Fear and Centipedes in Las Vegas, New Mexico - Crazy Folklore From the Past

The desert is a peculiar mistress. She offers beauty that steals the breath and danger that stops the heart. New Mexico, my home, is no exception. It’s a land where legends and reality often blur, where the line between truth and myth is drawn with a shaky hand. It's a place where old women swear centipedes crawl under your fingernails and eat your heart. It's not just a story whispered to frighten children but a genuine belief held with the fervor of religious conviction. Old New Mexican women of Spanish extraction will scream in horror at the sight of a centipede, not merely for their swift-moving many-legged terror, but because these women honestly think that the bugs are deadly, murderous creatures.

In the arid sun beaten expanses of New Mexico, I remember my own grandmother, a woman of strange, deep-set, and often confused beliefs, who would warn us against these nightmarish creatures. Rollie-pollies (pill bugs) she would say, were the same as centipedes. Now it is generally known that rollie-pollies are harmless crustaceans, going by the scientific name Armadillidiidae, and that they are as far removed from centipedes as a housecat is from a lion. Yet to my grandmother, the sight of children playing among rollie-pollies absolutely evoked the same horror as finding them in the clutches of a python. Rollie-pollies were centipedes, and centipedes, she asserted, will burrow under your fingernails and craw into your body where they will eat your heart. (Death is then implied.)

These stories are more than mere legends told to scare children. I recall when I was but a wee goth in middle school, the occasion of a substitute teacher killing time by regaling us all with the very touching story of an incident whereat she had a live centipede removed from her ankle, an operation performed by what she claimed was a totally sane medical doctor. (And folks wonder why New Mexico ranks so poorly in education...)

To the scientifically minded, this of course seems absurd. Centipedes, after all, are not parasitic. They are arthropods, hunters of insects, spiders, and even small vertebrates, but they do not seek human flesh for sustenance much less burrow inside of it to live. So where does this nightmarish myth come from? What lies beneath the fingernails of New Mexico's collective unconscious?

Now, it’s worth noting that these superstitious old ladies and grandmothers were born in the 1930s or so, a time when modern medicine was already taking hold. Penicillin had been discovered, vaccines were proliferating, and Atomic bombs were being tested in the nearby desert. But even in the face of all these scientific strides, certain fears and misconceptions persisted, passed down as folklore through generations, like heirlooms of horror.

To unravel this mystery, one must delve into the psyche of the desert dweller. The centipede is indeed a creature that inspires fear. But the description of a centipede as a parasitic entity that burrows under the skin doesn't align with any scientific understanding. 

However, just as the rollie-pollie is not a centipede, maybe another misidentification is the culprit behind this myth? 

My own nomination for the parasitic predator is the larva of the screwworm fly. Screwworms, or Cochliomyia hominivorax, are true parasites. The female fly lays her eggs in open wounds of warm-blooded animals, and the larvae burrow into flesh, causing severe damage and sometimes death. They look as similar to centipedes as do rollie-pollies; and while today they've largely been eradicated in New Mexico, they were formerly a known pest in the region.

I once sought to get to the bottom of this mystery by asking my old grandmother what the actual word for centipedes had been in the local Spanish. I hoped she might give me a dialectal word with a more diverse meaning; but, alas, she just gave Mexican Spanish ciempiés, a word she admitted she'd learned much later in life from watching Mexican television. I couldn't get her to reveal what the older word had been -- it is not impossible that the old folks just used the English word, at the time, even if they were otherwise speaking in Spanish. My father, meanwhile, half-recalled a word centipiés but he admitted he was less than sure about its use. A mid-19th century Spanish dictionary offers up cientopiés, as well as considering that the cucaracha is a type of centipede.

The story of the parasitic centipede is more than just a tale of mistaken identity; it’s a reflection of human vulnerability and the need to explain the inexplicable. In a land where life clings precariously to the edge of survival, every shadow can harbor danger, and every creature can become a monster. The centipede myth is a testament to the strength of belief and the ways in which our minds weave reality from threads of fear and misunderstanding. It’s a reminder that the legends of our ancestors, no matter how fantastical, are rooted in the very real experiences of a harsh and unforgiving world. As the sun sets over the desert, casting long shadows that dance like specters on the horizon, one can't help but ponder the power of myth. 

In the end, the desert holds its secrets close, and the truth of the centipede myth remains as elusive as the horizon. But as we gaze into the vastness of New Mexico's wilderness, we can find solace in knowing that even the most terrifying legends are born from the same place as our dreams: the boundless, unpredictable depths of the human mind.