A rather distressed reader wrote to us the other day about some worms he found on the bathroom floor. To his further chagrin and disgust (the word “yuck,” all letters capitalized, appeared twice in the reader’s email), he also found one of the worms in the basket of his dirty laundry. The worms are small, about one centimeter in length, and they are a clear brownish color. The worms also have several horizontal lines on their body. What are these small worms on the bathroom floor, and what can our reader do to get rid of them?

An alein worm is actually a newly discovered worm—at least by the water and sewer company in Raleigh, North Carolina, that lives inside old pipes.