I spin, therefor, I have wool, therefor, I have moths. Wool moths. Little tiny golden winged moths that can breed, cloud, and overtake any storage area where wool is readily accessible. They also go for cotton or rayon if wool is not sufficient.

I did the thing that people have done for ages. I ordered mothballs. My mother used them, as did her mother. They didn’t like the smell, but you put a few into a box that had wool stored in it, and it deterred them. They were not strong enough to kill the moths.

Yesterday I opened the mothballs. They are not the mothballs my mother used, these are absolutely deadly.

They do not let you breathe. The chemical smell is so strong you can’t even breathe around it. It is a pesticide smell, but not like malathion. Just heavy and solventy and intolerable. It isn’t the smell that you can’t tolerate, it is what the smell is made up of, and it is deadly.

A few minutes around it and you get a headache. Moringa helps (metabolic detoxer). But it isn’t enough.

ONE MOTHBALL is enough to make your ENTIRE HOUSE uninhabitable. No exaggeration, I mean this LITERALLY, JUST ONE is SO MUCH that you can’t live in your house.

Once you open the bag, YOU SMELL THEM. I put a few into a ziplock bag (I did not touch them). Then I put that bag into another bag, and the second into a third. THREE LAYERS of zip bags.

I could still smell them, and they were strong enough to make me not want to breathe the odor.

I put the CLOSED BAG into the closet where I store the wool. You can still smell the mothballs in there.

Having been told that mothballs can help eradicate bedbugs, we use HALF of one mothball, crushed, to sprinkle sparingly along the edge of the carpet and wall at the head of our bed.

We can no longer sleep in our bedroom. The smell is so strong in there we can’t stay in the room long enough to more than grab an item we need, and bolt.

We have an exterior fan pulling fresh air in, and another window open there to let the contaminated air out. It has been this way for nearly 24 hours now, and the smell is still so strong you can’t go in there for long. I can’t even tell that it has diminished in all that time.

And this is AFTER we vacuumed up the crushed mothball.

I used a plastic glove to handle the half mothball I put down in our bedroom. My hand stank of mothballs for hours afterward – from exposure THROUGH the glove. Washing with soap had no effect on the smell.

There really is only one brand out there, and it is SO BAD, there should not be any out there AT ALL. Those puppies are DEADLY, and there’s almost no way you can use them to deter moths without killing yourself.

They contain two chemicals, one of which is uber-deadly, and one of which helps stabilize it so it off-gasses slowly, breaking down over time, to release the chemical into the air. The stabilizer is napthalene, and it is none too healthy, but the other is paradichlorobenzene. Basically, this is chlorine gas combined with benzene gas, and turned to a solid. These things are so toxic that they cannot be handled without protective gear, or you die horribly from the exposure.

Chlorine is a metabolic disrupter, as well as a mutator.  Benzene is both mutative, and disruptive also, and is known to cause raging cancers that are particularly persistent and lethal. These are not safe to be compressed into a balled tablet for extended dispersal.

I’m going to have to shampoo the carpet to get some of it out, but I know it isn’t going to do the trick, really, because soap did not take it off my hands. I’m going to have to anyway… just to lessen the contamination in the bedroom.

We have a guest room, and we slept there last night. We could just barely smell the stuff all night. I’m glad we have a guest room, and a spare bathroom. Otherwise we’d be driven out to a hotel for several nights, at least.

This sounds all dramatic and emphatic. It is. And it is not an exaggeration at all… quite the opposite. There are no words to describe the ferocity of the chemical attack that grabs your lungs and makes you have to hold your breath. I just can’t tell you STRONGLY enough how bad it is, and I promise you, anything you are imagining isn’t even CLOSE to the reality!

Please don’t use mothballs, thinking they can be a safe way to eliminate ANY kind of insect in your home. If you get enough to do the trick, you’ll kill yourself as fast as you kill the bugs – IF you kill any bugs at all.

The thing they drive out first, is YOU.