A Delta Airlines flight scheduled to fly from Amsterdam to Detroit turned around mid-trip after maggots rained down on passengers from an overhead compartment.

Delta flight 133 AMS-DTW “was interrupted due to an improperly packed carry-on bag,” an airline spokesperson confirmed.

“The aircraft returned to the gate and passengers were placed on the next available flight,” Delta said in a statement cited by CBS News.

Customers on the Tuesday flight were compensated for the inconvenience, but the spokesperson did not elaborate.

A passenger told Fox2Detroit that he saw about a dozen maggots land on the woman seated next to him.

“She was freaking out,” Philip Schotte, a Netherlands native who lives in Iowa, told Fox2Detroit. “She was just trying to kind of fight off these maggots.”

He initially thought it seemed like a prank.

“I don’t really know what was going through my mind. I was trying to process it – disgust is one thing of course,” Schotte said. “We had to wait there for help to actually come.”

But flight attendants discovered the insects were in a passenger’s carry-on-bag that had spoiled fish wrapped in a newspaper, Schotte told Fox2Detroit.

In a statement, Delta apologized to passengers.

“Their trip was interrupted due to an improperly packed carry-on bag,” Delta said. “The aircraft returned to the gate and passengers were placed on the next available flight. The aircraft was removed from service for cleaning.”

The flight tracking site FlightAware showed that the plane only got as far as the U.K. before doing a U-turn and returning to Amsterdam, CBS News said.