to leave DP because he won't rearrange the bedroom...

[acatcalledjohn]

...in order to catch the big black house spider which ran behind it?

We only noticed its presence when JohnCat climbed in the curtains to try and catch it. It promptly fell on the floor and ran behind a chest of drawers (which I made DP move). Spider has since inconveniently relocated to behind the wardrobe. I'm now pretty much permanently staring at the wardrobe, waiting for it to appear.

Tempted to sleep in the car.

[AliceScarlett]

LTB

[mrselizabethdarcy]

Absolutely LTB

[lunar1]

No need to LTB, chances are that it will be one of the eight a year that one of you will eat in your sleep. It will be gone by morning.

[acatcalledjohn]

lunar!

[PeppasNanna]

lunar !!!

[acatcalledjohn]

It's re-appeared, been caught and put outside!

Oh, the relief!

[acatcalledjohn]

I should add that it travelled 3 meters along a wall and then climbed up it.

Like Usain Bolt but with 6 extra legs...

[catl1tterinmybra]

You can get awesome spidery removery things from Lakeland.

[Happfeet2911]

Sack the cat, mine is an ace spider killer!

[Fluffyears]

Why are people scared of spiders? They are harmless insects more scared of you than you are of it.

[waitingforcalpoltowork]

fluffyears im not only scared of spiders but also balloons i know its fucking stupid its not called an irrational fear for nothing you know

[VenusInFauxFurs]

Not insects, Fluffy.

[howabout]

YABU

My house spiders keep all the nasty insects at bay.

Also we are a cat allergic family.

[Aramynta]

Get rid, undoubtedly.

DH, not the cat

[MyFavouriteClintonisGeorge]

fluffy it's not fear really, it's panic: "a sudden overwhelming fear, with or without cause, that produces hysterical or irrational behavior, and that often spreads quickly through a group of persons or animals" according to dictionary.com.

So-called after the Greek god Pan, who could spread such fear by playing his pipes. Or something.

If phobias were rational and explicable, people would just think their way out of having them.

[acatcalledjohn]

To be fair, I don't like spiders, but I catch them and put them outside, rather than kill them. We also have two daddy long legs type spiders which live in the bedroom and can stay.

Those big & fast house spiders I do not like at all. They run . I can catch them in a glass, but I absolutely loathe them.

My issue last night was knowing one of those was in the room, but not knowing where. It's an irrational fear, I know that. However, knowing it is irrational does not make it a cure.

[TheIncomparableDejahThoris]

People do NOT eat eight spiders a year.

From snopes:

Origins: It's hard enough to avoid those horrible wriggly things while we're awake, and now we have to worry that they're crawling into our mouths while we sleep? Little Miss Muffett was a piker.

Fear not. This "statistic" average the average person swallowing eight spiders per year was not only made up out of whole cloth, it was invented as an example of the absurd things people will believe simply because they come across them on the Internet.

As noted inScientific American, this claim is highly implausible from a biological standpoint:

The myth flies in the face of both spider and human biology, which makes it highly unlikely that a spider would ever end up in your mouth.

Three or four spider species live in most North American homes, and they all tend to be found either tending their webs or hunting in nonhuman-infested areas. During their forays, they usually don’t intentionally crawl into a bed because it offers no prey (unless it has bed bugs, in which case that person has bigger problems). Spiders also have

no interest in humans. "Spiders regard us much like they'd regard a big rock," says Bill Shear, a biology professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and former president of the American Arachnological Society. "We're so large that we're really just part of the landscape."

More than anything, spiders probably find sleeping humans terrifying. A slumbering person breathes, has a beating heart and perhaps snores — all of which create vibrations that warn spiders of danger. "Vibrations are a big slice of spiders' sensory universe," Crawford explains, "A sleeping person is not something a spider would willingly approach."

From the standpoint of human biology, the oral spider myth also seems ridiculous. If someone is sleeping with her mouth open, she's probably snoring — and thus scaring off any eight-legged transgressors. Plus, many people would likely be awakened by the sensation of a spider crawling over their faces and into their mouths. Shear can attest: once, while camping, he awoke to find a daddy longlegs crawling on his face.

So how did this claim arise? In a 1993PC Professionalarticle, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of "facts" that were circulating viae-mailand how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her ownmade-uplist of equally ridiculous "facts," among which was the statistic cited above about the average person's swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst's propagation of this false "fact" has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.

Last updated: 28 April 2014


Sources: Barham, Andrea. The Pedant's Revolt. New York: Delacorte Press, 2005. ISBN 0-385-34016-8 (pp. 21-22)

Clausen, Lucy W. Insect Fact and Folklore. New York: Collier Books, 1954 (p. 24)

Domke, Ellen. "Average Folks Need to Keep Mouths Shut." Chicago Sun-Times. 26 August 1997 (p. 20).

Holst, Lisa Birgit. "Reading Is Believing." PC Professional. 7 January

[acatcalledjohn]

I have a friend who once woke up with half a spider by her mouth.

She has been terrified of them ever since.

[EmilyPunkhurst]

I just need to say the most heartfelt thank you to TheIncomparableDejahThoris.

Really.

Thank you.

[TheIncomparableDejahThoris]

No problem.

P.S. careful on the actual snopes page. There's a rather large picture of a spider.

[Gottagetmoving]

There are probably spiders in every room of the house all the time, you just havent seen them all, so it is never safe to be in the house

[hedgehogsdontbite]

Burn the house down.

Then emigrate, just in case.

[Nanny0gg]

Then emigrate, just in case.

Just not to Australia...

[hedgehogsdontbite]

I hear there's no spiders on Antartica and house prices are cheap.