The 10 Most Horrifying Parasites that Infect Humans

Like something out of a horror movie, the idea of a worm crawling across your eye sends chills down your spine, until you realize it’s actually happening. There is a parasitic worm slowly making its way across your eyeball, and you can feel it. In the dead of night, you wake up, in a cold sweat, pitch black and feel a burning sensation on your skin, reaching for the light switch you locate the source of the burning; a festering ulcer on your leg. This is when you realize you have a parasite using your skin as a womb to gestate its young.

Fact is, there are parasites everywhere, in most living matter. The majority of these parasites don’t infect and make hosts of humans, they simply leave us alone and focus on our pets or our livestock instead. There are a select few parasites, however, lurking in the filthy waters, contaminated soil and even in our pets that will gladly make a new home inside our skin, stomachs, eyes and brains, doing everything from merely using us as a vessel for their own means, to outright killing us.

In homage to Halloween and Nick Cutter’s gruesome (and topical) new horror novel The Troop, here are the ten most horrific parasites that infect humans.