Woman starts fire to kill spider

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Woman sets home on fire trying to kill spider

Fire department called after woman's arachnophobia gets out of hand


A Kansas woman was arrested after police said she went to extremes trying to kill a spider.

Ginny M. Griffith, 34, told officers in Hutchinson she set a pile of towels on fire at about 1:30 a.m. Friday in hopes of catching the spider and burning it to death...

http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/woman-sets-home-on-fire-trying-to-kill-spider/26725118
 
The spider is dead, that is all that matters. The rest is just collateral damage.
 
Well how else do you kill a spider?

:floorlaugh:

OMG... I had a neighbor who was TERRIFIED of wasps & spiders (I really am too) but she was something else. Her husband was in the Marines and always gone and she REFUSED to try to kill them herself -- she had this fear that if she tried to step on the spider it would somehow crawl from under her shoe and over to the top of her foot and bite her -- it just went on and on.

Just so happened she was also a clean freak -- disinfected her entire house every day... so she always had a bottle of Windex handy.

I got irritated with her calling my husband at the most inconvenient times or running out of her house screaming, "HELP!" and alarming the neighborhood so I taught her how to 'DISABLE' the spider first by soaking it with Windex and then stomping the heck out of it...

But I think setting a fire might be too extreme even for HER! This lady must have been really, really, REALLY skeered!

Come to think of it, I remember a disabled woman called the police sub-station (not 911) a few years back about a spider because she was afraid she couldn't kill it and that it was poisonous -- police showed up already laughing but then they saw the spider & it was hugo-mongous -- they had a video of it and shined the flashlight and one of the officers even jumped back and said, "Oh my God!!!" Hilarious...

But seriously... A FIRE????
 
Bet she's glad she doesn't live here...

polls_australia_huge_spiders_health_bar_2615_527691_answer_4_xlarge.jpeg


These guys are all over the house in summer.
 
Ugh, I hate those things, Ausgirl. So creepy. One of the very few downsides of living in Australia, the giant spiders. Thankfully there's been none inside in my new house, yet...

At least I know how to deal with them now. ;)
 
The huntsman spiders here are huge but just spray them with fly spray and they end up as a little ball.
 
:( Nuuuu! Don't kill the huntsmans, please. They are very useful -- they eat their own body weight (what, about 3 pounds? LOL) in flies and mosquitos every day. And they are totally harmless, not aggressive at all!

I am quite fond of all but a very few (very deadly) spider species. I allow daddy long legs, hunstmans and jumping spiders to roam my house at will. My flatmate is pretty phobic -- and even he won't kill a huntsman!

They are easily scooped up in a jar (or in one case, long ago, a large salad bowl... heh) and released outside, where they can continue to do a good job eating peskier pests.
 
yes Ausgirl I have saved many a huntsman in a jar but when it is in my bedroom that is another matter. I would freak if one crawled on me in the night. They have to stay in the rest of the house. The same with cicadas...the nursing home where I worked was inundated with them in summer. I carried a glass around with me to catch them.
I would have residents buzzing complaining of the noise. Climbing under beds, pulling furniture out all to find where the noise was coming from.

No I don't kill every spider I find. I even have white tails here. My daughter at Patterson Lakes has red backs. They are everywhere.
 
Once in awhile there will be one up at the ceiling/wall, and as long as he stays up there, I'm ok.if he stays a week or so, I'll give him a name, like Harvey or something. My mom told me it was bad luck to kill one, so if its down on my level, I'll try to scoop it into a cup (disposable ) and let him outside. But a giant one? I'd get the oven cleaner or bleach or something and freak out!
 
I had to laugh when I read this, even though it's not funny that this woman wound up accidently setting her house on fire! I too am terrified of spiders, and have done some kinda crazy things to kill them, but setting anything on fire isn't one of them! :floorlaugh:
 
Bet she's glad she doesn't live here...

polls_australia_huge_spiders_health_bar_2615_527691_answer_4_xlarge.jpeg


These guys are all over the house in summer.

now that's impressive!


I understand you have big flying cockroaches there too
 
Well how else do you kill a spider?
Funny you should ask! I watched my son-in-law try to shoot a black widow with an air pellet gun once. He was a bit skiddish...so after he hit it once and lost it under a rock...I found it and stepped on it. ;) We never spoke of it again. LOL
 
White tails and redbacks get short shrift around here! I am permanently disabled, from a whitetail bite. So they die, the end. And vengeance is mine.

I have an incredibly hilarious tale about a *very large* huntsman and a friend of mine, too long to tell the whole thing here, I think.. But the gist is, she was horrifically phobic and the spider had entrenched itself in her car for several days. No matter what she did, or where we went, up it would pop at the MOST inconvenient moments.

This damned arachnid caused us to:

- Nearly run over a member of the Royal family. I am not kidding.
- Bail out of a moving vehicle (not on a public road, thank goodness). My friend jumped out first, and I can't drive! So I bailed, too.
- Come close to causing a gas station attendant to call the police on it. We tried to mime the reason for us screeching into the gas station on two wheels and leaping out in hysterics (my friend, over the spider and me, over her driving..) - he mistook our gestures from his little window-booth as a sign there was some sort of serial killer hiding in the back seat.
- Almost crash doing 100kph on the freeway, when it decided to crawl out of the air vent and pop up in a rush on the driver's side bit of the windscreen.


In the end, and after I'd returned home from the visit, my friend saw it perched on the very front of the car's hood -- and drove into her garage door in an effort to squash it, causing a couple of hundred dollars' worth of damage to both car and door.

We don't know if she succeeded. But it was never seen again. I've always suspected it simply moved on to a new victim....
 
LOL...I bet the spider survived the fire.

How do you manage a catch and release of a huntsman when they're so damn fast? I'd happily do it if I could slow it down by drugging it up with some spidy-valium first.
I used to have an overwhelming fear of spiders, and have used all sorts of methods to kill them. Using a full can of hair spray once was the funniest..It ended up rock hard, and when I eventually scooped it up to toss off my 3rd floor balcony it landed with a huge thud.

Marg from Oz...Don't be fooled by those smarty-pants spiders that curl up into a ball and look dead. Did you know they learn how to play dead with that move at spidy-school? That's where they also learn to hide behind wall clocks at daylight savings time and behind sun visors in cars. :panic:

Years ago, as I was settling my girls into their baby and toddler car seats, a huge huntsman appeared on the car door just inches from me and I did the most awful thing....I ran away screaming for hubby. I left my babies with the spider! That's when I knew I had to toughen up.

I don't mind daddy long legs spiders at all (I actually ate one as a toddler) and would happily let them share my home with us...but that happens to be the one spider my daughter is absolutely terrified of ...especially when they're in bathrooms. Don't ask me why. It's just one of her weird phobias, even though she knows they're completely harmless and serve a good purpose.

I got a lot braver with spidies when I lived in the country. Even though redbacks are dangerous, I'd still rather share my home with them than huntsmans. Redbacks keep to themselves and stay up high, with none of that running and hide and seek game playing.
As an aside...Just today I thought about not having had any huntsman visits this year, but after seeing this thread, I bet one comes to visit me soon....or maybe he's already here, lurking and just waiting for the right time.
 

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