Paul Franklin, a four-year-old from Aliso Viejo, California was spending a normal day at the Spooner’s Cove beach when he fell and wounded his right knee. Like parents normally would, they simply cleaned the wound and put a Band-Aid on it.
Things went on as normal for a couple of weeks. But then the wound grew swollen and seemed infected.
Paul’s mother recounted, “I came home from work and his knee was the size of an orange and hot to the touch.”
When parents Rachael and Ken Franklin brought Paul to the doctor, the wound was diagnosed to have developed a staph infection, so antibiotics were given.
That somewhat helped, but soon, the family noticed a black bump within the wound. That’s when Rachael took matters into her own hands and squeezed the cut.
Then something popped out.
“It looked like a rock; it was a black thing,” Rachael shared. “It was a black thing. I put it on a paper towel and I’m like, ‘That is a weird-looking rock. It has swirls on it,’ and I turn it over and it is a sea snail.”
It is believed that when Paul hurt himself at the beach, a snail egg was embedded into his knee, and the wound was not thoroughly cleaned, thus leaving the egg to develop, and later on, hatch.
Just a few weeks after the episode, Paul is fine and is caring for the snail he “gave birth to” like a real pet.
“I thought it was kind of crazy,” Paul said.
Surprisingly, this creepy-crawly-in-body story isn’t the first of its kind. Around this time last year, a woman in China was found to have a spider living in her ear canal.
Pictures of Sea Snail that Hatched out of the boys knee
