Internet viewers have been left horrified by photographs of a woman who unwittingly returned from a trip to the basement with a terrifying hitchhiker attached to her hair.
Lyndsay, 34, lives in New York with husband Josh, 35, and proved to be far braver than most people as she somehow remained calm when a giant spider got tangled in her hair.
Josh shared a photograph to Reddit via his account u/Noidstradamus on June 1, showing the back of Lyndsay’s head, her hair tied up with what appeared, at first glance, to be an unusual clip. However, on closer look, part of that “hair clip” was actually the long, brown-and-yellow legs of a spider. A series of photos then showed the arachnid, placed on a countertop, with Lyndsay’s finger beside it to illustrate its size.
Josh told Newsweek that he hadn’t even been home at the time. “She has an amazing ability to turn panic off basically. She took that photo herself. Then she used her comb to pluck it out,” he said.
Josh said that Lyndsay went into the couple’s unfinished basement for laundry, and “it must’ve dropped down onto her head” from above.
When she got upstairs, she “felt something move in her hair and reached back to grab it. That’s when she realized it was something big.”
Lyndsay looked in the bathroom mirror and saw the spider staring back at her, and, like most people would, “started to panic”—but, unlike most people, Lyndsay “then got a hold of herself.”
Jerome Rovner, of the American Arachnological Society, identified it as a female fishing spider, telling Newsweek that it is a common spider found in eastern and midwestern U.S. and Canada.
He said that despite getting its name due to being “capable of capturing small fish,” the arachnid is “more often seen on tree trunks in woodlands and even on buildings. They sometimes enter basements and rest on a wall or other vertical surface, their large size frightening most people” Rovner said.
“Importantly, large size in spiders does not represent a threat,” he added. “Like 99.95% of the world’s 50,000+ species of spiders, fishing spiders do not have dangerous venom. Furthermore, unlike what is shown in Hollywood movies, spiders do not deliberately attack people. They only bite in self-defense, i.e., when a person accidentally presses one against their skin.
“Such a defensive bite by a huge fishing spider is no worse than a bee sting.”
A 2022 YouGov poll that surveyed 1,000 American citizens found that around a quarter of adults in the United States fear spiders, with over half of those respondents admitting they fear them a “great deal.”
While many people fear spiders, a full-on phobia of the creatures, arachnophobia, is more rare, with between 3 and 15 percent of Americans suffering from the disorder.
Arachnophobia causes physical symptoms, from sweating and shaking to trouble breathing and dizziness, according to the Cleveland Clinic. It can be treated with exposure therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
However, in Lyndsay’s case, animal lovers will be pleased to hear that she saved the spider and then brought it outside to release it, with Josh praising her as a kind soul.
“I admire the positive response by the woman after she became aware that she had taken a fishing spider aboard. She certainly is a well-informed person,” Rovner said.
Josh posted the photos to the Nope sub, where it received over 7,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments, with the caption: “My wife went into the basement and came back with a new friend.”
Lyndsay remained calmer while living the experience than many commenters on the post. One wrote that they thought the first image was “a great hair clip at first, then realized slowly it was actually my worst nightmare.”
“I would have cut off my own head in a panic,” another posted, while a third user added they would “straight up guillotine myself.”
“Just burn the entire house down at this point,” one comment read, but another praised Lyndsay as “clearly a compassionate and calm person.”
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