I. Would. Freak. OUT.
Sorry, just a arachno/all other bugs and insects-phobe here.
My cat killed a spider in the best way ever.
Tank (my cat) weighs about 15 pounds and couldn’t possibly care less about bugs. There was some sort of beetle on the floor of the bathroom. She sniffed it and it scuttled away. In this situation any normal cat would give some sort of chase. She went back to cleaning her face.
Anyway, early one morning, I’m lying in bed watching Tank sit in the window well and watch the birds when she notices a little spider crawling toward her. She cocks her head and paws at it. The spider does the defensive raise his two front legs thing. It was great, this tiny spider confronting this huge cat. It looked like a boxer’s stance which made it even funnier. Tank notices that I’m watching her closely and decides I need to pet her. She takes a step forward, right onto the spider. She’s completely oblivious to this act of destruction. She backs up when I burst out laughing and the spider throws itself into the screen well where she can’t get to him, and dies.
I felt bad for the guy, he was just eating bugs, happy as a clam in the window when the massive paw of death came down upon him, and the cat never had a clue.
[Barenaked Ladies voice] If I had a million dollars, I’d incinerate all the spiders, but not the real spiders, that’s cruel[/voice] 
What he said.
Seriously, though, I’m a reflexive spider-screamer. Maybe this should go into the
Embarrasing Things thread, but I reinforce every stereotype concerning spiders and young women. Shrieking, swatting at thin air, shrieking, running, shrieking, shrieking…eurgh. I hate it, but the second I see one on the wall, ceiling, or worse yet, shower – “EEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”
Joins Kythereia and goes into fetal position. Hold me, will ya?
Also? I could learn to spell. That’d be totally awesome, too.
I like to look at spiders - when they aren’t in my house. I love to examine webs.
However, once woke up with a very large red swollen spot (about 3 inches across) on my leg. Thinking nothing of it (mosquito bites have led to bigger bumps), I went to school.
About an hour later, I went to scratch my itchy leg and noticed through my nylons that my entire leg was covered with a large rash. So, I went to the medical center. The RN gave me a prescription for some benedryl and hydrocortisone. Almost 2 months later, my leg finally went back to normal. The RN was able to identify a spider bite in the middle of the bump but never identified the species.
Those yellow sac spiders look a lot like the ones that infested my car last year. I think it happened while I was away for a week. After weeks of watching spiders crawl across my windshield (on the inside), and finding them on my seat, I finally brought in the exterminator. He said that my entire engine and the wheel wells were FILLED with spiderwebs. :eek:
I don’t like spiders. I don’t like almost getting into a car accident because they startle me. I also don’t like my car smelling like insecticide for 3 months 
Okay now I’m skeeved I’m skeeved i’m skeeved I’M MAJORLY MAJORLY SKEEVED!!!
(sits for a moment, panting)
That said, I do catch spiders for my daughter, including 4 wolf spiders last fall. I even have a patent spider-catcher made out of a mason jar and piece of paper.
I’ve tried so hard to get past my arachnophobia, I’ve probably ruptured several internal organs. 
Nonetheless, the base arachnophobia is still there…
(brushes back of neck, lets, runs fingers through hair, looks carefully at floor around feet.)
Daddy long-legs don’t bother me, though.
And Asbestos Mango was right in that other thread about Black Widows being EVERYWHERE in Vegas. The book drops for the James R. Dickinson Library at UNLV were full of them. I’ll also never forget the day I was talking to a friend in her laundry room and she casually mentioned I had a Widow the size of my thumb about three inches from my ankle. :eek:
Mrs. Furthur
Something very similar happened to me a few years back.
I was still living with my parents and I was in my room doing homework on my computer. I was drinking some orange juice and casually brought it to my lips, when I noticed a brown something squirming in my drink. Big honking brown spider. Gah!
However, I didn’t calmly place the glass down and cry, oh no. I spastically freaked out - impulsively throwing the glass away from me, and it shattered to the ground. Then I cried.
My dad saw the whole thing not knowing at first that a spider caused the whole drama. The look on his face was one I never saw before.
The more recent of spider crossing was at my first apartment. I was very cheerfully walking to my bedroom with a plate of food when I saw a HUGE HUGE brown spider on my wall near my fireplace. It was Ahnold Schwartzenspidah. I nearly dropped my plate.
I was almost in tears. I was all by myself, scared to death of spiders - enough to where I can’t even bring myself to kill them because I’m irrationally afraid that they will attack me.
I eventually worked up the nerve to throw my shoe at the wall. I got him, but it was really hard for me to sleep that night. Washington house spiders are truly wicking looking things…shudders
So, guess what lovely critter invaded Pookah’s dream last night?
Well, at least, unlike Lightin’, I got to wake up and realise it was all a bad dream.
We get huge spiders in the summer here. After talking to my coworkers and doing a few searches, I found out that they’re Nephila clavata, or jyorô-gumo in Japanese.
As one of my friends put it, “I’ve got spiders the size of a small dog in my back yard.” They look like this. The official story is that they’re only 20-30 mm, but often the bodies on these buggers are the size of my thumb (5-6 cm) or even bigger by the end of summer. And yes, unfortunately I have been close enough to compare. The webs are everywhere. Cleaning shreds of web off your face is a daily occurrance in the warm season.
Cross my heart, the following is true, I saw it happen myself.
I was working in the bakery of one of the big Wal-Marts. A coworker of mine had a fly touch down on her upper lip, just below her nose. Very startled, she gasps and inhales the little bastard up into her sinus cavity. Did I mention it was still alive? And wiggling around in there? She had to go to the ER to get it flushed out, or extracted, or whatever they called it.
Spiders. shudders Horrible visceral spider fear.
crawls in corner with Kythereia and dare_devil007_
I wish I weren’t so afraid of spiders. The time I found a spider in my bed shot the possibility of losing my fear all to hell.
twitches
Yes, I know spiders kills bugs, blah blah blah … Goodie for them. I still hate the creatures.
I have two spider stories.
Story 1:
I lived in Guam for a year when I was 12. My sister, my mother and I were watching television one night. I was sitting on the floor, and my mother and sister were sitting on the sofa behind me.
I turned to tell my sister something, and on the wall not two feet behind her head was a ***GIGANTAMONGOUS *** spider . It was WAY bigger than my fist, and it was black with long hairy legs.
I was transfixed. I couldn’t speak, only pointing like a deaf mute at the wall while my sister said, “What? WHAT??” all the while looking at me like I was an idiot.
She finally turned around, and when she spotted it she moved so fast it put hummingbirds to shame.
I went and got a broom, my sister grabbed a can of Raid, and my mother tried to catch the cat to keep it from trying to bat the spider down from the wall.
It took us 20 minutes to kill it.
I was thoroughly traumatized by the incident and didn’t sleep well for weeks afterward.
Story 2:
I was swimming in an irrigation canal behind my house, just playing in the water on a hot summer day, right next to this makeshift “bridge” that consisted of several long wooden planks thrown over the expanse of the ditch, which was about six or seven feet.
Under the wooden planks I spied a rather large spider. On closer inspection, I realized it was a wolf spider and it was really just minding its own business.
Like an idiot, I began splashing it with water, hoping to dislodge it from its place under the bridge, but it held tight; I actually saw it hunker down. This went on for, oh, about a full 60 seconds. I grew bored and went back to playing in the water, but revisited the spider about a half hour later. It was still waiting for a meal to happen along. I splashed it again - and again and again and again, and then it did something that I’ve never seen a spider do, ever: IT LUNGED AT ME. And I don’t mean that it fell into the water and looked like it lunged at me. I mean that it jumped a foot from the bottom of the bridge toward me, and then ** skitted across the water in several short hops in my direction.**
It moved about four feet in under 3 seconds. Holy crap! I barely had time to react. Luckily, it didn’t catch me, cuz it would have made a snack of my face if it had.
Needless to say, I never tortured another spider again.
And DAMN, those wolf spiders are smart.
To hell with Jaws…THAT story makes me afraid to ever go in the water again!
runs away to the corner to join the others, whimpering "they skitter…they skitter…
Hobo spiders hate me. Thank heaven I moved south!
These guys are thick on the ground in southeast Idaho (whence I came) and basically nonexistant in Texas (where I am). We used to rate them in “thumpers” based on how many thumps of your average athletic shoe it took to kill it. Resiliant, aggressive, pure evil. And they would go out of their way to get me.
When I moved to Texas I took a bus to Salt Lake City and then a plane from SLC to DFW, which took most all of one day. The morning after I arrived in Texas I woke up with a large swelling and bruising on my leg. It looked incredibly similar to the hobo bite I had received a year prior, but since I was assured that “We don’t have hobos down here” I was a bit nervous that it might be a recluse bite and decided to keep an eye on it.
That night I was up late reading in bed when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Climbing out of my backpack is this hobo! A triple-thumper, easy! This bastard apparently hitched a ride in my backpack which was with my person the whole trip and which I reached into who knows how many times, stayed quiet throught the whole trip, got out at night to climb on the bed and bite me and then went back into the backpack to hide again! And he was coming out again for another attack! Eeeyuch!
Maybe I’ll rethink that visit to my parents’ house in Idaho this year…
So, I’m rock climbing with my husband - I’m on the rope, he’s on belay, and things are grand. Until. While looking for a hold, I spot this enormous spider, just hanging out there on the rock. I yell “Let me down now!” SpouseO, being a good kind of man, does just that.
Since I wasn’t up very high, I point out the spider. We’re either killing it or moving, 'cuz no way in hell am I climbing with it there. And setting up takes a goodly amount of time, so moving’s not really an option. Mr. Snicks smiles kindly, and you can just tell he’s thinking, “there she goes again, another tiny spider.” Until he actually looks at it. Then he’s afraid that my hiking boot won’t make a very good spider smasher as the spider’ll probably just grab it and throw it back at him. I was happy to have found a spider that would give him the heebies.
Another time, we’re on vacation in Florida with my family. We decide to visit the Everglades and enjoy the natural beauty. If you’ve been, you know that they have many boardwalks set up so that you can really get out there and see without disturbing anything.
I’m sure the mangroves really are quite beautiful. Personally, I wouldn’t know. I was too busy being terrified by the spider hellhole I was in - spiders between the railings, spiders suspended from the branches above me, spiders weaving webs in the mangrove roots all around me, spiders everywhere. Eventually I abandoned all pretense and ran to the end of the boardwalk and waited by the car for everyone else. I’ll enjoy the view from the car, thanks.
How about a spider in your PANTS?
As a side note, many years ago I awoke to discover the tickling sensation on my lips was a June Bug. Anything with more than 4 legs now gives me a crawling fit of the heebie-jeebies, and I think I’m going to join the crew in the corner now.
Move over guys, I need some room. shudder
The story in that link made me laugh so hard. [sidebar] What did Payton’s Servant do to get banned? [/sidebar]