Taig Spearman
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Most people jump when a spider gets too close, but not everyone. Some go so far beyond the natural "shriek and flail" reaction that they completely disappear over the horizon, abandon their children, or even threaten mass shootings at the sight of some eight-legged freak. When you finally figure out what that little tickle was on the back of your neck (probably a brown recluse?!?!), just try to keep the undignified screaming under control. Unlike, say ...
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What's the worst kind of car accident you can imagine? It probably involves crashing into a school bus, right? How about if your kid was also involved and was somehow alone in your moving car, while you fell out of said car? Also, the entire thing was your fault. That's about as bad as it could get, right?
Wrong. The answer is: all of that plus being TOUCHED BY A SPIDER.
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The spinoff failed to achieve the success of the original.
Indiana woman Angela Kipp lived through this precise nightmare in September 2015. She was backing out of her driveway when she noticed a spider on her shoulder. We've all heard of mothers lifting cars off their infants with sudden, inhuman bursts of strength in times of crisis. Angela Kipp is ... not that kind of mother.
She made the outside-the-box choice to leap through the driver's side window, leaving her terrified young child in the vehicle as it rolled toward the street. To his credit, after watching his only source of clean laundry and waffles abandon him so fast it'd make an orphan flinch, the kid did manage to crawl from the back seat to the driver's seat and tried to slam his foot on the brake pedal. Just one problem: Nine-year-olds can't tell the difference between the brake and the accelerator. The car, still in reverse, sped backward into a school bus.
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"Well, at least you know what not to do when you take driver's ed."
This is the part of parenthood no book prepares you for: watching your son roll into oncoming traffic while trapped in a car with a spider at the wheel.
Fortunately, no children were on the bus, no one was seriously injured, and no charges were filed. The spider, however, remains at large.
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Burning at the stake is classically reserved for only the most evil of threats, such as witches, women we think are witches, or just women we don't like very much. And if it's good enough for witches, it's good enough for spiders. But it doesn't always work out the intended way. An unidentified Seattle man was in the laundry room of his house when he encountered irrevocable proof of an uncaring God: the spider. Instead of going, "Ah!" and then swatting at his hair for a few minutes, he quickly fashioned himself a makeshift blowtorch and, as the local news put it: "Firefighters say the man who rented the house was trying to kill a spider in the laundry room with a can of spray paint and a lighter. The flames quickly spread through the room and into the attic."
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"Where'd he go?! SUPPRESSING FIRE!"
He called 911 and firefighters put the blaze out, but not before it caused $60,000 in damage to the house -- which wasn't even his house. We're sure the landlord was very understanding when he explained, "It almost touched me."
This "panic and then fire" approach to spider-problem-solving wasn't an isolated incident. In Michigan, a man was pumping gas when he spotted a lone spider on the roof of his car. He pulled out his lighter (sensible!) and managed to set the spider on fire -- along with his whole car and very nearly the gas station.
Instead of acting like a normal person and abandoning the car for scrap.
The gas station attendant hit an emergency button to stop the flow of gas to the pump, so the blaze was contained and did not, y'know, explode and cause several deaths.
Though we can all likely agree: That would be the coolest way to be killed by a spider.
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It was a nice day out, so a retiree and his wife fired up their grill for a little barbecue. They let it preheat and then tossed some meat on to cook. All was going surprisingly well!
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"All that's left to do is to confidently finish this sent-"
Until the knobs started shooting out flames, then melted entirely. After putting out the fire and shutting off the gas, the man called the manufacturer for a well-deserved "What the fuck was that, exactly?" In a masterstroke of customer service deadpan, the representative told him that the problem was caused by his grill being full of spiders.
After the screaming stopped, the rep explained that the customer didn't hermetically seal the whole thing at the end of the autumn, so by spring all the local spiders had packed the workings so tight with nests and squirming spider bodies, it burst into flames. That particular grill model was recalled for being a spider condo, and the company introduced SpiderGuard technology (yes, it was literally called SpiderGuard) to every new model thereafter. They also offer SpiderGuard replacement burners for every one of their pre-SpiderGuard models. We know what you're thinking, and yes, we're already on the phone asking if they SpiderGuard things aside from grills. We'll get back to you.
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"No, no, SpiderGuard will absolutely not make it easier for us --
I mean them -- to get into your home."
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As the Postal Service Creed goes, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds -- unless there's a fucking spider, in which case, all bets are off."
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"You deliver the letters; I'll deliver the pants-shittings."
Because Kevin Keating was elderly enough to still care about snail mail, he noticed right away when the post office ceased all delivery. Not one single Bi-Mart catalog, nary a Papa John's coupon booklet -- not a single AARP discount card! All delivery to his home had ceased, without even an explanation from the Canadian Postal Service. Keating called the local office, and a week later he got a response in the form of a handwritten note that just said "Spider webs" and the date. The carrier was refusing to deliver the mail because of the webs.
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And pop culture myths ruined his arming mail carriers solution.
Keating walked outside, knocked down the spider web strung across the unused entrance, put up a big plastic "eff you" spider to mock the mail carrier, then called the post office -- and the news.
After the public embarrassment, delivery was resumed, and the Canadian Postal Service admitted the carrier in question may have been "overzealous" when he stopped delivery because of a spider web.
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"Union rules clearly state that a mail carrier may refuse to deliver if the house
gives him or her the heebie-jeebies."
But also, like, we get it.
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Australian Police responded to an apartment building after receiving frantic calls from neighbors saying that a man was beating his wife, throwing furniture around, and yelling, "I'm going to kill you! You're dead! Die die die!" accompanied by a woman screaming bloody murder. All that happened all right, except the guy was alone in his apartment and always had been.
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"That explains why all the wadded-up tissues had no blood stains."
We'll let him speak for himself:
"Where's your wife?" an officer asked.
"I don't have one," the man replied.
"Where's your girlfriend?" he pressed.
"I don't have one," he said.
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*several silent moments pass*
Police told the man that other tenants had heard the screams, the death threats, and the dull thud of flung furniture. "Come on mate, what have you done to her?" the officer asked.
"It was a spider," the man replied sheepishly. "A really big one."
"What about the woman screaming?"
"Yeah, sorry, that was me," he said. "I really, really hate spiders."
Why, yes, that was a scene from The Simpsons.
The Simpsons have already done reality.
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Secretaries at the county prosecutor's office in Logan County, West Virginia, received some seriously negative feedback on their Halloween decorations from a co-worker last October. Chris White was an arachnophobic assistant prosecutor, apparently with serious self-control issues. When White got to work that fateful October day, he took one look at the variety of dangling horror on display -- some of which were fake plastic spiders -- and went straight for his gun. Suitably defended, White pulled down one of the spiders, set it on a chair, and, while the decorating committee watched in terror, he put his gun to its thorax and threatened to shoot every last fake spider in the entire office if they didn't take them all down.
He took Halloween decorations hostage. And it worked.
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"Told you." -Post office guy from earlier
Instead of calling the police, the secretaries merely gave each other "holy shit" looks and took the decorations down. The lead prosecutor did later issue a memo stating employees could no longer strap gats at the office. But ultimately even that wasn't enough to soothe the terror shakes of the decorating committee, so some weeks later, White was suspended and the sheriff's office began an investigation. The prosecutor stated that they were trying to "work our way through it as an office" and that the now-unemployed White "knew what he did was wrong."
Right. He should have used fire.
Tspearman once touched a spider to impress a gal. Hear all about it on Twitter.
Deep inside us all -- behind our political leanings, our moral codes, and our private biases -- there is a cause so colossally stupid that we surprise ourselves with how much we care. Whether it's toilet paper position, fedoras on men, or Oxford commas, we each harbor a preference so powerful we can't help but proselytize to the world. In this episode of the Cracked podcast, guest host Soren Bowie is joined by Cody Johnston, Michael Swaim, and comedian Annie Lederman to discuss the most trivial things we will argue about until the day we die. Get your tickets here!
For more reasons nature is completely frightening, check out The 6 Deadliest Creatures (That Can Fit In Your Shoe) and 5 Animals That Could Take Over the World (If They Wanted To).
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