I don’t really get bothered by spiders these days. I never kill em in the house when I see them, and if I’m motivated enough at the time, I’ll usually just catch em and put them outside.
However. I was terrified of any sort of spider or insect when I was a kid. (Still terrified of most insects, actually…I can handle ladybugs and caterpillars, but the caterpillars have to be the furry kind, or they oog me out).
One time, my father (a CPA) was doing some work on the side and had a client over at the house. My mom was upstairs washing her hair or something, and had sent me to the basement to get some towels.
Now, our basement terrified me as a kid. It was a cold, concrete unfinished basement, it had very low lighting, and I just knew there was something living under the stairs that wanted to grab me and eat me up.
So, when I was forced to go into the basement for something, I used to jump down the last 4-5 stairs. Because, ya know, that way the goblins couldn’t grab my ankles or nothin. (Hey, quit laughin, I was like 7 at the time)
So, I went down, jumped down the stairs, ran to the machine, grabbed the towels, and turned for my dash upstairs. (The goblins wouldn’t grab me if I was facin them, like as I was going up the stairs…what can i say, I had a vivid imagination).
Reached the bottom of the stairs, dropped the towels, and started screaming as if the goblins had grabbed me and were in the process of disemboweling me.
There, on the third stair from the bottom, was someone’s escaped pet tarantula. No, I’m really not exaggerating. It was a fucking tarantula. My mom ran down the stairs 3 at a time to see who was murdering her eldest, saw the thing, and joined me in the screaming, till my dad came downstairs.
He sees my mother and I screaming and pointing frantically, sees the tarantula, and yells “Holy shit! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING?!?” just as my neighbor (the aforementioned tax client) comes to look, joining me and my mom in our blind panic.
Finally, my dad grabbed the bathtowel off the floor where I’d dropped it, threw it on the spider, and quickly started jumping up and down on the stair it had been perched upon, yelling some sort of Accountant’s War Cry the whole time.
I refused to go into the basement for months after the Tarantula Incident.
You know, when I think about it these days, I feel bad for that spider. You know it never moved an inch the whole time? I figure it was just staring at us the whole time saying to itsself " 
What the fuck is wrong with these people?"
