Recently I was sitting in a recliner watching some cartoons with my son when I felt a tickle on my arm. My immediate thought was that there was an ant crawling on me. I jumped up and brushed off my arm but there was nothing there. It happened again. I jumped up… nothing there. I decided to take my chances with the couch instead. My wife then sat down in the recliner, felt a tickle on her arm and jumped up to see the giant chair-colored spider that was there this whole time. Because my brain thought “ant” I was looking for a dark black shape and looked right past the horrific reality in front of my face.
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I’m terrified of spiders, not to the point that it’s a full blown phobia, but enough that I take a few big steps away when I happen across them.
They’re just so creepy looking, especially the multi-segmented bulbous variety. Plus I associate them with venom…somehow venom is just so much more shiver inducing than simply getting bitten or clawed.
@DoctorWhy: it’s debatable just how much of the spider fear is instinctive, and how much is picked up in young childhood from the way that the adults around us react to spiders. Same goes for other “creepy-crawlies” like snakes and rats. Most small children will be fascinated and interested, not afraid, of such creatures … right up until one of their parents or another adult whom they trust goes “eek, get away from that!”
try being in the middle of a pee and see 4 buggy eyes peeping at you from over your knee. jumping spiders…ick! (shudders)
I had a little bitty jumping spider as a friend fora bout five minutes….then a peer killed him. I wrote an ode to my spider when i got home. so sad…
Ah, spiders. I’m not phobic of them, but I have a very healthy respect for them. I personally prefer them to live in my garden (as there’s not much of anything in the house for them to eat, and if desperate enough, they’ll bite anything). I’ve seen in my garden little black wolf spiders, the standard black-and-white-striped jumping-spiders, a few nervous royal jumping-spiders (they’re fuzzy, much larger, and have lovely colors), and a wide assortment of orb weavers. The one I can’t identify is a spider that I only see when I’ve been digging in the garden and disturbed quite a lot of earth: it’s built like a wolf spider, but it’s got a white abdomen and day-glo orange everywhere else. I let them run away (to more dirt) because bright colors tend to mean dangerous toxins. I’ve done a lot of looking and found nothing about them. Advice would be welcome!
As for why spiders get into houses? I personally think they’re curious. Jumping-spiders have been known to jump on people just to watch them freak out or catch a ride (we’re way too big to be considered dinner). As for tiny spiders in the house, they’re just babies and they’re lost; take them outside.
I don’t have anything against spiders personally. However, i always freak out and reflex kill them when they surprise me. and they always seem to surprise me. Also waking up with a couple on your face in the middle of the night isn’t exactly helping to strengthen relationships.
Ugh. Spiders.
I have two nice and creepy ones to share with you today!
Okay, so in the middle of the night, I wake up, seemingly for no reason at all. I look at the clock on my bedside table. It’s about 1:00, 1:30. Don’t remember the exact time, but I remember it was one of those evil, evil hours of the morning where nobody sane is awake. I’m sort of going, ‘Okaaay, WHY am I awake, again?’ Then I feel this tickle on my arm. So I reach up and turn on the lamp over my bed, figuring it’s an ant or something, but wanting to make sure. BIG. BROWN. SPIDER. ONMYARMOHGOD. OHGOD. (It was about an inch or so long.) So I screech, jump out of bed, and wave my spider-inhabited arm around a couple of times. It lands on my bedsheets.
So here I am in my nightclothes, standing in my tiny room, staring at this inch-long brown spider that’s on my sheets. I watch it crawl around for a bit, my mind going a mile a minute, and then finally get the presence of mind to think, ‘Hey, maybe I can pick it up in one of those boxes I keep around!’ So I grab this tiny little white cardboard box, and approach the spider. While I was thinking, the spider had been crawling off of my bed and onto my carpet. Which was somewhat good, because it was no longer in my bed. But it was also bad, because, ohgod, IT WAS CLOSER TO ME. Cue the whimper, please. Finally, I catch it. With the small, unattached lid of my box. On carpet. Oh, WONDERFUL. How’m I going to pick it up?! So I have to let it GO again. Now the spider has had enough. It has really had enough. So it runs like the dickens for my computer desk, and disappears somewhere behind it.
Needless to say, I hid under the blankets that night.
The other story is far less complicated, but perhaps a bit more dangerous, as the last spider wasn’t recognizably poisonous.
My little sister and I were unpacking a few boxes from our move. We open a few boxes, put some stuff away, it’s all normal. Then I hear my sister scream when she lifts something out of a box we’re working on. I rush over, ask the usual questions (“Are you okay? What’s wrong!?”) and then I look into the box. There’s a black widow in there, hanging upside-down on a web it built. And I’m sure it was a black widow because, again, it was hanging upside-down. Nice, bright red hourglass on its belly, plain as can be. I screech as well. The parents aren’t home, and all I can think is, ‘Did it bite her? Did it bite her?’ Thankfully, a moment later, I realize that the widow doesn’t seem to be at all disturbed, and my sister isn’t at all in pain, nor does her hand have any puncture marks when examined. So I dig up some bug spray, and spray that sucker into oblivion.
And then, of course, it keeps twitching.
Then I realize I picked up the flying insect spray, not the stuff for spiders and other creepy-crawlies. It’s still killing it, but very slowly. Ugh. Poor thing. So I rather quickly go and fetch the spider spray and put it out of its misery. I don’t like spiders, but I don’t like torture, either. Took me a full half-hour to convince my sister to go anywhere near that box again, though….