Snopes wrote:[Collected via e-mail, 2001]A girl has just started having sex with her ex-partner again. After a few days she starts feeling itchy in her privates. Se goes to the doctor's thinking she must of caught a sd off her ex. The doctor examines her and tells her he will have to phone the police. She is in shock and asks why. The doctor replies that she has maggots inside her vagina and the only way that can happen is if she or her partner is having sex with dead people too which she replies her ex works in the morgue.
[Collected via e-mail, 2002]A friend of mine essentially told me the following story. He says he knows a girl whose sister is a real slut. She's at a party and meets a guy, and winds up giving the guy a blowjob. They part ways. Two days later, she's developed a rash around her mouth. She goes to the doctor and he takes some samples and tells her to find the guy. She goes back to the house where the party took place, and the guy who lives there tells her her boy's at work, and gives her the address. When she gets there she sees he works at a funeral parlor, but there's a big funeral going on, so she decides she'll contct him later. That night she gets a call from her doctor. He tells her that the rash is caused by a kind of louse that is most commonly found in the bodies of the recently deceased. When she goes to confront the necrophiliac the next day, she is told that he has died of an untreatable parasitic infection.
[Collected via e-mail, 2003]A young girl from central London went to visit her doctor regarding a genital rash. The doctors were unsure of the cause so took routine swabs and blood samples for testing. She was recalled the following week and asked to repeat the tests. She was concerned that the doctors had become increasingly coy about the whole mater and that she was asked not to talk to anyone else about it.
She was later stunned when the police arrived on her doorstep asking questions regarding her sex life.
It turns out that a bacteria has been found that only occurs on dead bodies. It was later discovered that her boyfriend, who worked at the local underatakers had been "overly-friendly" with his "customers" and passed the infection onto her. Her boyfriend was subsequently jailed.
Variations:- The nature of the infestation varies to include maggots, worms, body lice, or an unspecified bacteria.
- Some versions make it abundantly clear the girl could not have picked up this infestation from anyone else by presenting her as a virgin.
Origins:Every society has its taboos, and engaging in sexual acts with the dead is one of our big ones. It seems only fitting that disgusting acts should carry their own penalty, something that repays the perpetrator for his perfidy. The notion of such contacts leaving the deviant's genitals crawling with maggots satisfies our urge to see justice in kind.
Yet this legend is an expression of misdirected retribution because it is the necrophiliac's next living partner who ends up with the infestation. Sexual juvenilia is rife with tales of icky punishments visited upon those who engage in kinky practices, but this particular legend stands out because the one suffers the consequence is the innocent party. Unlike the gal in the Mayo Clinic legend, whose creative use of tuna during oral sex results in a vaginal infestation of maggots, the young lady in this story pays a horrifying price for her partner's misdeeds, not her own. Her boyfriend's disgusting secret comes to light in an awful fashion: The gal is left not only with horrifying knowledge of someone she previously trusted, but with the tangible (and wriggling) mementos of his act.
Could such a scenario play out in real life? No. Despite what some versions of this legend would have you believe, there is no special "corpse worm" whose presence on the living would immediately announce close contact with the dead. That flourish is part of the legend because through it the disillusioned girlfriend comes to find out what her boyfriend has been up to. Without this contrived plot device, she would not otherwise discover his indulgence in necrophilia.
The "worms" we associate with death aren't worms at all; they're ordinary maggots, which themselves are the larvae of flies. (Earthworms are entirely innocent of the rap that's been hung on them; they have little interest in dead bodies even though what could have been their dinner is delivered to them through our practice of burying the dead.) Flies are attracted to the smell of decomposition, and after feasting herself, Mama Fly will happily lay her eggs on any fine food sources she encounters to give her young ones the best possible start in the world. Those eggs hatch out as maggots and immediately set to doing what all young ones do, which is eat. Hence, corpses wriggling with "worms."
Though we associate worms with corpses (thanks, in part, to macabre schoolchild chants featuring lines such as "The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out . . ."), deceased humans do not magically erupt with such critters; they have to come into contact with a pregnant fly. There are few opportunities for this in a morgue or the embalming room of a funeral home.
If the boyfriend had been having sex with the inhabitants of a morgue, he wouldn't have come into contact with maggots. The story also flunks the logic test both with his failure to notice his penis crawling with "worms" and with his (living) girlfriend's failure to notice anything amiss with his equipment.
If we divorce ourselves from the ickier aspects of this legend (which isn't easy with a story built around maggots, vaginal infestations, and necrophilia), we can see this as a cautionary tale about how we never truly know the one we love, expressive of our misgivings about what our partners might be keeping hidden from us.
