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In June 2010, the Malta Independent reported on a gruesome tale which had recently been sweeping that island: This salacious mortuary rumor was just another iteration of a years-old urban legend, one which we originally wrote about back in 2001 and has been expressed in many forms: 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 girl 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. Versions of this legend that circulated in April 2009 were set in typical Spring Break locales (e.g., Jamaica, Florida) and changed the nature of the dark secret from necrophilia to cannibalism: Unsuspecting girls come down with puzzling medical conditions (e.g., fungi, lesions, sores) developed from having intimate contact with young men who don't merely have sex with corpses, but who actually eat them — the legend thereby intimating that these girls risked not just their health but their very lives through their injudicious flirting: If we divorce ourselves from the ickier aspects of this legend (which isn't easy with a story built around maggots, vaginal infestations, necrophilia, and cannibalism), we can see this as a cautionary tale about the dangers of incautious intimacy with those we don't know well, perhaps more broadly expressive of our misgivings about what even our long-term partners might be keeping hidden from us. Variations:
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