SPIDERS! Right out of a horror movie....

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

…well not quite. However, I had a confrontation tonight. I went out back to turn off some sprinklers and on the way back to the door walked through a spiderweb. Well, spiders don’t really freak me out and walking through a string or 2 of spider silk at night happens, so I didn’t think to much about it and when I got to the back door light I brushed it off my face and saw a streamer of web from the light comming out of the house. Hmmm… in that streamer are hundreds of baby spiders. Before I even looked down at myself I muttered, “Oh, F**k!” Looked down and, YUP, covered in baby spiders. The floating streamer? Caught on the door jam but floating like a streamer inside the house. I scooped them out of the air and beat off real quick (:D, pervs!) and ran to the shower. Every drop of water going down my back was a spider. I’m pretty sure they’re still in my ears.

Ever been covered in bugs?

2

I had a very similar experience. One day last spring I opened my rarely-used front door to check the mailbox. I stuck my arm into a web that ran from the mailbox to the other side of the door. There must have been an egg sac burst just that day because all of a sudden there were teeny tiny spiderlings all over me. I didn’t go back into the house, I just grabbed the (already running) hose and doused myself off.
I promptly went into the house and got all of the ‘Raid’ that I could, and when I ran out of that used hot water on the little buggers. Euw.

3

No, but thanks to you I will tonight, in my nightmares.

4

So, watch Arachnophobia lately? :smiley:

5

::shudder::

6

In the aforementioned movie Arachnophobia the deadly spiders they had scuttling around the place were gathered from a suburb in Auckland, New Zealand called Avondale. These are known as Avondale Spiders.

But in fact that’s just a different name for Huntsman Spiders, which are native to Australia and are every-bloody-where.

So when you say “Seen spiders from out of a horror movie?” I can safely say “Yes. I have.”

Huntsmans are actually harmless, and quite docile from what I can tell. But they’re frickin’ eeeeeee-normous!!!

7

I’m squealing in my chair right now. Thank you.

8

Cripes, Whammo!

I’m not a bugphobe in general but spiders… spiders… spiders… ok, I know they have their place in the food chain and all and I won’t squish 'em… unless they’re the big hairy ones that live in the woods near my parents… little bits of SATAN they are getemoff getemoff getemOFF!

(Am I the only one who doesn’t find Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web all that charming? Get the friggin’ Raid! There’s a giant friggin’ spider in the barn!)

9

Once when on holiday in Tasmania I went on a guided tour of a couple of cave systems. In the first cave the guide told us about a fairly common type of cave spider that we might encounter. She said we shouldn’t worry though, as they weren’t very big, “only about the size of a woman’s hand.” :eek:

And I feel it worth restating what GuanoLad said: “Huntsmans are actually harmless, and quite docile from what I can tell. But they’re frickin’ eeeeeee-normous!!!” I encounter them not quite rarely enough. shudders

10

There was a small spider in my shower this morning. It couldn’t climb out of the tub, so I picked it up and put it on the ledge.

It was either that or shower with it.

11

OMG! :eek:

Whammo, that’s just disturbing. I’m so glad I didn’t read that right before going to bed last night and I hope that I get that image out of my head before I sleep tonight.

12

A very good frined of mine is so deathly afriad of spiders, she won’t even spell the word. As in, when we were talking about going to see a recent movie, she writes Along Came A Sp-d-r. If you are in a grocery store, or a pool, or a car or even in bed and you brush your fingers on her and say “Spider” she freaks right the hell out and has the heepy-jeebies for a good 5 minutes or so.
It’s gotten to the point where we came just look at her, wiggle our fingers and mouth spider and she’ll squirm.

Now, for my “baby spiders” story.
Years ago I was lying in bed, taking a not-quite-nap (you know, where you’re not quite asleep, but you’re not quite awake) and I noticed little tiny dots movign across my ceiling. I spent the next hour and a half crushing baby spiders on the ceiling of a 12’x14’ room. Damn near slept with a mask for a week, too.

13

Two events in my life have turned me into a raving spider-phobic.

As a young kid I went over to play at a friend’s house. He had a treehouse in the back yard. We raced each other and (lucky me!) I was first to the treehouse and up the ladder. Inside was pitch black and it took me several beats to realize that every inch of every surface inside that space was covered with daddylonglegs. That quickly started covering every square inch of ME, as well.

In my haste to exit that box of horrors I forgot that my friend was still climbing up the ladder behind me. Fortunately it didn’t take more than a few days for my sneakerprints to work themselves out of his spine.
Second event was during a family canoe trip through the Okeefenokee. (“Here’s a vacation idea! Let’s drag our pre-teen kids through a vermin-and-alligator-infested swamp!”) After a stop at an all-too-rare “comfort” station (if comfort is defined as a festering sh*t-hole dug into the peat) we climbed back in the canoe and shoved off again. About fifteen feet from shore I felt a tickle and looked down. There on my forearm was a huge hairy grey eight-legged nightmare.

Shrieking, frantically swatting at the beast, I knocked it off my arm. But did it fall in the water? No, I’d knocked it into the bottom of the canoe, right between my feet. I stood up and started doing the watusi around it, and my father, mindful of us capsizing anywhere NEAR possible alligator locations, forcibly sat me down, reached around, scooped up the thing and dropped it in the water.

It was with no small amount of satisfaction that I sat and watched it slowly tumble down to a watery grave.

Despite my cowering hatred of all things arachnid, I’ve still been designated the “Tygr Household Spider Killer” because

A) Mrs. Tygr hates and fears them even more than I do.

B) My shoes are bigger than hers.
-Tygr, Defender of the fair Lady Tygr and Slayer of the Nasty Eight-Legged, Thousand-Eyed Beastys

14

Spiders and I have an “arrangement”. They don’t come anywhere near me, and I don’t scream and cower like a little girl. Sometimes they break the deal, however; and I am forced to do likewise.

Why is manly ol’ Lighnin’ so afraid of the eight-legged horrors, you ask? Well, lemme tell ya.

I grew up out in the country- Santa Fe, Texas, to be precise. It’s over near Galveston way. We had a HUUUGE front yard- about two acres of wooded land. And did I mention the spiders? No? Well, I should have.

They were frickin’ everywhere. We’re talking black, white, and yellow monstrosities. They liked to weave these huge webs between the trees (they also put these cool lookin’ zig-zags in the webs, too, which made spotting the webs slightly easier). You probably know what kind of spider I’m talking about- we always just called 'em “garden spiders”, as if a harmless-sounding name could defang these terrors.

Huh. I’ll be darned. That IS what they’re called. This is one: http://www.ecofloridamag.com/gallery/gal_garden_spider.htm

Scary, eh?

Anyway.

Around my seventh birthday, a date which will live in terror, I was playing hide-and-seek with the neighbor kids. I was running away from my friend as he tried to tag me, when I accidently tagged a garden spider’s web.

With my face.

With the spider in the web.

Spider side in.
Yep, I ran directly into the web, and pinned the spider to my face with its own web. I’m sure the thing was just as terrified as I was. I’m also certain the damn thing was trying to eat my face off, and had been just lying in wait for me to run into its web, thinking that it’d be able to live for YEARS off my tender young flesh.

I screamed a scream I’ve been destined to repeat whenever, in later years, a spider has once again gotten too close to me, and proceeded to pound my face with my fists- and when that didn’t work, the ground.

Five minutes and one black eye later, I was still breathing like a racehorse. I think the spider got away safely. All I know is that, from that point on, any sort of web on my face makes me curl into a fetal ball.

15

Ahhh, yes, garden spiders. Beautiful creatures, in a frightening sort of way. I really love it when they start shaking their webs…

I had a spider try to catch me once. No shit, I came out my front door one day, and a smallish brown spider had strung it’s web between the railings of my front porch. Undaunted, I grabbed a twig, tore the web down and went on my merry way to the supermarket. When I returned with my groceries, I found the spider had spun a new web, clearly figuring that when I returned, I would be too busy fumbling with my bags and housekeys to notice, and it could get me with assorted side dishes from the grocery sacks into the bargain. A few years after that I saw a “Far Side” cartoon in which two spiders had built a web across the bottom of a playground slide. One was saying to the other, “If we pull this off, we’ll live like kings!”

There are exactly two species of spider in the universe that I’m not afraid of- the tarantula, which is very large, and you can see them coming, so a sneak attack is out of the question, and the black widow.

Vegas is crawling with black widows. There are probably more black widow spiders per square foot out here than there are casinos. Go for a walk some evening. Every chain-link fence, wall, piece of landscaping edging, has at least one black widow web every three feet. You see the residents of these webs hanging there,upside-down, displaying the telltale red hourglass markings on the undersides of their abdomens. (I never see them when I’m on the Strip, though. They have waaaaayyyyy too much class to hang around up there)

Black widows are the second deadliest creature on the planet, the first being an Australian spider that I can’t think of the name of. They are also incredibly mellow. Your average black widow spider is more laid back than your average Buddhist monk. I once was sitting in the grass in front of my apartment when I realized that my hand was about six inches from a black widow’s web, spider in situ. I shuddered briefly, then realized that the spider meant me no harm. She just sat there. So, I just sat there too. If you are bitten by one, you’re in trouble- a bite can kill a child, and an adult would be very ill and in extreme pain for several days if antivenin wasn’t administered in time, but you really have to try to get bitten- stick your hand right in the web, the spider would probably try to escape before it would resort to biting you.

“I’m deadly, I’m cool. You don’t fuck with me, I won’t fuck with you.”

16

The “Garden spider” whose photo was linked to looks like a yellow argiope, just to apply more specific nomenclature.

You’re probably thinking of the Sydney Funnel Web, which has killed a moderate number of people (in the low double digits) in the past thirty years. They get to be 3" across, and will aggressively charge at interlopers. Their fangs are strong enough to bite through a shoe.

I’m not sure what you’re using to measure lethality, but black widows aren’t nearly as venomous as something like a brown recluse spider. And both of those pale in lethality compared to a taipan (snake) or a cone snail.

I was in Queensland, Australia, and was told about the golden orb weaver, a large (the size of your hand) black and yellow spider. Apparently the bites aren’t fatal unless you’re young/old/infirm, but they’re supposed to be excruciating. And the spiders latch on and bite repeatedly.

I was walking through an outdoor area, looking at something, and turned my head just in time to see the spider in its web, six inches from my face. A nice big golden orb weaver. Gah! Made me nervous the rest of the trip. In fact, it still gives me the willies, knowing that I almost had that venomous monstrosity clinging to me.

17

as long as they keep their distance! And the really little ones amuse me. But brown recluses scare the bejeebers out of me - extremely bad bite and they’re aren’t easy to recognize, unlike black widows.

One time I had a spider that I swear was after me. I had brought a computer and printer home to do some work, and I was working while getting ready the next morning. As I sat at the computer, this large spider(looked like a half-sized tarantula) crawls on the ceiling to the spot directly over my head. So I decide it’s time to get dressed. When I get back, she’s hiding in the corner by the door I go through. So when I sit back down, she moves back to the ceiling right over my head. Don’t tell me this isn’t deliberate! She probably thought I looked like the juiciest tidbit she had seen in a long time. So I found the can of Raid and soaked her.

18

Oh yeah… Spiders are icky! My latest spider trauma was pretty bad. We have these pretty big grass/garden/wolf spider things around here. They look like anorexic tarantulas. (shudder)

Well anyway, I’d been leaving my wet river boots out on the porch to dry (I’m sure you can see where this is going). One morning, I to run to the car and needed a pair of shoes. So I grabbed them and put them on. I took a few steps when I realised that one boot was full of “river gravel”. Boy was I surprised when I took the boot off thinking I shake the rocks out. This HUGE monster spider rolled out! Not hurt in the slightest from my walking all over him inside my boot.

The entire neighborhood heard me howl. It was so big, that my normal spider killing roomie was afraid to get near it. And I had my wee little bare foot in there with that beast. My skin still crawls. (the roomie is now required to inspect all suspect boots for spiders now)

19

Reading posts like these remind me why I live where I do. The worst thing to fear around here is a crazed Japanese tourist with a fetish for having his picture taken with a Canadian hottie :wink:

I have not ever been afraid of a spider. Wolverines, bears, the occasional feline, but never a spider. I don’t usually kill them when I find them in the house, either, because they eat other, bad bugs like mosquitoes and horseflies and generally nasty things.

If, however, I find one in the bedroom, I get rid of it. Usually by putting it outside, occasionally squeeshing it.
However, we don’t have big-ass spiders. Unless you wanna count the Rocky Mountain Barking Spider… And even those aren’t big. They just have reeeeally bad breath :wink:

Ginger

20

Did you hear about the girl who had this really tall beehive hairdo, and then one day she fainted, and after she was rushed to the hospital the doctors discovered that spiders had nested inside her hairdo and EATEN HER BRAIN! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! :wink: