I’m the first to admit that spiders scare me. It all started when I was playing with my toys outside as a kid. I was suddenly struck with the horrific realization that they were covered in tiny red ants. I never played in that spot again. Spiders are wiry and unsettlingly fast, even if they are pinhead-sized like the red ones I saw that day.
These tiny god-knows-how-many-legged demons love dark and enclosed places we rarely clean. When I recently moved apartment, I discovered a sizable spider under my bed and spent hours trying to coax it out of my bedroom. Despite carefully guiding it out with a dustpan, I saw it scuttle across the floor later that night.
Household spiders, however, usually only grow to a certain size. If you’re particularly unlucky, you’ll find one big enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But the colossal monstrosity Twitter user Lydia found in the corner of her bedroom on August 30 really was the stuff of nightmares…
I have absolutely no idea how Lydia managed to mistake a spider that large for dust. As if the spider itself wasn’t bad enough, unbeknownst to Lydia, it had started a family in her bedroom. What makes this story even more horrifying, however, is that what happened to Lydia is not an isolated incident…
Lydia lives in Yorkshire, England, and the aforementioned Tweet was posted at 23:46 BST – meaning that she’d probably spotted it just before going to sleep. Personally, I’d have screamed the house down if I’d found a spider that big and its sprogs in my bedroom!
It didn’t take long for Lydia’s post to go viral, and the good people of Twitter echoed similar sentiments to mine.
To put Lydia’s horrific discovery in context, here’s a close up of the spider and its babies. It’s so big that it looks like a Halloween decoration…
Thankfully, Lydia had a sense of humor about the attention her horrific discovery received on the social networking site.
Lydia might be based in England, but what she found in her bedroom mirrored similar discoveries around the world in recent weeks. Lauren, from Mount Coolum in Queensland, Australia, posted a video of this monstrosity scuttling up her window this week too…
Whilst the type of spider in Lydia’s room has not been identified, the one found by Lauren was a huntsman spider, and some Twitter users have speculated that Lydia found the same thing. However, these are native to warmer parts of the world and not England.
This is how the spider in Lydia’s room eventually met its fate – with hairspray and toilet roll.
Well, I don’t know about you, but this story has inspired me to invest in a very large duster and a lot more cleaning products. Horrifyingly, spider sightings like this one are most common around this time of year because it’s the mating season so it is probably a good idea to lock your windows too.
Here’s a video that proves us aracnaphobics are perfectly justified in our fear. This spider had the nerve to attack a venomous snake…
