True story? I think not. The separate accounts you have just read, the first set in Virginia and the second set clear across the country in California, arrived in my inbox five days apart (and more have arrived since). They are variants of the same urban legend. The urban legend is false.
A cockroach primer
Consider this. A pregnant cockroach carries her eggs in a hard capsule called an ootheca, in which they incubate, intact, until the larvae (or "nymphs") hatch, bursting the capsule open from the inside. The eggs themselves are tiny and delicate, and couldn't survive at all outside the ootheca, let alone flourish within the body of a mammalian host. It would be highly improbable, is what I'm saying, to find viable cockroach eggs strewn about on random surfaces — least of all on the folded flap of an envelope.
Consider, too, the logical inconsistencies in the story. How is it that when the victim visited her doctor the first time, reporting a paper cut and showing visible signs of "abnormal swelling," he found "nothing wrong"? And what was the point, during the second doctor visit, of x-raying the poor woman's tongue? The "lump" allegedly detected by the x-ray was already in plain sight.
Errant insects
Infestation legends derive from and play on people's horror of insects. The subtype in which "creepy crawlers" invade the human body provoke an especially visceral response and are particularly popular for that reason. "Roach Eggs on Envelopes" is very similar to the 1998-vintage "Roach Eggs in Tacos" legend, wherein cockroach larvae ingested in a fast food restaurant purportedly incubated in the lining of the victim's mouth.
In a general way, both stories resemble "The Spider Bite," an older legend about a traveler in a foreign country who discovers a seemingly innocuous insect bite on her body after an outing:
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...She goes to her doctor, but he says that he can see nothing suspicious and that she should not worry. And then one day, while brushing her hair — not blow-drying — her brush accidentally touches the spot and the sore bursts open and hundreds of tiny spiders are running all over her.
It's not as if wayward insects never, ever find their way into crevices of the human body — they sometimes do, to the horror not only of the victim but of anyone who happens to hear the tale. But the bulk of infestation legends are just that: legends. They are concocted out of the teeniest, tiniest grains of truth, a generous sprinkling of latent dread, and a heaping helping of imagination. It's hard to resist sharing them with the ones you love.
Reuters ran a news story a few years back about a British woman who complained to her doctor of a headache and "strange noises in her ear." On examining her, the doctor found a large spider lodged next to her eardrum.
"The doctor removed the spider with a syringe," the article continued, "but also raised an unsavory possibility — that the arachnid was a female intent on laying eggs."
No spider eggs were found during the examination, however. So, why raise the "unsavory possibility" at all?
'Tis obvious: to make a good story just that much better.
