It’s spider season here on Knifecrime Island, but it looks like I’ve escaped this autumn’s offerings. At least that’s what I tell myself smugly as I prepare my first cup of coffee in the British predawn pitchdark of 6:39 am.
Anyone who’s ever watched a horror movie is already reading through thinly slatted fingers. Humming insouciantly – she doesn’t know! – I casually reach for a pan I left out last night – and instantly throw myself across the room. The thing that was waiting for me inside the pan is about the size of a human head, its arms and legs (and some more legs, and more after that) sprawling in every direction like a beer guy manspreading on a frat house couch. If that beer guy had hundreds of legs.
Scientists claim spiders have eight legs, but this is an obvious lie fed to us by academics who have never been alone in a dark room with a spider. From the furthest edge of the kitchen – a room in which I remain only to make sure that the thing doesn’t leg it into a new hiding place, all the better to surprise me with later – I inquire, in only a slightly elevated tone, whether my other half could please perhaps consider removing the interloper. A not reasonable request, you’ll agree.
He comes clattering down the stairs in a state of half undress and full panic. “What happened? Are you all right?” On his heels are two children – I think they’re mine, but in the heat of the moment it’s hard to be sure – looking equally concerned. “There’s a spider,” I repeat. The words sound so clear and calm inside my head. After several more attempts to get coherent syllables out of me, I find out that the noises that came from the kitchen sounded like I had accidentally cut off all my arms and legs at the same time.
A few minutes later, I perch in the middle of the stairs as my other half and one small child carry the invertebrate to the front door under a glass that seems much too small to house the monster that brutally attacked me in the kitchen. The child eyes me reproachfully. My other half is a bit more conciliatory, assuring me that “this one was bigger than usual.” I find out later, via the child, that he was lying.
You may have deduced by this point that there is a history of mild… I don’t want to say overreaction, but I probably should. However, I wouldn’t say I was exaggerating. I would swear in a court of law that the spider that now fits under a child’s drinking glass was bigger than my hand.
Scientists have a word for people like me. No, it’s not what you’re thinking, and that’s rude. I am what’s known as “high spider-fearful”. (I will concede that the word you were thinking gets the point across a bit more directly.)
(Maybe you’re wondering: how does one get officially classified as “high spider-fearful”? By one’s answers to the Fear of Spiders Questionnaire (FSQ). It has 18 questions. I’m pretty sure that’s 17 more questions than you need.)
According to the entomologist and insect evangelist Gwen Pearson, “high spider-fearfuls” have a documented case of what I’ll call spider body dysmorphic disorder: scaredy cats are liable to significantly overestimate the size of a spider. The scardier the cat, the more inflated the spider. A study published in 2012 in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders finds that, on average, people exaggerated it by about 50 percent, though the lead author told Live Science that he had seen people triple the size. As it turns out, the brain’s areas for fear and visual perception are connected. The amygdala – our brain’s fear factory – can really befuddle the visual cortex with its “holy shit what is that thing” response.
That’s not the only effect of this phobia dream-team – it seems we HSFs also convince ourselves that these gargantuan spiders move much faster than they actually do. You see an arachnid minding its business – I see a cross between Usain Bolt and Neo from the Matrix coming at me like an 8-legged rage zombie. (This might be exacerbated by another mechanism that freaks out the high spider-fearfuls – spiders’ legs move in a stop-motion horror way that emphasises their angularity. It’s a trait that some people find uncanny and counterintuitive, spicing up the phobic terror with a soupçon of disgust.) But here’s the funny thing: when they move away from us our perception is restored to full accuracy. Brains are so weird.
I’m sure it’s all very interesting, but none of this information is useful to me. In the video below, “low spider-fearfuls” probably see an innocent little Damon diadema spider using its little spider pincer hands to fend off unwanted harrassment.
Me? You could use this animal to extract any confession out of me – your imagination’s the limit. Do you need a shooter for the grassy knoll? It was me. No, I wasn’t born yet – but I’m happy to forge my birth certificate. Whatever you want, just please get that thing away from me. And before anyone makes the suggestion, I’ll never be that person that goes into VR therapy where they put fake spiders on you, or (Jesus Christ) the real kind where they take a spider for a walk on your forearm or submerge you in a tank of spiders or whatever horrors get inflicted by the people who claim to offer so-called “exposure therapy”.
The good news is that being afraid of spiders does not have to be passed down. There’s no science to back this up. Only the naked contempt of my children.
* England really does have a spider season; during autumn or as I call it British Spider Time (BST), spiders here get absolutely enormous and I don’t know why. We don’t even have bugs.
Image credits
A Giant Spider Catching People, Wellcome Collection. CC BY
Video of Damon diadema, Gwen Pearson on Twitter, 5 November 2019.