How’s this for terrifying: a nine-year-old Virginia boy has died after what health officials are calling a “brain-eating amoeba” entered his body.

The boy, who the Post reports died earlier this month, apparently contracted the bug after attending a fishing day camp — such “brain-eating amoebas” are apparently quite common around freshwater lakes and ponds. The “amoeba,” properly known as Naegleria fowleri, was first discovered in Australia in 1965 and usually invades the human body through the nose, proceeding to “hijack the human brain in its hunt for food and shelter.”

Shudder.