Tormented by house flies? Try this trick and put them on the run!

Lowcountry house flies are running scared.

I know this is sad news, but it's true, according to several people who ought to know.

It's a peculiar thing, the way they scare the flies away. But here in the land of blue voodoo, looking-peculiar has never stopped us before.

What people are doing is hanging clear plastic bags filled with water from a window, door tent or tree -- and a fly won't go beyond it.

I saw it for the first time last week at Solomon and Della Campbell's roadside vegetable and seafood stand on Spanish Wells Road on Hilton Head Island.

They look just like the bags we used to get as children at the five-and-dime store when we made another sound investment in a goldfish.

I was trying to carry on a conversation with Solomon Campbell, but I kept looking over his shoulder wondering why he had goldfish hanging outside the windows of his open-air market.

"It keeps 80 percent of the flies out," Campbell declared with all the assurance and authority of a county extension agent with a Ph.D. in entomology.

This is the first summer the Campbells have used this tactic. Della Campbell said a customer brought them the idea from the Caribbean islands.

"I used to use fly swatters," she said.

Another helpful customer told her to put black pepper and little hot sauce in a cup and put it in the window.

Save yourself the trouble. It actually attracts flies.

"They were enjoying it," Della Campbell said.

The flies used to be all over the sweet peaches. "They loved tomatoes and the sweet yellow and red peppers, and also the Vidalia onions," Della Campbell said. "They liked my local honey jars. But they're gone now. This is the first thing that has worked."

She explained to me -- and this gets very scientific -- that a fly's head is basically thousands of eyeballs and when these eyeballs catch their own reflection blown way out proportion by sunlight refracting through the water, the fly not only leaves, it leaves in a big hurry.

Now she's heard that it's even better to put pennies in the bags of water.

In Bluffton, Mike Saturday has water bags dangling from the roadside tent where he sells fresh, local shrimp.

He brought the idea home from a shrimp retailer in the Upstate.

"I thought, 'He's full of it,' " Saturday said. But he says it keep 95 percent of the flies out of his open tent on the side of S.C. 46 near the post office.

Frank Kidd, who works with Saturday, said he heard about the trick two years ago from his brother, Ben Frazier. Now he wishes he had listened to him.

"The flies are gone," he said. "They don't hang around."

Clemson University entomologists were out in the field Friday and unavailable to debunk all of this.

But it's clear the bag of water trick is not new, and it's used from Mississippi drive-ins to European cafes.

A syndicated newspaper columnist called "The Bug Man" says his mail ran 9-to-1 saying the method worked when he wrote about it many years ago.

"It is not clear why these water bags repel flies, but they do," Richard Fagerlund wrote.

Then he advised:

"You may also get some questions from visitors as to why you have a Ziploc bag of water on your front door.

"Some possible answers are: It attracts flies. It scares flies. If it freezes, we know it's cold outside. If it boils, we know it is hot outside."

I told you this gets very scientific.