from the box to the shallow plastic container we store them in at home. The only solution would be to grab a spare fish tank we had out in the shed, which would take a bit of time, requiring a trip outside in the deep snow and chilling cold. Back at my desk, after all, I had a nearly finished story that was due to my editor. Rather than upend my workday for the sake of $11.50 worth of Internet crickets, I decided to retape the box and store it in a secure location until I had time to deal with it”
Image credits: _cingraham
“Besides my wife, Briana, and I, our house is home to 5-year-old twins, a 1-year-old, three large cats, one beagle-basset mix and one lizard. There was only one place where I thought I could put the cricket box without it getting overturned or split open by a child or an animal: the bathroom adjacent to our kitchen. I put the crickets in the cabinet above the toilet and went back to work. For about 20 minutes, everything was quiet”
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: fotologic
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: _cingraham
Image credits: Christopher Ingraham
“Our dragon, whom we named Holly, eats a lot, and the thing she loves to eat most is crickets (typically about 10 a day, in addition to other things like mealworms and vegetables). Briana later told me that she first realized something was terribly wrong when one of the cats suddenly leaped on to a pumpkin pie that had been warming on the countertop. It was going after an unusually large cricket that was munching the filling. I’m happy to report that as of Saturday afternoon, I am alive. The lizard is well-fed. The cats are sleeping deeply. The Ingraham household is finally still. But something’s chirping in the bathroom”
People loved the story:
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Here’s what people had to say about the hilarious incident
I have a similar cricket related tale. We kept a tarantula, who lived on the things. We had a secure container of crickets. However, when going on holiday for a week we thought it was kindest to let them loose outside rather than leaving them to starve, assuming they wouldnt survive the cool evenings - wrongly. We returned to find there had been an unexpected heatwave and the crickets had thrived and multiplied, infesting a dozen or so adjacent gardens.they were driving the neighbours mad with the noise at night (Crickets are not native in the UK). We kept very quiet as to where this unnatural plague had come from.
Fast forward ten years to documentaries about the deforestation of Britain and construction of cricket proof fence, like Australian rabbit fence or they bring in lizard predators that adapt to "island life" mutate, become Godzilla size and attack buckingham palace. Meanwhile, you all just keep whistling and looking the other way!
Load More Replies...I say - I don't like cricket oh no... I love it. Nice one Chris Pitch!
Load More Replies...my horrible cricket story - had a box of a thousand that I emptied into a large garbage can. This has always worked - until I got a new cat. When I wasn't looking, said cat jumped up on the garbage, knocking it over. I heard the crash, but by the time I got to the can, about half of them had gotten out. I lived in a very old apartment which had odd little holes in the corners of the closets. The can was near the hall closet, so most of them headed in their since it was dark. I don't know how many escaped into the holes, but the neighbors flipped. Of course I didn't mention that I had 6 lizards, and a dozen frogs, and played dumb when the rental office started phoning around asking who had lizards. We were finding crickets for months.
Oh dear - nightmare to find the damm things . luckily it went cool round our area a couple of weeks later and they shut up
Load More Replies...Ah yes. Reminds me of when I was a kid and spent a whole day at my grandma's catching roughly 30 grasshoppers, intending to keep them as pets. I go back in for dinner and leave the grasshopper box in my room. Somewhat later, while I'm watching cartoons on tv, my grandma starts yelling. Apparently, I had forgotten to close the lid properly... Also, my dad did exactly the same thing to his grandma when he was little, only with a box of snails...
Moisten cloth towels, and wring them out. Roll them up loosely and lay them against the baseboards in the rooms where you know crickets are, leave them overnight. In the morning, the crickets will be under the towels.
Now I understand why my husband says, “Just because somethings on sale doesn’t mean that we need it.”
They where not in a sealed container? The senders must have thought that was a good prank, but that's just not cricket!
My very smart, very organised best friend was slightly flustered in her first week at her new job and accidentally left the lid loose on one if the cricket containers at the end of the day. The next morning she came in to find it empty and not a cricket in site. The had all successfully escaped, gotten into the vent system and migrated overnight. Three years later, when she moved onto another job, the company STILL had a cricket infestation 😄😄 Oops!
as a previous reptile owner, i can sympathize with his story. mostly, i can laugh & cringe, because whether it's crickets or mice or meal worms, etc, most reptile owners have a similar story at least ONCE! and it's always easy to laugh at when it's over...
cringiest ever story is when the pet shop ran our of little mice - for the 4ft great plains - and I was reduced to quartering a (very dead and defrosted) rat - the boa food - into a manageable size for the ratsnake. That chopping board never got used again. worse than school science class
Load More Replies...There's a simple solution - get a duck. I have a duckling that hatched in an incubator just before Christmas and yesterday I bought a small containerful of crickets as a treat. The little beastie LOVES them, and since it figured out where they were housed it frantically runs around the house looking everywhere for any that may have escaped the box. Of course duck poop is the price of admission...
Once I had a similar issue. I thought our cricket eggs will hatch the next day so I left the nest freely beside the heater. Well, they were born around midnight. IU realised the catastrophy when one lil' bastard came into my mouth while sleeping. One thing to mention - crickets in a closed room are louder at night than a Jumbo jet...
It pisses me off that people think that living creatures are just any old materials for their own selfish needs. It disgusts me that they are sold and posted in boxes, like it's of no consequence.
Thank goodness my husband never pulled anything like this!! I have an absolute hatred of crickets in the house (outside I don't care). I have gone on midnight cricket hunts because one is chirping just enough to keep me awake. My family knows better, lol.
And the second you turn out the lights, you'll "find" the ones you missed before.
This could be a great commercial about something,i don't know,but it's hilarious.
those sticky traps for mice...don't work that well with mice..but work fantastic with crickets. since we had 100 crickets escape as well....lol. i did enjoy this story
Years ago the seniors at my high school released over 2000 crickets in the school as a prank. We were finding cricketsin the oddest places for about 2 weeks😂
I have a similar cricket related tale. We kept a tarantula, who lived on the things. We had a secure container of crickets. However, when going on holiday for a week we thought it was kindest to let them loose outside rather than leaving them to starve, assuming they wouldnt survive the cool evenings - wrongly. We returned to find there had been an unexpected heatwave and the crickets had thrived and multiplied, infesting a dozen or so adjacent gardens.they were driving the neighbours mad with the noise at night (Crickets are not native in the UK). We kept very quiet as to where this unnatural plague had come from.
Fast forward ten years to documentaries about the deforestation of Britain and construction of cricket proof fence, like Australian rabbit fence or they bring in lizard predators that adapt to "island life" mutate, become Godzilla size and attack buckingham palace. Meanwhile, you all just keep whistling and looking the other way!
Load More Replies...I say - I don't like cricket oh no... I love it. Nice one Chris Pitch!
Load More Replies...my horrible cricket story - had a box of a thousand that I emptied into a large garbage can. This has always worked - until I got a new cat. When I wasn't looking, said cat jumped up on the garbage, knocking it over. I heard the crash, but by the time I got to the can, about half of them had gotten out. I lived in a very old apartment which had odd little holes in the corners of the closets. The can was near the hall closet, so most of them headed in their since it was dark. I don't know how many escaped into the holes, but the neighbors flipped. Of course I didn't mention that I had 6 lizards, and a dozen frogs, and played dumb when the rental office started phoning around asking who had lizards. We were finding crickets for months.
Oh dear - nightmare to find the damm things . luckily it went cool round our area a couple of weeks later and they shut up
Load More Replies...Ah yes. Reminds me of when I was a kid and spent a whole day at my grandma's catching roughly 30 grasshoppers, intending to keep them as pets. I go back in for dinner and leave the grasshopper box in my room. Somewhat later, while I'm watching cartoons on tv, my grandma starts yelling. Apparently, I had forgotten to close the lid properly... Also, my dad did exactly the same thing to his grandma when he was little, only with a box of snails...
Moisten cloth towels, and wring them out. Roll them up loosely and lay them against the baseboards in the rooms where you know crickets are, leave them overnight. In the morning, the crickets will be under the towels.
Now I understand why my husband says, “Just because somethings on sale doesn’t mean that we need it.”
They where not in a sealed container? The senders must have thought that was a good prank, but that's just not cricket!
My very smart, very organised best friend was slightly flustered in her first week at her new job and accidentally left the lid loose on one if the cricket containers at the end of the day. The next morning she came in to find it empty and not a cricket in site. The had all successfully escaped, gotten into the vent system and migrated overnight. Three years later, when she moved onto another job, the company STILL had a cricket infestation 😄😄 Oops!
as a previous reptile owner, i can sympathize with his story. mostly, i can laugh & cringe, because whether it's crickets or mice or meal worms, etc, most reptile owners have a similar story at least ONCE! and it's always easy to laugh at when it's over...
cringiest ever story is when the pet shop ran our of little mice - for the 4ft great plains - and I was reduced to quartering a (very dead and defrosted) rat - the boa food - into a manageable size for the ratsnake. That chopping board never got used again. worse than school science class
Load More Replies...There's a simple solution - get a duck. I have a duckling that hatched in an incubator just before Christmas and yesterday I bought a small containerful of crickets as a treat. The little beastie LOVES them, and since it figured out where they were housed it frantically runs around the house looking everywhere for any that may have escaped the box. Of course duck poop is the price of admission...
Once I had a similar issue. I thought our cricket eggs will hatch the next day so I left the nest freely beside the heater. Well, they were born around midnight. IU realised the catastrophy when one lil' bastard came into my mouth while sleeping. One thing to mention - crickets in a closed room are louder at night than a Jumbo jet...
It pisses me off that people think that living creatures are just any old materials for their own selfish needs. It disgusts me that they are sold and posted in boxes, like it's of no consequence.
Thank goodness my husband never pulled anything like this!! I have an absolute hatred of crickets in the house (outside I don't care). I have gone on midnight cricket hunts because one is chirping just enough to keep me awake. My family knows better, lol.
And the second you turn out the lights, you'll "find" the ones you missed before.
This could be a great commercial about something,i don't know,but it's hilarious.
those sticky traps for mice...don't work that well with mice..but work fantastic with crickets. since we had 100 crickets escape as well....lol. i did enjoy this story
Years ago the seniors at my high school released over 2000 crickets in the school as a prank. We were finding cricketsin the oddest places for about 2 weeks😂
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