Yesterday evening I happened to notice a spider at the edge of the ceiling in our bedroom. This happens all of the time, and I usually reach for a shoe and crush them at the moment I see them. I didn’t crush this one. I forgot about it.
I woke up at around 2am for a brief trip to the bathroom, and when I came back, I lay down and began to fall back into peacful slumber.
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. plop
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I felt something land on my left arm. Even in my three-quarters-asleep state I had one clear thought: the spider :eek:
But it couldn’t be. I must have told my wife a thousand times with previous spiders “It’s up there on the ceiling, bothering no one. It isn’t going to fall on us.” But this one did. Actually, it slid down its single glistening thread of spider silk like a silent ninja, landing gently on my arm, awakening me immediately.
I slowly held my arm up to the dim glow of the street lights outside and saw the clear profile of the creature. Ick. I didn’t swat at it, fearing that it would escape in the darkness – I slowly reached over and turned on the light to better follow my quarry.
It was gone.
I spent the next fifteen minutes shaking the pillows and bedclothes, moving the mattress, until I finally spotted it on the box spring. A small furry spider with stubby legs. Alas, I wasn’t fast enough. It’s still there somewhere.
Figuring that it was happily spinning a web between the coils of the box spring, I attempted to go back to sleep, but after such vigorous exercise it took some time.
Damned spider.
I learned my lesson: Squashing spiders in the bedroom has priority over all other activities. Always squash them the moment they are first spotted.
I was sitting here at the computer this morning, with my left hand on the mouse, and I felt like what could have been a splinter in my thumb. The splinter thing could have been possible, as we are having some construction going on at the house.
I kept feeling a sharp pain in my left thumb, like the pain you feel when you press on your skin where a deep splinter is. It kept hurting, so I finally looked at it. It was a damned spider! Apparently, it had been biting my left thumb, in the crease where the fingernail and skin meet.
I didn’t used to be a 'phobe. Not until I was about 9. I crawled in bed on a cold night and after a few minutes felt what I thought was a ball of lint on my leg by my knee. But it seemd to be an awfully big ball of lint. Acting on a hunch I stopped moving my leg around and wedged my hand between the mattress and my leg until the “lint ball” rolled between my hand and leg. It wriggled. I knew what it was. In about a tenth off a second I was standing on the side of the room looking at a very bruised and befuddled spider glaring back at me from my bed. It was one of these as best as I can tell, or at least the imported version which has overrun the Pacific Northwest.
I was a little freaked out, but I was no sissy and might have recovered fully. But after dispatching it in the usual manner (smashed it with a rock) I flipped the covers back just to make sure it was alone. It wasn’t, there was another. I slept on the couch. I don’t know if they were beamed there from the mother ship, or if they were just out for a romp, or if my brother had something to do with it, but I haven’t been right with spiders ever since.
About ten years ago, I noticed a fat green spider scurrying across my bed. I tried to whisk it off, but I couldn’t seem to manage it. I reached over to my nightstand looking for something to hit it with, and saw *hundreds * of tiny green spiders crawling all over my nightstand, the floor beneath it, and the wall above it.
I remember reading somewhere that the dreaded Hobo Spider of North America is actually an imported UK native spider, which is little-known over here since it is preyed on by the common (and harmless) house spider. Tegenaria gigantea is your friend!
Now you have made me feel quite guilty, and I suspect that my current episode was just spider karma coming back to me.
You see, one day back in the springtime, one of the kids was complaining that there were spiders in their room. These guys are teenagers, so I just blew it off and told him to kill it and go to bed. He said he couldn’t reach it, so I went in to assist.
There were hundreds of little baby spiders crawling on the ceiling. I kept my cool while saying “Let’s make sure we get them all and then you can go to bed.” as I was squishing spiders like mad with my thumbs.
Remarkably, they both accepted my mandate and slept through the night.
My wife washed every bit of bedding and vaccummed the furthest recesses of the room the next day. No one ever mentioned the incident again.
Nuts. The Kohr-Ah and the Kzer-Za may be mortal enemies as well, yet they would both conquer us. Spideys have no love of humans, they are competing for the right to eat our eyes!
mutters to self Don’t click links in spider threads. Don’t click links in spider threads. Heck, don’t click on spider threads!
I have a recurring nightmare of waking up to see a spider coming at me from the cieling hanging from his thread. I wake up and jump out of bed, switch on the lights and start smacking myself trying to get it off me, then I search the bed for the spider. It’s always a dream but I can never go back to sleep without checking for spiders anyway.
Once when I was small, and slept with a light on, I opened my eyes to see a large fat hairy black spider crawling across my ceiling. Warily I watched it as it reached a point directly above my face and then deliberately and with malicious aforethought let go.
I broke some laws of physics exiting my bed and leaping across the room; indeed I moved so fast that when I reached the wall and turned around I could still see me on the other side of the room. Once my heartbeat calmed down and my skin stopped whimpering and trying to crawl off my body, I tore my bed apart. Never did find the little fiend. I swear spiders have teleportation powers.
Someone once told me that at no point in your life are you ever more than 3 feet away from a spider. I smacked that someone, because that was information I was happier not knowing. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
You know, Diana, I slept absolutely horribly last night. My saving grace as I’ve been slogging through the day today was having the knowledge that absolutely nothing could keep me from sleeping soundly tonight.
Thanks for killing that dream. :mad:
I tend to let spiders in our house live unless they’re in a place where we’re likely to come into contact with one another soon. The bedroom is off limits, though, and the previous stories in this thread tell me that I’m well justified in my thinking. My own spider freak-out came not from within the bedroom, but while I was in my car. I park my car in our garage, which has plenty of spiders in it, but we all leave each other alone and live peacefully. One night, however, I left my sunroof open. The next afternoon, I was driving down the street about four blocks from my house when a smallish white spider dropped down from the ceiling and proceeded to land ON MY MOTHER-LOVIN’ GLASSES. :eek:
I will never know how I didn’t run off the road. I am, however, quite certain that any patrons outside of the Walgreens I pulled over next to got quite a kick out of seeing me flailing helplessly at my face. The real pisser is that I managed to fling the offender onto my dashboard where he scurried away into a crevice. I spent about a week afterward being extremely paranoid while driving. And I haven’t left a window cracked in the garage since.
I saw some stupid devil/horror movie when I was teenager and in the movie some poor girl was forced to lay in bed with her mouth open as a spider was lowered into it.
I slept on my freakin stomach for MONTHS after that!
I will never get how such a small little thing freaks me out.
I’m not especially arachnaphobic, but my ex-wife is. I walked into our daughter’s bedroom once and found Michelle standing frozen in place, her complexion as white as a sheet. When I asked what the problem was, all she could do was move her eyes up to the ceiling, where a really tiny spider was dangling from a thread. Until I had applauded it to death, she was completely unable to move. And then she burst into tears.
She’s must better now, though.
As far as things that go scuttle scuttle in the night, there was the time that I opened my eyes to find a four inch long scorpion climbing the wall right in front of my face. When I turned on the light, it dashed under a poster. I grabbed a hiking boot and tried to stomp it through the poster. With a fairly satisfying crunch, it dropped down to the floor behind my bed. After finishing the rest of the night on the living room sofa, I went back the next morning with a flashlight and tongs to recover the corpse. There wasn’t one.
I’ve been an arachnophobe since I almost ran face-first into a big ass yellow and black spider. Keep in mind that I was only about six years old at the time.
The closest I can come to identifying the spider from memory is this (warning, creepy bugs ahead) picture and page. However, it says that the yellow garden spider, which looks suspiciously like what I ran into, only reaches about an inch long. This sucker was easily three inches long in the body, with a legspan that could have covered my face at six years of age.
I was never afraid of spiders and creepy-crawlies in the past. In Texas, which is where this happened, we had a house that had big tall windows that swung out like doors. Being six, I thought it was the niftiest thing ever to climb out of them. Until I did one day and found one of THOSE sitting about two inches from my face.
I screamed, and I never liked spiders after that. The only reason, btw, that I know that it was that big, is because it was apparently a nesting female, and she STAYED THERE for about a month, not moving except to kill stuff, and my dad measured her (she was outside, laying against the window). He was quite impressed with her girth, and refused to kill her even at my terror. “Tasha, that spider is downright beautiful.” He said.
ME TOO! Well I actually didn’t see the movie “Deadly Blessing” But I remember the advertisement for it with the hands around the ladies head and the spider dropping in. ACK!
I checked up on the myth of swallowing spiders in your sleep, there was a claim that the average person swallowed 8 live spiders in their sleep per year. Fortunately, SDSTAFF weighs in.
Also reminds me of a Bloom County cartoon where Binkley was talking to the creature from his closet, and the creature mentions that while Binkley was sleeping there were cockroaches on the ceiling. “So?” says Binkley. “Clumsy cockroaches!” says the creature in the closet.
