The green tomato worm

By the 1830s, the love apple was cultivated in New York, but a new fear emerged. A tomato worm, thick-bodied, three or four inches long with a horn on its back. It was believed that brushing against the worm could result in death. One Dr Fuller in New York said it was "poisonous as a rattlesnake." Contact with the spittle would make the victim swell up, and within a few hours, the victim would die.

But entomologist Benjamin Walsh insisted that the tomato worm couldn't hurt a flea.