12-Yr.-Old Girl Bitten By Scorpion At Wal-Mart
Posted May 27, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It advertises itself as a place where prices are so low, you’re often surprised. But surprise doesn’t even begin to explain what a 12 year-old girl felt as she went shopping with her parents in a Barboursville, West Virginia Wal-Mart on Sunday.
Meagan Templeton was picking up a watermelon from a bin at the store when she felt a sharp pain in her hand. She looked down and was stunned by what she saw – an inch-long scorpion had crawled onto her flesh and stung her as she attempted to get the big fruit into a shopping cart.
“It felt like a staple went through my finger,” the youngster recalls. “I had my hand on the side of the watermelon box and the scorpion crawled up and stung me on the tip of my finger.”
Her father came to her rescue and at first refused to believe her kid’s story. A scorpion – in a West Virginia store?
“She said daddy ‘I just got stung by a scorpion’ and we had just left the movies,” relates William Templeton. “And I thought maybe she saw it in the movie and got stung by a bug or bee. There is no scorpions in West Virginia. (sic)”
But then he saw the brown coloured creature (top left) scurry under a box and knew he had to act fast. The child was taken to hospital as a precaution and later released.
Despite their reputations, most of the nearly 2,000 different kinds of scorpions aren’t considered dangerous to humans. And luckily for Meagan, this one fell into that category. “I thought I was going to get really sick because I thought all scorpions were poisonous,” she admits.
The plucky little girl was treated for an ache said to be like a bee sting but is expected to be fine.
The creepy crawler was later captured by Wal-Mart employees and removed from the store. Employees have been unable to explain its presence but believe it was shipped in with the fruit and was disturbed when the child reached into the bin.
“We are very concerned,” confesses Richard Coyle, the senior director of international affairs for Wal-Mart. “This is a very rare incident. When I spoke with the store manager, she said in her 17 years she had never heard of something like this.”
The chain prides itself on telling shoppers to watch out for falling prices. But until now, falling scorpions have never been part of that guarantee.
