Urban Legend True: Scorpion Stings Wal-Mart Shopper

Everyone thinks they are merely urban legends. You know the ones about the tarantula in the grapes and the scorpion in the bananas? Well, sometimes they are based in reality.

The Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia, reported on May 26, 2008, that a scorpion stung a girl at one of the state’s Wal-Marts.

A family shopping for Memorial Day food on Sunday afternoon at the Barboursville (West Virginia) Wal-Mart ended up in the hospital after their daughter was stung by a scorpion.

Megan Templeton was in the produce department picking out a seedless watermelon when she was stung. The scorpion, it is theorized, got into the crate when it was shipped from Mexico.

The scorpion, said her father William Templeton, stung her finger. She was taken to Cabell Huntington Hospital to be monitored for any allergic reaction.

The store manager caught the scorpion, which was a tan, inch-long example of an unidentified species.

The Associated Press later noted that most of the nearly 2,000 kinds of scorpions are not dangerous to humans.

Richard Coyle, senior director of international affairs for Wal-Mart, said store employees believe the problem was with a single shipment of watermelons.

“We are very concerned,” he said. “This is a very rare incident. When I spoke with the store manager, she said in her 17 years she had never heard of something like this.”

I would imagine for our West Virginia readers, you may wish to check to see if seedless watermelons are on sale at the state’s Wal-Marts in the next few days.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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