Deadly Spiders of the United States

I have always been deathly afraid of spiders, but at the same time fascinated by them. The black widow in particular is one of those spiders that you simply can not ignore. Just last week I had a run-in with this deadly spider in spades.

My wife and I have to lug off our trash and as much as we try, it will sometimes pile up on us. This past Saturday, I decided to finally go out and gather up the trash that had been sitting by our curb for a week and lug it to the dump.

After grabbing two big bags of trash, I went down to pick up a third. As my hand went to the next bag, I saw it. The biggest, fattest, black widow spider you have ever seen just sitting right where my hand was heading.

Now, one can surmise that the widow likely would have ran off, but if I had grabbed where I planned to, I would have directly grabbed the spider. That would have been a bite to be certain.

Five minutes later, I bumped into a second one behind bag number five. Lord only knows how many black widow spiders were among all that trash. It certainly has caused me to be more timely with the trash!

My personal experience with these spiders is that they are not especially aggressive. They like to stay well out of our way, and only occasionally do we come across one another. When we do, it is always my fault.

If you are careful, then the likelihood of being bitten is very slim. Check out some of the links below to get even more info on the black widow spider.

I had a very close relative get bitten on the foot by one of these little buggers and it very near killed her. Her foot began to rot away over time and the doctors were unable to stop the venom from spreading around her leg for a long time. She ultimately was able to recover, but never fully. Her leg still bothers her to this day, and she still has tissue damage.

My own personal drama with the brown recluse was during a visit to a relative in Missouri. I was staying with them, and my wife and I were sleeping in the basement of their home due to limited sleeping space.

During breakfast one morning, the subject of spiders came up. After talking about it for a bit, my relative told me that they have tons of brown recluse spiders in the house. As a matter of fact, they had more than a ton.

She took me upstairs to the attic and showed me the glue boards she had laying around to catch the buggers. Their were literally hundreds of them all over several of the boards. I nearly freaked out!

Worse still, we were sleeping in a dark basement where black widows and brown recluse spiders love to lurk. I did not sleep a wink the rest of the vacation.