As the program manager at Vancouver’s Rio Theatre, Rachel Fox has seen her fair share of horror movies.
Earlier this week, Fox lived through her own scary movie when she was stung by what appears to have been a scorpion while sleeping.
“It was horrifying. It was like a Cronenberg creature,” Fox said, referring to the Canadian-born horror director.
In a Facebook post, Fox described waking up early Thursday morning after experiencing a “sharp pain.”
“I thought I had rolled over onto a shard of glass,” Fox said.
“I moved my hand away from my arm and I was very confused because I felt intense pain in my hand and in my arm, which immediately didn’t make any sense.”
She went to the bathroom to examine her wound, then checked out her bed before going to her iPad to see if she could find an explanation for what might have happened.
Then she saw the creature.
“I saw a fluttering,” she said. “I thought it was a feather from a pillow or something like that. And I looked at it and then I slowly moved away from the foot of the bed. As I was at the foot of the bed, this black thing came out from under the pillow and around the top of the pillow and scurried across my beautiful Italian floral sheets.”
She screamed and after a bit of a frenzy, her roommate managed to track the creature down and kill it with the help of a frying pan, a broom and a bottle of Raid.
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The dead creature now rests in a jar on her coffee table.
Dr. Adrian Walton of Dewdney Animal Hospital said the creature appears to be a northern scorpion that can often be found in the Okanagan. But he said it was possible the arachnid “came in…through fresh produce from Mexico or the southern United States.”
He pointed out that there are thousands of species of scorpions but only 25 species are dangerous to humans.
“For the most part they’re completely harmless and they’re a normal part of the natural environment,” he said.
Fox said she has felt no serious long-term side effects from the incident, although her encounter with the scorpion could be something out of a comic book.
“Apparently I’ve been told I have super-powers now, which includes glowing in the dark,” she said.
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