Not ’‘scary’’ per se, but it disturbed me. :/
When I was little I loved insects, and they were a passion of mine. I read books about them, drew pictures, and of course, I went out and caught them. One of my favorite things to do was to catch caterpillars and have them turn into butterflies. I’d use a salad bowl, fill it with dirt and put in leaves that whatever caterpillar I captured ate, if I managed to locate them. (although most caterpilars won’t eat withering leaves) Then you put a noodle strainer on top so they can’t escape. This particular incident included the Mourning Cloack butterfly, but the caterpillars never hung out on any plant. They were always on buildings and stuff. Still, it worked, and they often turned into butterflies. The transformation takes about a week and a half…but sometimes I got caterpillars that some predatory insect got to first, so instead of a butterfly, I got a shitload of small fly like bugs, or a wasp.
But the worse thing was…I usually had more than one Mourning Cloak caterpillar in the salad bowl. Once, two caterpillars made their cocoon next to one another. So close that both cocoons were like merged together, forming one big fucked up cocoon. When the butterflies emerged, they were stuck together, like a Siamese twin. It was freaky, it had like five wings, malformed antennas and like nine legs and the body was really fat. After it was done drying its wings, I let it go as was my custom, but the damn thing flew all crooked, smacked into a wall and fell. It couldn’t really do anything, and I remember feeling pretty disturbed. It flew around a little bit but always just kind of tumbled to the ground. I killed it, and not that it was gonna do better out in nature, anyway.
A friend and I also got attacked by a wasp’s nest, but that’s another story.