Howie Mandel Recalls When Bugs Lived Under His Skin as a Child and He Had to Have Them Burned Out

Howie Mandel had a traumatic childhood experience that will make your skin crawl — literally.

During an interview with In Depth with Graham Bensinger, which was reposted to their social media account earlier this month, the America’s Got Talent judge, 70, recalled a time when he was around 6 or 7 years old and had larvae living under his skin.

“I do remember vividly the feeling I had when they discovered that I’d been bitten by a sandfly, and it laid its larvae in me,” Mandel said, explaining that he had “itchy little bumps” that would move when he would scratch them.

“It’s like a horror film,” he said. “You are the horror film, and the horror film didn’t stop.”

The comedian explained that his mother took him to a doctor, who “decided to put me on display.”

“There was a dermatology convention in Toronto because we didn’t know what the answer was, and they hadn’t seen this in humans,” Mandel said. “They put me on a table. I remember I was in… I think it was a lecture hall. There was all these doctors from all over the world. It seemed like an amphitheater of a hundred people. And they put me on a table in my tighty whities.”

At the convention, Mandel said, nurses would hold him down so liquid nitrogen could be put on his skin.

“Liquid nitrogen is so cold it burns,” he said. “And I would watch my skin sizzle and bubble, and then it would open up and obviously kill the larvae. And I was screaming.”

Mandel said that’s when his mother unstrapped him from the table and carried him out. However, they still needed to remove the bugs that were living beneath the surface.

“Every night we would pick one, and then she would take a rough washcloth and alcohol and just rub it and rub it and rub it,” he said. “First it felt good, but [she’d] keep rubbing it until the skin broke and it would bleed, and it opened, until she got them all.”

Mandel said that talking about it is still “traumatizing” today, adding: “I had things living under my skin.”

According to the Winnipeg Free Press, Mandel wrote about the experience in his book Here’s the Deal: Don’t Touch Me, explaining that the sand fly laid eggs in him during a family trip to Florida.