#1070 – Leap

Recently I was sitting in a recliner watching some cartoons with my son when I felt a tickle on my arm. My immediate thought was that there was an ant crawling on me. I jumped up and brushed off my arm but there was nothing there. It happened again. I jumped up… nothing there. I decided to take my chances with the couch instead. My wife then sat down in the recliner, felt a tickle on her arm and jumped up to see the giant chair-colored spider that was there this whole time. Because my brain thought “ant” I was looking for a dark black shape and looked right past the horrific reality in front of my face.

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58 thoughts on “#1070 – Leap”

  1. Karen says:

    I hope you didn’t smoosh the spider … always makes me sad when people kill them just for being “scary-looking”.

  2. A spider tried to deafen me three nights ago.

    I was fresh out of the shower taking a q-tip to my left ear when a monstrous (1cm – city-threatening!) wolf spider ran up the wall from behind the toilet. Yes, I jammed the q-tip into my head as I flinched in wet, naked panic.

  3. Church says:

    I had a moment like this once, I was actually under my sun room in back of my house with my brother in law looking at the foundation when I saw a spider crawl onto my shoulder like “Hey, sup?” I freaked out smacked it off and hit my head off the floor above me.

  4. Chris says:

    @Howard – There was once a spider in my q-tip box. Clearly this isn’t a coincidence and part of some sort of grand arachnid plan.

  5. speakerblast says:

    My best spider story? Why thank you for asking!

    So I’m sitting in my room, about to go to bed, when i catch movement out of the corner of my eye. It’s this average-sized spider just tearing across the wall. I of course to the manly thing and fall out of my bed. As I get a tissue to squish it, it goes and just lets go of the wall and falls to the ground. About a half hour of sentry duty in the middle of my room, and I find the spider hanging out on my blinds. Since I cant squish this spider on the blinds with a tissue, I grabbed my calculus textbook and pressed it against the blind. At this point, the spider made another dive bomb off the wall, and I dropped the textbook, knocking over a metal bottle, and waking up the house. My dad comes in angry and tells me to go to sleep. Long story short, I spent the night completely under my covers.

    I attained victory the next day when I saw the spider on the ceiling and exclaimed “YOU!” before squishing it.

  6. Miles says:

    Coincidentally, my roommate was trapped for ten minutes last night by a pair of black widow spiders. She came into the house quite shaken, and looked as though she’d been in tears while I did my absolute best to not laugh. Instead, I went out in my bare feet, and was standing in the laundry room as I read the instructions for the poison. She came out a bit later and cautioned “You’re standing exactly where the two spiders were menacing me.” I shrugged and told her I was not confronted by spiders. Also, it turns out at least one of the spiders was not a black widow. It WAS a black spikey looking spider, but it’s abdomen wasn’t bulbous enough and had np red hour glass underneath. Poor spider. . I only like spiders because my younger brother decided he didn’t when we were young. Now I don’t mind picking them up in my bare hands so long as they aren’t a clearly poisonous to human type (black widow, brown recluse). Centipedes on the other hand…

  7. BradSk88 says:

    I like how this comic is indirectly a joke told in two parts. Because you have to double-take before you see him outside.

  8. Sven says:

    A long time ago, while on holiday, we were surprised by a really large (5cm maybe), really scary looking spider.

    The really bad part: we saw this spider walking across the rear seat of the car. While on the highway. And it managed to get out of sight before we could catch it. And we had another 500km or so to drive with that spider in the car, without knowing where it was.

    For the record, we never saw it again.

  9. i.half4 says:

    Eight days a week? Eight legs, eight days.

    …OK, I know it’s a long shoe. [ignored typo because I found it amusing]

  10. Caitlin says:

    In a house with three boys, I am the designated spider remover because they’re all too pansy. I always take them outside instead of killing them, except for daddy-long-legses.
    My only horror spider story – staying at a holiday house with a semi-external (attached to the outside of the house) toilet, and a slow light. Turned the light on, nothing happened, sat down, light came on, entire room is full of daddy-long-legses. They’re the only spider I’ve ever seen en masse like that and so the only spider I absolutely hate 😛

  11. billy says:

    I used to think spiders back in my hometown (sunny Canada) were big. Then I moved to Australia where any spider under 3cm is considered small. Huntsman spiders(do a google search), which are entirely too common, like to hide behind things and run like hell towards what ever disturbs them.

  12. Fafnir13 says:

    I consider spiders to be cute on at least the same level as kittens. I think it’s the little black eyes and twitching mandibles.
    Did you know many spiders are “fooled” by TV’s? A lot of animals aren’t, seeing still images shown in quick succession rather then what we see. At the place I used to live, big wolf spiders were regular visitors to the TV room’s ceiling (it was right above the garage, which was pretty much spider central). They often seemed perfectly content to hunker down and watch TV with me. Then the rest of the family came home and the screaming started so I had to take the poor little guy outside.

  13. Vrominelli says:

    With a recent infestation of earwigs that moved into the weed filled garden at my house they’re looking for a new home after I removed all those weeds.

    So far I found earwigs into the double digits in my own home, and all those Biff comics with spiders made sense one night when I awoke to the blasted things crawling on me.

  14. Nilly says:

    Oh god oh god.

    I’ve had spiders crawl on me. Most disgusting feeling ever. I think the first one bit me.

  15. Micah says:

    Oh, man…I killed a spider in my bathtub this morning and I was waiting for it to go down the drain before I got in, but it never did. I ended up scooping it up in a piece of toilet paper, but I got the paper soaked by doing it. At least I got rid of the spider BEFORE the paper dissolved.

    Looked like one of those brown recluse.

  16. Micah says:

    Sorry for the double post, but…

    What was Biff doing watching TV without his shirt on? Or do I not want to know?

  17. Baughbe says:

    OK, I’ll bite. Why does Biff watch TV with his shirt off? Is it like a teletubby thing in reverse? Did that last question even make sense? Why am I still typing?

  18. Julie says:

    I once traded in a car after watching a thin white/clear bodied spider crawl up the windsheild and into the headliner while I was driving to work.

  19. steve-o says:

    Nothing ever happened to me, but a friend once had a black widow crawl in his ear

  20. MaskedMan says:

    @Baughbe; I will never look at Biff the same way again…

    A spider gave my sister a concussion once… OK, it was a paper spider, but still. One of my sisters dangled a paper spider over the edge of the top bunk on a bunk bed set, and the sister sleeping below cracked her head open on the bed frame trying to get away.
    Sleeping arrangements were changed.

  21. MaskedMan says:

    Oh, and I had a spider on my hand this weekend. One of those cool jumping spiders – about 7 or 8 mm long. I gave her a boost on her way with a hard puff of breath. I *like* jumping spiders. And orb weavers. And wolf spiders. But brown recluse and black widow spiders must relocate or die.

  22. brad says:

    When i was in the boy scouts at this one camp we would watch daddy long legs run into the camp fire. They sound like they are they are screaming eeeeeeee!!! as they burn. We just sat there laughing and fell off the benches.

  23. Morigale says:

    Sometimes I’ll see what I think is a gnat, only to realize it is an incredibly TINY spider of unknown species hanging on a line from the ceiling. What kind of spider is that? Where did it come from? Worst of all, how do I know the others that I DON’T notice haven’t landed on me?

    Larger spiders, the ones I can see, I’m fine with. As long as they stay out of my way, I try to herd flies in their direction. But the tiny, floating, invisible ones… Eeeeeegh.

  24. Acies says:

    wonder why most people are afraid of spiders but obviously dangerous animals like lions and tigers are cute? =3 i think the fuzzy ones with a row of eyes are cute.. but guess I haven’t met a real one yet….
    I used to take the spiders outside too, but I read online that some species like indoors, some like outdoors. If you found them in your house, they probably likes indoors and would not appreciate being put outdoors =/ So now I just move the spiders out of the way but let them stay in the house =3
    When I was little, I saw a spider on the wall and so I yelled for my dad. At the sound of my voice, the spider fell off the wall and I never saw it again XD

  25. Forte says:

    @Acies – I think most people are afraid of spiders because they have too many legs and too many eyes. Personally, I don’t like them because twice in the past, I was sitting at my computer and a spider thought it’d be funny to hang a line and descend right in front of my freakin’ face.

  26. Chris says:

    @steve-o – I actually said “Ahhh!” out loud when reading that.

  27. Amanda says:

    Brown recluses used to inhabit my mail box. Guess who’s jb it was to get the mail?

  28. sheherazahde says:

    *shudder*

    I suffer from arachnophobia too.

  29. Niha says:

    Something similar happened to me once. Luckily, it was with dishwasher liquid bottles instead of bugs (I just didn’t saw the bottle right in front of me because I was looking for a white one, and my mother had bought another brand -with green bottle-)

  30. Kya says:

    I recently had a scary spider encounter. I wrote a fiction story about it too!! Because there are ants and spiders raging war inside my house.
    But I was sitting at my computer in the middle of the night, pretty tired, when a big brown one crawled up from the back of my computer monitor to the top of it… I shrieked bloody murder.

    And I am arachnophobic, not just “afraid” of spiders but actually a real phobia. If I wasn’t I know that I wouldn’t mind them, because I love all animals otherwise.

  31. noname says:

    I hate spiders.
    But Biff is awesome.

  32. grapy says:

    a couple houses ago we would find A LOT of spiders i have been bitten crawled on jumped off tangled in web and the worst spiders were not the black widows we had the scary one’s for us were the wolf spiders so i am no longer have a fear of spiders i just cant spell the word for spiderphobia

  33. grapy says:

    oh and by the way i also don’t wear shirts while watching television sometimes mostly when i am sunburned and we have leather gaming chairs which feels cool when they stick to my back

  34. SkydiverTodd says:

    I had a scary spider encounter in college–was working the graveyard shift closing a fast food restaurant and got home to the apartment in the dead dark. All the pathway lights were out, so I didn’t see the giant spider web I walked through en route to my front door. I brushed it off my coat and went home to bed.

    Next day, got up and got ready for work, put my coat on and something moving in sleeve made me pull my arm out *FAST*! Next thing I know, this spider that is probably three inches across is scooting across the room at speeds I have never known spiders to achieve! We could not run fast enough to catch it, we had to wait for it to stop to get rid of it.

    That thing scared the daylights out of me, I understand Biff’s reaction completely.

  35. sfchicken says:

    A few months ago I woke up with what appeared to be a funny looking piece of hair on my pillow next to my mouth. It wasn’t until I put my glasses on and got a better look that I realized it was a long, thin spider leg. I freaked out because I can only guess where the rest of the spider went. -_-

  36. Torri says:

    Had to do some work on a floating dock on a lake one day, get down to the dock, and this grey spider runs up to the edge of the floating dock in front of me, raises several limbs, and hisses at me. It was big enough that I could hear it hiss from 10 feet away! So I go back to my workshop, come back down and introduced it to my little hatchet.

    Nice crunching sounds…

    So I go to work removing the all-weather carpeting, and find out why it was that brave to stand up to me. Under the carpet, and now all over me, are little tiny grey spiders. It’s not Bambi’s mom all over again, but she was defending her nest.

    Right away I decide to go swimming, until I finished clearing out the baby spiders from the dock. That was me splashing water on one side, pushing baby spiders off the other side of the dock.

    I don’t have a bad fear of spiders, but when they want to fight, I don’t care if I have the unfair advantage.

  37. Roborat says:

    I thought I read somewhere that daddy long legs aren’t actually spiders? I also remember that their bite is poisonous, but luckily, the way their mouth is shaped, they are harmless to people.

  38. wannabeelf says:

    @Roborat there are several creatures known as “daddy long legs,” some are spiders, some are not, but even the ones that are spiders are not poisonous–at least not to humans.

  39. Caitlin says:

    Some daddy-long-legses are actually insects, with leg-length antenna, that go backwards and tap their antenna on the ground occasionally, making them look like legs. Unfortunately they kind of look like the spider ones as well.

  40. darkwatersong says:

    Best spider story involves a pet spider…a really big one named Rosy. AKA a Chilean Rose Tarantula.

    Well I needed to clean Rosy’s cadge, and I wanted to let her wander a bit so my dad had me put her in a large cage we had around a 40gal horse trough that had bullfrogs in it. 10 minutes later I came out to retrieve my spider, only to find a frog munching on it. Dad’s comment, “Hmm I guess they could eat a spider that big!”

  41. Twilightfairy says:

    But daddy long leg spiders don’t do anything. They sit in a corner and catch mosquitos.

    My recent spider story happend about three days ago. I was in my rom playing with the DS and i just see this small black blur decending down the nearby wall. Now I didn’t have my glasses on so I couldn’t really tell what it was, at first i thought fly. So I put the ds away grab the glasses and realize it’s a little spider that i see out in the yard constantly. Sadly outta swatting instinct i killed the poor thing. Although the question i’ve got is.. how the heck did it get in the apartment?

  42. Paul says:

    I used to go camping in pre established canvas tents, me3 and my friend viewed daddylonglegs as friends.(since they ate the mosquitos and annoying gnatas and moths) we opened out tent flaps and found about 10 or so of em, till we started to feel malicous and killed em either with a little mini bottle of concentrated off bugspray in a pump , or a off fireball produced from the pump.. or just lit em on fire with a lighter…… little known fact do you know that they pop like fireworks if exposed to enough heat? neither did i

  43. Rico says:

    I’m almost arachnophobic (lucky me I don’t see many) I have to run and regroup everytime I see one, and even if the spider dies, I spend a lot of time being paranoic and jumping everytime the wind moves my clothes. And just while i was writing this (i’m lying on the bed) my phone made a vibration and I almost died of an heart attack. >_<

  44. Rico says:

    dammit.. just as I pressed submit phone did again, and scared the hell out of me… >_<

  45. August says:

    @ steve-o and Chris- I skimmed past your post (steve-o’s) and read Chris’s first. When I scrolled back up and read the original I ‘Aaah!’ed out loud too.

  46. Radical Edward says:

    My worst moment with a spider was when I was 5. It was on my leg and it was a baby spider. I freaked out and I was in Grandpa’s Oldsmobile at the time.

  47. werp says:

    I have a spider friend at work – she lives in between the windowframe and the glass and is of a startling size to jump out of such a tiny crack. Fortunately folk ’round here know it’s terrible bad luck to kill a spider, so I don’t have to worry about sidling carefully in front of the window when nervous people are about…

  48. Stoof says:

    Spider on kitchen table. Big, black. First instinct is to hit with shoe. Spider erupts into hundreds of baby spiders. BAD

  49. good.news says:

    Oh man, living in the country with massive spiders (huntsmans and wolf spiders easily bigger then my hand), I have more horror stories then I can recount. Stories such as:

    The time I went to the toilet, sat down and looked at the cabinet on the floor (that is literally inches away from your leg while sitting) and lo and behold, a giant BRIGHT orange (???) spider was just hangin around. Due to the fact that I was on the toilet also meant I couldn’t LEAVE, and thus had to sit there WATCHING it.

    Then there was the time I was getting a dvd, pulled it out of the dvd rack and out of the HUNDREDS of dvd’s I could’ve picked, I got the one with the hunstman sitting on top.

    Or the time the exit from my room was blocked off because one was on my wall next to my door (did you know spiders can jump? Well they totally can), and the only way I managed to get my parents attention was by BASHING my chair on the floor, because they couldn’t hear me yelling for them.

    Then there was the time…

  50. Doctor Why says:

    @Acies: I believe it has been demonstrated that most fear of spiders and many insects in humans is instinctual. Many bugs are dangerous in themselves or spread disease, after all. It is theorized that insect defense is the origin of the tickle reflex – you are most sensitive in areas insects might go for that you wouldn’t otherwise notice. Humans don’t really need an instinctive fear of lions, though, because they are big and scary enough when they’re angry that we all know to get away.

  51. CasualOtaku says:

    I’m terrified of spiders, not to the point that it’s a full blown phobia, but enough that I take a few big steps away when I happen across them.

    They’re just so creepy looking, especially the multi-segmented bulbous variety. Plus I associate them with venom…somehow venom is just so much more shiver inducing than simply getting bitten or clawed.

  52. Karen says:

    @DoctorWhy: it’s debatable just how much of the spider fear is instinctive, and how much is picked up in young childhood from the way that the adults around us react to spiders. Same goes for other “creepy-crawlies” like snakes and rats. Most small children will be fascinated and interested, not afraid, of such creatures … right up until one of their parents or another adult whom they trust goes “eek, get away from that!”

  53. Tigergulp says:

    try being in the middle of a pee and see 4 buggy eyes peeping at you from over your knee. jumping spiders…ick! (shudders)

  54. Kiwi says:

    I had a little bitty jumping spider as a friend fora bout five minutes….then a peer killed him. I wrote an ode to my spider when i got home. so sad…

  55. HeidiK says:

    Ah, spiders. I’m not phobic of them, but I have a very healthy respect for them. I personally prefer them to live in my garden (as there’s not much of anything in the house for them to eat, and if desperate enough, they’ll bite anything). I’ve seen in my garden little black wolf spiders, the standard black-and-white-striped jumping-spiders, a few nervous royal jumping-spiders (they’re fuzzy, much larger, and have lovely colors), and a wide assortment of orb weavers. The one I can’t identify is a spider that I only see when I’ve been digging in the garden and disturbed quite a lot of earth: it’s built like a wolf spider, but it’s got a white abdomen and day-glo orange everywhere else. I let them run away (to more dirt) because bright colors tend to mean dangerous toxins. I’ve done a lot of looking and found nothing about them. Advice would be welcome!
    As for why spiders get into houses? I personally think they’re curious. Jumping-spiders have been known to jump on people just to watch them freak out or catch a ride (we’re way too big to be considered dinner). As for tiny spiders in the house, they’re just babies and they’re lost; take them outside.

  56. Shultz says:

    I don’t have anything against spiders personally. However, i always freak out and reflex kill them when they surprise me. and they always seem to surprise me. Also waking up with a couple on your face in the middle of the night isn’t exactly helping to strengthen relationships.

  57. DragonDancer says:

    Ugh. Spiders.

    I have two nice and creepy ones to share with you today!

    Okay, so in the middle of the night, I wake up, seemingly for no reason at all. I look at the clock on my bedside table. It’s about 1:00, 1:30. Don’t remember the exact time, but I remember it was one of those evil, evil hours of the morning where nobody sane is awake. I’m sort of going, ‘Okaaay, WHY am I awake, again?’ Then I feel this tickle on my arm. So I reach up and turn on the lamp over my bed, figuring it’s an ant or something, but wanting to make sure. BIG. BROWN. SPIDER. ONMYARMOHGOD. OHGOD. (It was about an inch or so long.) So I screech, jump out of bed, and wave my spider-inhabited arm around a couple of times. It lands on my bedsheets.

    So here I am in my nightclothes, standing in my tiny room, staring at this inch-long brown spider that’s on my sheets. I watch it crawl around for a bit, my mind going a mile a minute, and then finally get the presence of mind to think, ‘Hey, maybe I can pick it up in one of those boxes I keep around!’ So I grab this tiny little white cardboard box, and approach the spider. While I was thinking, the spider had been crawling off of my bed and onto my carpet. Which was somewhat good, because it was no longer in my bed. But it was also bad, because, ohgod, IT WAS CLOSER TO ME. Cue the whimper, please. Finally, I catch it. With the small, unattached lid of my box. On carpet. Oh, WONDERFUL. How’m I going to pick it up?! So I have to let it GO again. Now the spider has had enough. It has really had enough. So it runs like the dickens for my computer desk, and disappears somewhere behind it.

    Needless to say, I hid under the blankets that night.

    The other story is far less complicated, but perhaps a bit more dangerous, as the last spider wasn’t recognizably poisonous.

    My little sister and I were unpacking a few boxes from our move. We open a few boxes, put some stuff away, it’s all normal. Then I hear my sister scream when she lifts something out of a box we’re working on. I rush over, ask the usual questions (“Are you okay? What’s wrong!?”) and then I look into the box. There’s a black widow in there, hanging upside-down on a web it built. And I’m sure it was a black widow because, again, it was hanging upside-down. Nice, bright red hourglass on its belly, plain as can be. I screech as well. The parents aren’t home, and all I can think is, ‘Did it bite her? Did it bite her?’ Thankfully, a moment later, I realize that the widow doesn’t seem to be at all disturbed, and my sister isn’t at all in pain, nor does her hand have any puncture marks when examined. So I dig up some bug spray, and spray that sucker into oblivion.

    And then, of course, it keeps twitching.

    Then I realize I picked up the flying insect spray, not the stuff for spiders and other creepy-crawlies. It’s still killing it, but very slowly. Ugh. Poor thing. So I rather quickly go and fetch the spider spray and put it out of its misery. I don’t like spiders, but I don’t like torture, either. Took me a full half-hour to convince my sister to go anywhere near that box again, though….

  58. Marscaleb says:

    Spiders are our friends! They eat the bugs we don’t want!

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