Irish Woman Finds Scorpion Stowaway After Returning From African Vacation

A resident of Ireland’s County Wicklow discovered she’d accidentally brought home a terrifying souvenir from a trip to Kenya when she saw a scorpion scuttling around her home in early February.

Lorraine Dempsey said she spotted the scorpion 12 days after returning home from her safari trip, and was petrified to see it quickly crawl under a couch in her room. “I first Googled ‘what to do if you find a scorpion in Ireland.’ Needless to say there wasn’t much information,” she told Storyful.

She contacted Ireland’s National Reptile Zoo, which told her how to capture the scorpion. After sending her child to a neighbor’s house and moving her dogs out of her room, she and a group of friends spent the afternoon searching for the creature, armed with “protective gloves and boots.”

Video from Dempsey shows the scorpion after it was eventually captured and put in a plastic container.

She brought the scorpion to the zoo, which identified it as a Fisher’s fat-tail scorpion. “I nicknamed the scorpion Kenny, and he is already looking much healthier and happier in his new home in the venomous unit of the National Reptile Zoo,” she told Storyful. “However, they now think Kenny may be a female and pregnant!” Credit: Lorraine Dempsey via Storyful

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