I’ve grown accustomed to waking to the sounds of ladybugs in my room. the way their wings sound and the tinking noises as they land in the light fixture hanging from the middle of the ceiling.
When Meghan and I moved here a year ago it was impossible to miss the multitude of ladybirds on the window sill of my room, climbing up the walls, or decaying slowly to dust in the corners of the room, crumbs of the previous tenants as their pillows. Over this time here I’ve come to find these beetles in my bed, on my person, or even in the pockets of my swimming shorts at the pool.
Myth says many things about these little creatures and you’d be hard pressed to find someone that has distaste for the bug. Some think that the number of spots of their backs can tell a great deal about the future, from the number of children one may have to the direction that one’s true love will approach them from. Although I’ve always been a sap for myths and fiction I’m truly beginning to think that there is something supernatural about them indeed.
I’ve been waking in the middle of the night completely racked with fear. Searching with groggy eyes around the darkness I can’t help but feel another’s presence in the room. Am I going mad, or like those who have lived in this room before me, is there something haunted in this place? Are there reasons beyond the south facing windows and the creaky floorboards drawing ladybugs into this place? Are these creatures merely attracted to the warmth of this wintery hideaway or is there something beyond me that I cannot see?
I’m riddled with questions this morning, in search for the reasons why I might be waking in the night with a fear that is only comparable to my late nights in bed after watching Unsolved Mysteries as a child.
I’m riddled with questions this morning, because unlike other mornings, I can no longer hear the wings of the lady beetles, I can no longer hear the sounds that their shells make against the glass.
I am forced to ask myself whether it is the coolness of the season that has driven them away or the lack of love that fills these chilly walls. I wonder if they, as some myths have said, can understand human language and have sensed my confusion over everything.
So perhaps, for a time, not only the ghosts in my room are the dearly departed. Perhaps, in time the ladybugs will come again to haunt me too.
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i was always so scared of unsolved mysteries…the music alone was enough to get me!
My friends house is haunted every year for two days by hundreds of ladybugs. They leave no carcasses and stay only in one room and then only on the walls. They appear suddenly somtime in September or October and then disappear just as suddenly. It was in this room that the previous owners wife died of natural causes. Are the ladybugs somhow connected to her death?
I have heard a lot of folklore that connects ladybugs with the presence of spirits. I have heard that they are both drawn to the energy of spirits and that they actually are representations of the spirits themselves. I tend to believe the former, if either. There is one piece of lore that says, if a ladybug passes through a spirit and the spirit is good, the ladybug will pass unharmed. If it passes through a spirit and the spirit is evil, it will immediately die and drop lifeless. There have been occasions in supposedly haunted locations where a single room is filled with ladybugs. There is one now closed asylum, The Weyburn Mental Hospital, I heard about that has a place called, “The Ladybug Room”. Rumors state that thousands of them fly around the room, hundreds suddenly dropping dead in mid-flight, their corpses littering the floor. I don’t know how this relates to the home where you live, but the idea I am given to believe is, since the ladybugs are alive; it’s a good thing. You need only worry when they start dropping over for no reason that you can see.
For general lore and the terrible truth about the nursery rhyme, try here:
http://www.celticbug.com/Legends/Lore.html