Yeah, what Anaamika said.
Baffle Ok, you win. I would have thrown up. That is the most disgusting thing I’ve heard. I haven’t seen a silver fish since I was 5 or something. But being young and curious I would go look for them every day. They lived under the cat food dishes. I thought they were pretty back then. Of course I also had my family of spiders in my window I would hold every day and talk to. (I am normal really…no Really!) How and/or why on earth, would there be a silver fish that close to your face or in your bed. Blaaaaaah!
My brain just threw up again.
PS, theunfounddoor, we do have brown recluse spiders here too… we call them “violin spiders” sometimes. But the ones that make little cocoons in my house are sac spiders. Both are equally disgusting (though brown recluses are more dangerous). Thanks for the first aid kit! Helpful tool.
It wasn’t going in, it was trying to get OUT! They build their nests inside your sinuses*.
*[sup]Not really… or do they?[/sup]
Just wanted to point out that the caption to the linked spider picture gives the size as “3-6 mm” (I assume they’re referring to the spider), which is a long way short of the inch and a half described in the OP. Probably not the correct species then. Unless it really IS a mutated giant…
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned black widows, which are shiny and black and can get rather large. Fortunately they have a completely different body plan from the spider in the linked photo; black widows use the “marble with feet” spider body with all the bulk in a big round abdomen, and this critter uses the sleeker “figure-eight” shape.
Anaamika, you’ll hate me for this, but there is a species of centipede that lives indoors full-time. It’s called the house centipede (how original) and is a dirty yellow to tan color with lots and LOTS of really long legs. If that’s the one you saw, you just sealed it inside with you, where it’ll be perfectly happy.
I have a story of my own about a spider climbing into my bed and biting my elbow as I was drifting off to sleep…but I’m sure everyone is going to have enough trouble going to sleep tonight as it is.
Yeah. Until I find it and TERMINATE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.
Just wait for it.
And yes, I used to get plenty of centipedes in my parents’ basement…where I used to rehearse for my dance performances. And I rehearsed sans glasses, and I had no contacts back then. Tired, fuzzy-visioned, and WHAT THE HELL IS THAT ON THE WALL???
I have a mildly amusing story…I was over at a friend’s house recently, and her little 4 YO daughter was running around. We saw a beetle or something on the wall and before we could do anything about it, the little tyke dropped everything, pointed at the bug and shouted,
“KILL IT MOMMY, KILL IT!”
That was my first thought.
My anecdote: once the mister and I were in the backyard. I wasn’t feeling well and was sunning myself on the garden bench, while he sprinkled granulated fertilizer around the plants. We kept this in a big paint bucket in the corner of the garage, and he was carrying the bucket around clutched to his chest.
I glanced up, and saw a ginormous, agitated and probably angry black widow scurrying up the side of the white bucket, a couple of inches beneath his arm. I yelled out, “Drop the bucket! There’s a black widow on it!” To his credit, he instantly threw the bucket straight down and the spider was knocked off. I walked up, pointed it out, and squashed it. He said “Jesus Christ! How did you know?” I told him I just happened to look up and see it before it reached his arm. It must have lived cozily on the underside of the bucket until it was disturbed.
We spent a lot of time sweeping up granulated fertilizer that morning.
ryobserver I never enough thought about it being a Black Widow. AFAIK they don’t live in Wi. But now I’m freaking out. Also, I didn’t notice the 3-6mm caption on that pic. I knew it probably wasn’t the right species, but that’s the closest pic to what I saw. I think my Bf would have noticed if it was a Black Widow. I don’t know for sure though.
teela brown that’s great you saw it when you did. On a related note: I had a friend in highschool who grew up in Texas. Her and her family where knocking a wall down in their house with sledge hammers (back in Texas). At one point as she hit the wall a Black Widow got knocked out of the wall onto her neck and bit her. (Now this is what she told me, I have no proof) She said it was the most painful thing she ever experienced. Her mom (who was a real piece of trash IMO) wouldn’t bring her to the hospital because they didn’t have the money. She was bed ridden for something like a week or two. She said her Grandma stayed with her the whole time. She was delirious most of the time and she said her complexion was greenish/grey. As far as I knew BW bites are leathal unless treated (no cite). She had another story about the fire ants too, but I’ll spare you. 
Anaamika, my last apartments entrance hallway was infested with those nasty house centipedes. Every day I came home and on the way through, I would watch for them and squash them on sight. Luckily they never made into my apartment then. But I found one in my kitchen the other day. ::shudder:: SQUASH!!! Ha Ha, I win.
Now I’ll find more, just for gloating.
I’m feeling very squidgy now. As a resident of an old Chicago brick apartment building with basement, I get to deal with all sorts of fun buggies. Centipedes are common, but we have an understanding; I promise to kill them as soon as I see them so that they can leave the disgusting body and existence they are currently trapped in and move into another one as soon as possible.
The abbreviated version of my very nasty bug story involves my kitty bringing me a present one night as I lay in bed in the dark. I could not figure out why he was so adamant on getting to his fake mouse toy even though I had the flashlight out to play (He would skip eating and drinking if it meant playing with the flashlight). As I laid there considering this, I felt the fake mouse toy run accross my legs??? I flew outta bed and flipped on the light. Nothing. I relax enough to lift the covers. Rasputin brought a live 1.5 inch long water bug into bed for us to play with.
I’m convinced the scream could have shattered glass.
I once woke up by a spider walking over me.
It was just a little spider (thank God we don’t have any big, nasty ones in the Netherlands) but it pissed me off.
I jumped out of bed and screamed at it.
The spider then just curled up and died.
Am I the only person to have ever given a spider a heart attack?
I had to chime in here. Being an outdoors kind of person, and my choice of biology to study in college, I rarely care about insects. I have always been the one to grab them and place them outside. Rarely will I kill one if letting go is an option. I have never have had the heebie jeebies about creatures, including snakes or spiders. I know they have their place in this world, and as long as they don’t bother me, I could care less about them. This brings me to earlier this spring. I decided to work in my garden and plant some flower bulbs. I was weeding and cleaning the area I was about to plant as normal. I had my bulbs sitting there so I dug me a hole. I remembered I had some “bulb food” left over from fall and decided to use it. So I went to the garage and grabbed the leftover bulb food. I walked back to my front yard where I was working. With bulb in one hand, I reached into the bag of bulb food to grab some to place in the hole when I felt like I shoved my finger into a piece of wood. I assumed it was a piece of mulch that had fallen into the bag last fall, so I pulled my hand out. Hanging from my finger was a BIG FREAKIN BROWN SPIDER! My first thought was to get it off me, so I shook my hand real hard. The spider went flying and I looked down at my finger, I could see the fang marks and had blood starting to exit my finger at the bite. I squeezed my finger as hard as I could (in my head this was to prevent any poison from getting any further into me) and ran back into the house. I was holding my hand and told my wife that I needed to go to the Emergency Room. I had been cutting some limbs in our trees earlier that day with a chain saw, so my wife asked me if I cut something. I explained to her was had happened as we got in the car to the ER. Normally spiders don’t bother me, but in Southern Indiana we have brown recluses (see links in earlier posts). My BIL got bit by one and now has a permenate scar from where it happened. I could just invision my finger falling off… So we rushed to the ER and the first thing they asked me was “did you catch the spider”… Umm… NO, I was too busy trying to GET IT OFF ME!!! I recieved some steroids (to limit any reaction to the venom) and antibiotics (to prevent infection at the wound site). They kept me for observation for about 6 hrs, then I was free to leave. I was lucky that I didn’t have any nasty reaction, just some minor blackening around the wound and some tingling… After this episode, I still don’t really care about snakes, but I have now joined the “Die Spider! Die!” club. I routinely “fog” my garage. The worse part?.. I freaking KNEW BETTER than to stick my hand into an open back that I pulled from the garage… It just goes to show you that it only takes once to forget…
Now just the thought of a spider gives me the heebie jeebies…
Die Spider! Die!
Why…can’t…I…look…away…from…this…thread?
I am sitting at my desk here at work with a permanent horror-stricken expression. This can’t be good for business.
I have a centipede story from high school. I was sitting in class one day, and I just happened to be sitting in the seat closest to the door. I think it was lit class, or something boring like that, because my attention started to wander. I noticed a huge centipede crawling up the wall in the corner. I hate centipedes. Nasty, nasty things that must have been created in the bowels of hell. Certainly, God never intended anything to have that many legs, right? Anyway, I made a noise like “Ewww,” which caused several other students to notice the poly-limbed monster. Soon, the entire class was skeeved out by this thing. Eventually, it crawled onto the side of the door frame (ie, the surface that the door closes against). I saw my chance. I got up, grabbed the door knob, and pulled the door shut. CRUNCH!!! One dead centipede. The girls were all totally grossed out by my act of centicide, but the other boys were laughing and thought that my extermination technique was really cool.
What the *&^%?!?!?!? This site says that a brown recluse lives for 3-5 years!
I’m never going to sleep again.
According to my Golden Guide to “Spiders and their Kin”, they don’t; they can occur “as far north as New York”, but perfer warm climates. Anyway, as I said, the body plan in the photo you cited is wrong for a black widow.
As far as I know (I don’t have a cite either) fatalities are rare; a black widow is not that large a creature, and simply can’t pack enough venom to kill a healthy adult human. Anyone bitten should hasten to get medical care anyway, of course; you never know if you’ve met some exceptional spider, the bites can get infected, and as your friend found out, they are hellaciously painful. The venom is neurotoxic, and neuropathic pain is horrible and can be hard to treat.
From my own experience, I can testify that even the bite of a mundane spider is painful in crazy disproportion to the tiny size of the injury. Like a wasp sting, but less burning and more shooting/ electric shock quality.
If y’all are squicked out by house centipedes then take a look at this.
It is Scolopendra heros which is the largest centipede in the US. Photos courtesy of my BIL.
Here it is next to a size 12 shoe for some scale.
And here it is in all its glory.
Pleasent dreams! 
Hey! I think that’s the thing that visited my classroom!
Wow, YouTube is just rife with fun centipede footage!