This may surprise you considering how collected I usually am around critters, but spiders scare the shit out of me. I saw a spider *web *and I shrieked. Just the evidence of a spider’s existence nearby made me scream. Yes, I know spiders are everywhere and you just don’t see them all, so no need to break it to me that there needn’t be a web for there to be spiders.
But anyway, so it’s summer now, and I’m suddenly not so in love with my new place anymore. So. many. spiders. I’m looking at the window in front of me right now, and I’m counting six spiders just hanging out, and that’s all I can see from here. If I got closer, guaranteed more little tiny spiders just lounging. I do have a screen which stops the giant ones, but the little fuckers just crawl right through them like the joke these screens are. I went to open my bedroom window, but stopped when I saw two little spiders hanging out between my window and my screen. Grr! I also know spiders are plenty capable of getting into tiny spaces which is how they manage to freak you out in the shower in the first place, but this is ridiculous. I’m too chickenshit to just open the window while there’s an army of spiders right there just hanging out. “Hey, come on in, little guys.”
I cannot get over how many spiders I see hanging around the windows in this building, and am terrified of opening them. This is every window in my apartment. This is actually pretty upsetting to me, and I kind of want to cry about it.
I know it’s stupid to cry about spiders, but I can’t help the way I feel. Is there anything at all I can do here? Am I just going to have to get over it?
We had a vent fan installed in the bathroom, which necessitated a slot being cut into the wall for the wiring to the new switch. It hasn’t been patched yet, pending other renovations.
I have not told the SO about the spider living in the slot, just above the switches.
Spiders don’t bother me at all, but I’m reduced to a pile of terror goo by bees, wasps and yellowjackets, so I feel you. Spiders are definitely my son’s phobia though, and since his room was in the basement, he spent a lot of time screeching.
I read about peppermint oil as a spider repellent and decided it was worth a try, but wasn’t holding out a lot of hope. Holy macaroni - it actually works! (and makes your house smell great) You just soak cotton balls in the oil and leave them around the areas you notice spiders. I even wiped down the outside of his door frame with it, since there were always a couple hanging out there. I refreshed the cotton balls once or twice in a 2-3 month span and then the spiders were just gone for good.
You’re probably going to prefer the peppermint oil suggestion over mine, but this did work for me: I, too, had a bad case of arachnophobia when I was young. I got a pet tarantula. Named him Fang. He was sweet and lovely. It took a long time before I got comfortable to handle him, but once I did, Fang quickly helped me get over my spider phobia. Now I just view them as Fang’s cousins.
Oh god, I hope this works. I spend almost no time in my apartment these days because I’m scared of it, and without any open windows, it is f-ing hot. A shame, too, because I get a really nice breeze from the lake.
I believe you live somewhere that doesn’t have any venomous spiders. That fact alone should help although I know most phobias aren’t rational. The only common venomous spiders in the U.S. are black widows and brown recluses. I grew up in an area with both and encountered both of them many times along with countless numbers of non-venomous spiders.
Black widows are extremely distinctive and don’t commonly bite people. I would find them by turning over a rock, see that distinctive red hourglass on her belly and she would be squished into goo as soon as I saw fit. It isn’t like they are fast or can attack you.
Brown recluses are a lot smaller and I have known several people that have been bitten by those. They usually don’t even know it until they get a distinctive bulls eye pattern of skin somewhere on them. It can be dangerous for some people but generally doesn’t kill the vast majority of people that get injected by one. Instead, the tissue around the bulls-eye dies and starts to rot away but any doctor can treat it.
My father got one of the nastiest brown recluse spider bites that I have even seen and his only got that bad because he had a ‘no doctors allowed’ policy at the time. Part of his upper thigh rotted out but it was still treatable even though he waited many days to go to the doctor and it eventually healed just fine.
The vast majority of spiders in the U.S. are completely harmless to people. You can pick them up with your bare hands with little worry. I even had somewhere bring me a rather rare wild Louisiana tarantula once that they caught crossing a road. The can technically sting but they don’t generally sting people even when held. I used to sit and watch TV with him. He was a sweet giant spider about 4 inches across. I felt horrible because I accidentally dropped something on him when I was cleaning his tank and he died from his injuries a few days later despite my best efforts to nurse him back to health.
If you don’t live in the Deep South or a few other areas that have venomous spiders, being scared of the ones you have around is about as rational as being scared of houseflies or ladybugs. Even in areas with venomous spiders, they are generally easy to deal with.
I worked with someone who was so scared of snakes that even seeing a picture of one would send her into panic mode. I’ve developed a lot more sympathy for folks like you because of her.
I grew up in a house that was quite spidery. We had a cockapoo who loved to kill spiders and lived for the moment when we moved a piece of furniture. He’d be back there like a shot and make short work of any unsuspecting arachnids he found. I don’t suppose you could invest in a spider-killing dog, huh? If not a cockapoo, anything with some terrier in it would probably fill the bill.
For the spiders that were too high for our dog to get, sucking them into a vacuum cleaner was quite satisfying. They dehydrate pretty quickly amongst all the dust and debris so you don’t have to worry about them popping out when you change the bag. They’d probably pretty mangled by the journey into the belly of the beast, anyway, so popping out may have been the last thing on their minds.
Best wishes to you. I probably haven’t been too helpful but I hope you find something that helps you become a little more comfortable with them.
Don’t write it off just yet. My mother used to have a horrible phobia of snakes to the point where she wouldn’t go outside if she thought there might be one around (and there always were honestly) and she woke up screaming with snake nightmares.
However, she was a science teacher and really wanted to get over her phobia. One of her students brought her a tiny little grass snake (about the least threatening snake there is) and she kept it for her class and learned to love the little guy. Later, someone gave her a baby boa constrictor. She learned to love that one too.
I can’t recall how the chain of progression went because she started to gain a reputation as someone that could take care of snakes that other people couldn’t handle so she had a number of them. She eventually ended up with a 7 foot long rat snake named Ricky that only she could handle. Ricky was not an attractive or nice snake at all. He was also a master escape artist and could hide undetected in the house very literally for months at a time. I am not especially scared of snakes but he made me nervous because he was more than happy to strike me or anyone else.
I once came home from college and they told me Ricky had been missing for a couple of months so keep an eye out for him. I woke up on the couch the next morning to the sound of things falling in a walk-in closet. I quickly opened the door only to see a flash of that long black tail quickly swish and then disappear on a top shelf. I really didn’t want to but there was a stepladder nearby so I had to became a snake wrangler with my bare hands. I eventually won but not without a long fight. I got Ricky back in his cage where he stayed for a couple of weeks before he escaped yet again.
Don’t write off a pet tarantula for yourself. They are nice spiders. How about a pet Daddy long-legs? I know they aren’t real spiders but the idea is the same.
Why would you want to? A little fear of the critters goes a long way in avoiding getting bitten. We’ve got all bad ones here, so keeping distance is a good idea.
You’ve got to encourage them to enjoy the great outdoors.
In Texas we had a bumper crop of spiders. A large specimen whom we named Queenie took up residence in a giant web near our side door. I made a habit of tossing her juicy bugs, of which Texas is also jam-full.
If the OP fed her window friends, maybe they’d stay there and not invade the house.*
*unfortunately, this past summer spiders decided to lay eggs in a number of potted plants, and we had a problem in the winter in the plant growing area in the basement with a major spider hatch and baby spiders running around all over the place. I draw the line at this.
Spiders don’t really scare me at all, even holding them in my hands. However the one exception to this was once late at night there was a very large Wolf Spider I think on the kitchen floor and I gave it an incomplete stomp with my foot and as soon as I raised it I watched in horror as what seemed at the time like 200 baby spiders spread away from the dead mother’s abdomen that they been clinging to before I killed it. My reaction was just this visceral, innate disgust and I snatched my foot away and almost screamed. I spent the next twenty minutes killing the babies and I feel like I got all but two of them. They had to pay for making me a big guy feel like a little six year old girl.
Oh, and another thing, just bought some peppermint oil with no evidence that it works because I’m desperate. A bunch of blogs on the internet say spiders are repelled by the smell, and even though I can’t find anything outside of DIY sites saying this is true, I figured it was worth a go.
Applied around the windows, and onto the screen where there’s a spider hanging about an inch away (I’m not even going to tell you how long it took to work up the guts to put my hand that close to it, even though it’s on the other side of the screen), and the spider just continued to hang there like it didn’t give a fuck about any damn peppermint. I am skeptical.
Edit: Velocity, as much as the thought makes my heart race, I think I’m going to actually have to do that. Otherwise, there is just no way I’m going to be able to live in this apartment. You have no idea how much of a crazy person this is making me. Getting a pet spider though, no. That’s madness.
I have OCD. I don’t mind spiders, but I hate mold, mildew, dirt, grease, chemicals, etc. Exposure-response-prevention therapy is sometimes the way I’ve had symptom-improvement.
