Culture

What It’s Like Being Terrified Of The Humble Grasshopper

Grasshoppers terrify me, and my life is hell.

by Jo Thornely  28 October 2020
grasshopers are scary

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Over Halloween, Junkee has reached out to writers to tell us about the first thing that taught them fear. These are their stories.

Not much fazes me. I seek out stories about the worst people on the planet for entertainment, and watch horror movies regularly. I’m one of those assholes who think having a spider in the house is good for mosquito control. I can stand at the top of a cliff, maintain a sense of casual sass at the dentist, shrug away clowns, and empathise with snakes.

But I am completely, violently, and blood-curdlingly afraid of grasshoppers.

Well, grasshoppers and crickets. Those sudden, crunchy little bastards taught me fear. It took me a while to figure out that grasshoppers don’t make a noise like a screaming human, because that screaming human was me.

Fear means willingly disrupting your life and looking ridiculous in order to avoid being anywhere near what frightens you, without thinking twice, forever. People who are afraid of vomiting (also me) go to sites like Does Someone Vomit to check if movies they want to see are safe. People who are afraid of basking sharks (honestly, this should be everyone) avoid swimming, obviously, in plankton-heavy water in the North Atlantic.

And people who are afraid of grasshoppers sleep on the couch for three days if there’s one in their bedroom. They might even shut the family cat in the room, telling it it’s not allowed to come out until it can prove a successful kill. Or so I hear….

I’ve entered and left my house via the back door and garage for a week because there was a grasshopper near the front door.

I can’t even be near a dead one. If I absolutely have to dispose of one, I’ll put on rubber gloves, find the longest broom I can, whisk it briskly off the premises while swearing loudly, and immediately have a shower.

Even while writing this I’ve put my hair in a topknot, because the end of my ponytail against my neck felt like a grasshopper reading over my shoulder.

My irrational fear is deeply stupid, but feels completely real.

I can only guess at how my fear of grasshoppers developed, but there were certainly plenty around when I was growing up. Our house was right beside a strip of heavily-leafed nature reserve in the suburbs, so there were always small things with four or more legs turning up everywhere. Dad would scoop funnel-web spiders out of the pool, and my brother named probably thousands of those little garden skinks ‘Ben’ because he thought every time he saw one it was the same dude.

I was okay with most of them, but the grasshoppers and crickets seemed to have run a successful campaign of gently relentless surprises that wore me down over time. I mean, is the jumping really necessary? It’s the jumping.

Those nefarious little crumples of hate-filled shards would plop out of the kitchen blinds, dart at me from their entry point on the bedroom windowsill, and worst of all, hide in the clean washing while it was on the clothesline so they could trick me into bringing them inside and folding them into my life for a spot of loathsome terror at an unknown future time.

There, in freshly laundered bedding and clothes, is where grasshoppers made themselves into my mortal enemies. I trusted clean laundry. I did not want or expect tiny parts of it to find their way out of my pillowcase into my hair, or to hitch a ride in my jeans. And do you know what those bitches sometimes do if they feel threatened? If you’re putting on your jeans without knowing a grasshopper has made them its house, it will bite you on the arse. BITE you. On the ARSE.

A short time before we left our childhood home, its warm, comforting memories, and its endless supply of translucent satanic horrors, my sister Shelley was in her car, Eric (she wants you to know the car’s name was Eric) in peak hour traffic. The sun was getting low, so she flipped down the driver’s side sunshade where a grasshopper was hiding and it jumped on her head. It JUMPED. On her HEAD. Mid-flail, she miraculously kept control of her car, and the grasshopper flung itself into the back seat. Somewhere. Shelley had to drive the entire way home knowing there was a grasshopper somewhere in the back of her car. You know how stressed the mother in The Exorcist gets knowing there’s a literal demon in her upstairs bedroom? That, in heavy traffic, for half an hour. There isn’t a stool softener in the world strong enough to recover from that.

So, in my head, grasshoppers grew from mildly startling inconveniences to the sudden fillers of pants, with their crunchy exteriors, menacing antennae, unblinking eyes, and obvious plans to chew through my arteries in the middle of the night.

I KNOW it’s irrational. That’s what makes an irrational fear so frightening: it’s immune to logic.

I was relieved to find out that fear of grasshoppers and crickets is an actual thing, called Orthopterophobia. Finding out that your deathly fear has a name makes you feel less alone, and less like an idiot for losing your goddamn mind whenever you see an insect the size of your pinkie with thighs like an Olympic cyclist plotting your death.

Delightfully, Salvador Dali suffered from both Orthopterophobia and from a deeply jaunty moustache. In his autobiography, he wrote “I am thirty-seven years old, and the fright which grasshoppers cause me has not diminished since my adolescence… If I were on the edge of a precipice and a large grasshopper sprang upon me and fastened itself to my face, I should prefer to fling myself over the edge rather than endure this frightful ‘thing.’”. I get it. I finally get Dali.

Okay, I have to stop. My skin is crawling. There’s probably one watching me.

And YES I’ve seen what a wētā looks like, I do NOT need to see another picture.

‘Zealot: A Book About Cults’ by Jo Thornely is published by Hachette Australia, RRP $32.99. Jo is on Twitter @JoThornely.