You may want to know how to kill scorpions if you find them in your house, as I do. Or maybe not. I am not bugphobic, though I do prefer that multilegged creatures remain in their own territory—outdoors—and stay out of my house. But these things—well, my skin gets clammy just thinking about these prehistoric-looking monsters.

Alas, I come across a scorpion intruder once or twice each month. I cannot allow them to stay. Neither can I capture and release, as I do with spiders. They must die. Sincere apologies if you’re a scorpion-as-pet aficionado. (But why?)

Though you can’t tell in the picture, the creature above blends into my stone floor. Here it is, injured, with an oozing wound on its back after a traditional slap with a slipper before I knew better. I went away a little shaken, this being my first encounter with a scorpion. When I returned, it was gone! It turned up three days later in my bedroom, expired.

How to kill scorpions

You can’t always just smash a rogue scorpion with a shoe. They get into corners and cracks and hard to reach places. With their hard exoskeletons, they’re impossible to smash on carpet. And who wants scorpion guts all over the place? My sister devised this foolproof method to kill scorpions. Necessity is the mother of invention, right?

Wrap tape around a broom, sticky side out. Make sure it’s secure. Now whack your intruder—the scorpion—and watch it stick, immobilized. It may wave its ugly tail a bit, or try to signal a truce with a pedipalp; but it’s not going anywhere. Fear not tight corners, door jambs, awkward spaces. The flexible broom bristles perform well in all instances. Bonus: distance between you and the arachnid.

At this point, all you need is another length of tape. Sandwich the critter, slide the tape off the broom, and get rid of the evidence.

The weakness in this method is that you have to leave the scorpion to go make the scorpion-killer-broom. However, you never want to take your eyes off a scorpion in the house. If you come back and it’s gone, you might not sleep for a week. My sister’s solution: She kept two scorpion-killer brooms ready to go, in opposite ends of her house.

Eventually, my sister had her house scorpion-proofed. Expensive, but it worked. All vents, outlets, light-switches, and other openings were screened on the inside (behind the wall). Pocket doors were sealed—made permanently open or closed. I don’t know what other physical barriers were installed, but she never saw another scorpion.

For now, I’m sticking with the scorpion-killer broom. Good luck!