First, let’s clear something up about recent reports of a live cockroach pulled from a woman’s skull. It was technically in her skull, between her eyes—but if you stick your little finger in your ear, that’s technically in your skull too.

More precisely, the roach had crawled into her sinuses. In a video that has gone viral, the roach is seen wriggling through pink flesh and eventually being pulled live from the Indian woman’s sinuses, after entering her nose while she slept.

M.N. Shankar of Stanley Medical College Hospital in Chennai, India, confirmed to National Geographic in an email that he filmed the extraction, and as far as we can tell, the woman’s plight is real.

This is the stuff of