Woman ‘Robbed At Cicada-Point’ Finally Tells Her Story

A Cincinnati woman is finally telling the story of a robbery where she was threatened with a cicada. She claims it has haunted her for nearly 35-years.

According to police reports, in 1987, Marquisa Kellogg’s name appeared in newspapers and publications all throughout the country. Her story traveled as swiftly as Brood X did that year.

At that time, two men allegedly stole $24 from a restaurant’s cash register after scaring the cashier away with a cicada. The two men entered the Grand Slam Restaurant with a cicada in their hands. Kellogg, who was 22 at the time, allegedly ran away after the two men threw the bug at her. She later discovered that the register had been robbed of $25 after she had recovered and returned.

We would say the tale went viral if it happened today. The article was taken up by at least 60 newspapers.

Kellogg explained, “One magazine had a cicada with a little gun saying, ‘Stick ’em up!'” She said, “Today, I’m the girl who gets the cicadas off people.”

Now that she’s 56, she sees the humor in the story, but she didn’t always. “You want the truth? Or do you want the lie?” Kellogg told The Enquirer. “I remember the entire thing.”

She said the problem is that the story that everyone was laughing about wasn’t at all what it seemed.

Kellogg said she was sitting outside the restaurant with a friend not long before the incident when she decided to play a prank on him. She snatched up a fistful of cicadas and tossed them onto his back.

“He went crazy, like any ordinary human would,” Kellogg said.

She returned to the restaurant, still laughing, to serve two men she recognized as friends (or so she believed) from the area.

Her friend then returned to exact his revenge, throwing a handful of cicadas in her face before running away.

“I took off running like OJ in the airport,” Kellogg said referring to the 1978 rental car commercial. “I completely forgot the register was open. “I ran like a bat out of hell.”

When she returned, she discovered that the bills in her drawer were not in order. She inquired as to whether the two men behind the counter had taken anything, but they denied it.

She counted the money in front of them and discovered that she was short by $25. When they refused to admit what had transpired, she reported the robbery to the police.

And it was at this point that the story evolved into what it is now. At most, it was a cicada-assisted robbery, but the police report and subsequent news coverage depicted two masked bandits with red-eyed, buzzing, six-legged insects rather than six-shooters.

“That officer put two stories into one and the joke was on me,” Kellogg said. “He heard, but he wasn’t listening. It was a joke to him.”

She believes the cop was paid for the story and plans to sue him for part of his pension “for putting me through all this embarrassment all these years,” if she can find him.

Squeaky, her buddy, she claimed, even made shirts. The shirts include a picture of a cicada with Squeaky’s face instead of the insect’s.

“I’m the butt of the joke,” she admitted, but her attitude toward the issue has improved over time. She said she now tells her patients the story to make them laugh. They’ll frequently look it up on their phones right then and there, and they’ll be shocked, she said.

This summer, she’s been enjoying witnessing the offspring of the insects that earlier drew national attention to her.

She does, however, want everyone to know that she is not terrified of cicadas, even if there is only one of them. An insect in the face is enough to make anyone nervous.

“The only thing I’m scared of is something with eight legs,” Kellogg said. “You can have the whole restaurant if you have eight legs.”