This is why you shouldn't leave strange organic matter in your car

Kill it with fire

What would you do if you found a chunk of mysterious matter lying on your doorstep?

This was the disturbing dilemma recently facing Kelly Quirino (tweeting as @keplyq) when she discovered a "mysterious root" outside her house.

The weird... thing...was massive, about “the length of her forearm”, and looked like it was rotting from within.

Would you be tempted to pick something like that up and investigate? Kelly did. What could possibly go wrong?

Kelly shared the photograph with her Twitter followers, before describing the absolute horror that ensued.

“It took me about eight seconds to become completely obsessed with it,” she wrote. “What IS it?? Animal? Vegetable? Mineral? Alien womb? Why is it full of all those sticks??? Is it a curse? A blessing? I mean. Duh. I knew it was a curse.”

She added that she then “picked it up, shook it, banged it against the step a bit” to see if it would make a noise, but nothing happened – although it was “oddly… squishy” and “warm”.

Here is what happened next. Brace yourselves.

It turns out that the thing had hatched "hundreds of horrible, tiny" worms, "squeezing into the backseat from my trunk...They had chewed through their bag."

Grim. Grim grim grim.

Surprisingly, she didn’t set her car on fire.

Instead she – quite bravely – grabbed the nest and flung it out of the car, before calling her husband to come and help deal with the worms.

But even now – two weeks later – she still finds the odd worm in her car.

*Shudder*

As you can imagine, people were not into the worm plague.

Turns out Kelly isn’t the only person to have discovered an unpleasant secret lurking in a vehicle.

One Twitter user, going by the name Dogged Hots, shared this horrifying experience.

Another, Chelsea Joyce, wrote that she had “hundreds of little spiders appear in her car overnight” – which crawled out when she “accidentally disturbed the ‘nest’/web" while driving.

But the prize goes to Andrew Power, who posted this photo of bees on his office window.

Others have tried to identify the terrifying creatures that infested Kelly's car.

The Bug Chicks, two entomologists, external who host a podcast about insects, wrote that the ‘worms’ are in fact dermestid carpet beetle larvae, external.

“They are used in museums to clean hides and skeletons,” they wrote. “Putting that gourd thing in the plastic bag in the car likely sped up their life cycle.”

TV scientist Kyle Hill agreed, writing: “Looks like you got carpet beetles.”

Whatever the creatures are, they’ve clearly come from the depths of hell.

Let this be a lesson to all of us not to keep strange organic matter in our cars.

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