TAMPA,Fla. (WFLA) – There’s no shortage of creepy critters invading our homes this time of year. But when Tampa apartment dweller Christina Tyler recently discovered one armed with two claws and a stinger, that sent her flying. “I’m like ‘oh my gosh, no’. I run out the front door,” said Tyler. The source of Tyler’s fear was a Florida Bark Scorpion that her pre-school son discovered crawling across her kitchen floor in an apartment complex  at 1503 E. Humphrey in Tampa.  Her cousin killed the critter and that was that-or so she thought.

A few days later, Tyler woke up to prepare a bottle for her baby girl when she felt something in the dark run across her feet. Yup, it was another scorpion. This time Tyler jumped straight up onto the kitchen counter before composing herself enough to find a shoe to dispatch the scorpion. This time I’m mad,” said Tyler. “This time I’m ‘ok, this thing has violated me.” The two encounters has so upset Tyler that she won’t let her three children play downstairs in her apartment.

It turns out one of her neighbors in a different building in the same complex had similar encounters. Gwen Patton tells us she’s found four scorpions in her home starting on the day she moved in last August. And like Tyler, she even had a dead one on hand as proof.  USF St. Petersburg biologist Deby Cassill tells us Florida Bark Scorpions usually aren’t fatal and feel much like a bee sting. Cassill insists they are generally shy creatures who hunt cockroaches and termites in the dark moist environments and will only sting a human when provoked.

“In a terrarium I love scorpions,” Cassill said. “In my home, unexpectedly, they’re like disgusting and scary and I’d want to get rid of them.” Tyler insists that several calls to her apartment property managers at Kain Cares went unheeded last week. So Eight On Your Side got involved and asked property manager Oliver Berger about the problem. Berger insists that scorpions are a commonplace problem in Florida and that he regularly dispatches Orkin pest control to deal with them in his various apartment properties. Berger agreed to deal with Tyler’s complaint immediately. “I’ll have pest control go out today because they’re out spraying properties right now,” Berger said.MORE STORIES FROM WFLA.COM