Everyone is saying they’re harmless, but we read house centipedes cam leave painful bites. I’ve never been bitten, that I know of, but when plagued with centipedes, I’d sometimes wake up with one of two types of mysterious bug bites: itchy, and painful. I know from prior experience that most North American spider bites are only ever itchy, so I always put the painful ones down to house centipedes. I can’t prove it, though. Here are the facts I do know about house centipedes, from empiricle evidence:

• They like damp. You’ll find them in damp spots, drains, around toilets, around damp areas in basements, etc. Not exclusively, but predominantly.
• They wage a secret war with spiders. Sometimes the spider wins, but usually the centipede does unless it gets trapped by a web.
• Alive, they move like the wind. Shockingly, alarmingly fast.
• When smacked, they explode into air and legs. So many legs, and not much else.
• Despite reports that they control other bugs, they are useless against real nuisance bugs like soldier and stink bugs. And for fly control, spiders do a better job. The only real thing we ever saw centipedes hunting were spiders.
• Small glue traps work really well at controlling them. I caution against large glue traps, as they might catch small rodentia, and if you want to know true horror, find a YouTube video of a mouse caught in a glue trap.

I’m team spider.

It’s a common house centipede.

Generally good critters. They do bite though.

I think that’s the bug they put in Neo in the first Matrix film