Chigger Lies
Chiggers do not bore into your skin. They take a bite, and leave.
After explaining something, I’ll get feedback from readers right away. Typically, I don’t like to respond until the next day, just to keep a healthy rhythm going.
This allows a group of responses to form, so I can step back into the thing I wrote 24 hours ago or so. Within this group of responses is often a nugget of a new idea I want to write about, and since I’ve written a lot of things, there’s a good chance the new idea dovetails with an older one.
John’s factoid is almost one of those necessary lies we tell to children:
We exaggerate and tell kids that their flesh will melt off if they touch the hot stove. We tell them not to swallow watermelon seeds, or else a watermelon will grow in your stomach. Gum takes seven years to digest. You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.
There are lies we tell kids so that we don’t have to explain uncomfortable things, like how storks bring babies, or how there’s someone watching you all year-round, determining whether you get a reward or not at the end of the year. These lies kick the explanation can down the road a few years, hopefully to a time when the kid is ready for your explanation.
However, the chigger one is really different for me, because I’m pretty confident that every adult I spoke with about chiggers believed the burrowing myth.
If you’re thinking, what’s a chigger?, you’re surely not alone.
If you grew up in the American South like me, you simply had to live with the idea that a critter would burrow under your skin. Then, it would continue to live inside you, under your skin, like some demonic parasite from hell.
You had to live with this idea!
It was terrible. This was the stuff of nightmares for imaginative kids.
If you didn’t grow up in the South or Appalachia, you might not be familiar with these little buggers, nor the folk remedy John’s full comment points to—nail polish remover for kids growing up in the 60s, or a product called Chigarid for 70s/80s kids. Both rely on the same underlying idea: you want to suffocate the little alien demon that’s living under your skin by making it airtight.
If you’re thinking: wait, isn’t skin already airtight?, you’re a lot more astute than I was. This does seem to belie the very idea of this myth, but maybe I imagined that even if I couldn’t breathe through my skin, some kind of terrible critter under there could.
Regardless, this myth persisted in my memory, so when I heard John’s comment about chiggers, I was instantly taken aback. Then I snapped back to 2025—the era where you can find out nearly anything with virtually no effort, and quickly to boot.
Mosquitos bite you and then leave, but I believed that chiggers were notably different. Part of the issue is how tiny these little mites are—while you can see a tick, flea, or mosquito, chiggers are nearly invisible to the naked eye. Still: they leave the flesh buffet just like everyone else.
I have now transcended mortality. Thank you for the recognition.
Andrew, let me tell you a story about chiggers. Way back in 1967 I was 15, a friend and myself got a gig cutting select cut pulp wood for his father. We both grew up way down here in the South with chiggers. A old black man that lived on the land where we were cutting pulpwood told us what to do about the chiggers bites. When you boys take your bath after working in these woods, put two or three caps of bleach in the water while you bathe. As I always shower, so I would take a quick shower then a quick bath with the bleach. Only got a couple of bites while doing this. Now fast forward a few years, was a Scout Master for 20 years and told the parents of our boys about the bleach trick. Some of them thought I was crazy, but the ones that believed me never had a problem with chigger bites after the camping trips.