Escalating Danger in Contemporary Legends

In these last two examples, the eggs are there, growing in the victim's body, but at least they can be removed. Note yet a further development:

A friend that I worked with . . . told me that her sister's friend went to Taco Bell. At the time she had a canker sore in her mouth. The day after she ate Taco Bell, her canker sore really started to hurt her. She went to the doctor because it was so irritated. When the doctor looked at her sore, he told her that she had cockroach eggs in it. Apparently, the Taco Bell she ate had cockroach eggs in it and they managed to get into her sore. To make matters worse, cockroach eggs have apoison in them. If they were moved they would [emit] this poison, which would kill the girl. The doctor told her, the only thing she could do was let them hatch; otherwise she would die from their poison (Fall 2000).

The possibility of removal no longer exists, and the woman has no choice but to serve as an incubator to the cockroach eggs. At this point, the relatively smooth progression ends, and further developments, while still escalatingly gross, follow several strands, involving either poison or incubation. One logical progression would be to see what results from the roaches' poisonousness:

This one Taco Bell had roach eggs in their food. A girl ended up eating it, and it made her, gyah, unbearably sick, almost killed her. I don't think there was any lawsuit or anything like that, but she went to the doctor, and he ran a check on her . . . something. I think it was her vomit; she'd been throwing up. Anyway, it was nasty (Spring 2002).

Just off I-75, right after you get into Florida, there's this Taco Bell where a girl died. She ate this taco, and she got really sick and died. When they did the autopsy, they found roach eggs in her stomach. Some of them got into her bloodstream and gave her an aneurism [sic]. The story was all in the newspaper, so the Taco Bell had to close down and get cleaned and everything, but two weeks later it was opened right back up. It's still in business because mostly tourists and travelers go there since it's where it is, and they don't know about the girl and the roaches (Spring 2002).

Although the birth of fully formed, live roaches from the eggs ingested at Taco Bell would seem a logical development, that strand took several more steps to develop. The legend first edged closer to it, going from eggs to larvae:

We were in school one day and someone was talking about leaving during lunch to get some food and Taco Bell was suggested as the choice of the day. Someone in the group . . . piped up and said "Oh! no! didn't you hear? some girl from [another] school went there a few months ago, and then she got sick and went to the doctor, and it turns out there were roach eggs in the refried beans and her mouth was full of larvae." Well, needless to say! we didn't eat there that day! And to this day I have not gone to a single Taco Bell and eaten (Spring 2002).

Until recently, full-fledged roaches growing in the victim's mouth are depicted as resulting not from eating at Taco Bell but from licking the seal of an envelope. For example, in one case, the woman has cut her tongue licking an envelope: