Did you hear about the deadly Christmas stockings?

It seems there was a very nice elderly woman who lived in neighborhood that had lots of children. Which was good because she loved kids. She gave out the best treats of anyone at Halloween.

So, when word got around that she was going to be giving out Christmas stockings to anyone who wanted one there was a lot of excitement.

For days, children were ringing her doorbell. Especially after school was out for winter vacation. Soon they were coming even from outside the neighborhood. There were all kinds of candies, fresh fruit, nuts and cute little toys in the red-net stockings.

"Each one has a special surprise," she told everyone who came to the door.

But, when several children in the neighborhood became violently ill and rushed to the hospital, the police investigated. They became suspicious of poisoning. But, the first real breakthrough came when one little girl walked into the kitchen where her mother was baking Christmas cookies and asked, "Mommy, what's in my stocking?"

Upon checking, the mother jumped back and dropped the stocking when she saw something move inside the netting. There in the middle of her linoleum floor, from inside the stocking, came crawling out a four-inch black scorpion.

When the police arrived and jarred up the insect, everyone said it was like nothing ever seen in these parts. When a college professor from across the street examined it, he was stunned. His words chilled everyone for several houses around who had all gathered in the front yard by then. It was, he said, a rare and deadly scorpion from South America that only emerges once every 10 years. They hibernate in something that looks like a Brazil nut until they are ready to come out. They are immediately ravenous and will strike to paralyze anything for food. Lots of farm families south of the border are killed every decade when they think they are gathering nuts, only to take home baskets full of hibernating scorpions.

One of the neighbors spoke up saying he heard the little old woman who was giving out the stockings say she had ordered several boxes of them from South America.

Mystery solved, said the officer in charge.

Everyone whose children had the red-net stockings rushed home to tightly bag the holiday treats and toss them out. But by then many toasty warm houses had several of the killer scorpions crawling under furniture, in closets, under bed covers and among ornaments on Christmas trees. Families would be finding them for months to come.

The police rushed to the elderly woman's house to remove the remaining boxes of Christmas stockings. When she didn't answer her door they busted it down. They called out, but no one answered. In her bedroom, on the floor they discovered a long, writhing black mass of scorpions. There was hardly anything left of the woman.

 

Another Urban Legend? Perhaps. Perhaps not.