Photo: Tobias Titz (Getty)
I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again: it’s always good to keep a blowtorch nearby for moments like this.
If the rolling spider is still haunting your dreams, the spider in this story will also inhabit your dreams, so sorry in advance.
A Michigan mom named Jillian Duke recently walked into her son’s bedroom only to be confronted with a spider so freaking big Duke said it “needed a leash.”
“I looked over thinking it was a big ball of string, and it turned out it had eyes and it was a big spider,” Duke told WXYZ of the spider. “I went to go reach for it and I kind of backed, and I said, ‘That’s just too much string.’”
Duke of course did not handle the spider (who would?), so she called her husband and her parents to handle the beast. Let’s first take a look at that spider thanks to Duke’s Facebook.
Even Duke’s father was thrown off by the spider.
“He’s 73, he’s pipelined across the country,” Duke said. “He couldn’t believe the size of the spider, and he’s never seen anything like that.”
Eventually Duke decided to reach out to a pet store in Utica that specializes in spiders and employees there contacted entomologists at the Cranbrook Institute of Science, who determined it was a Huntsman spider. That’s right, folks.
“Australian Huntsman spider, which would be one of the largest spiders in the world, but completely harmless outside of an allergic reaction to its venom,” Randy John Lee, an employee at Pets & Things, said.
Lee said the spider, which is usually found in places like Australia and Africa, probably hitched a ride from elsewhere. A plane? A car? Satan? Who knows.
So yes, there’s a small chance that a massive spider might find its way into your household.
h/t NY Post