It’s times like this I’m eternally grateful for the fact I was born and raised in rainy old England instead of Australia.
Because let’s face it, even though I’ll be getting absolutely drenched on my walk home from work tonight, there’s absolutely no chance I’m going home after my shift and discovering a ginormous huntsman spider in my flat.
Unless I’ve just jinxed myself, in which case I take back everything I previously said and beg the Gods of superstition for forgiveness because no way in hell do I want to experience what one woman Down Under did recently.
The unsuspecting woman, Laree Clarke, returned home yesterday (July 30) to find the huge creepy crawly just chilling on her property. As you do.
Laree’s first port of call was Facebook, where she put a request out to the people in the Bluewater News group asking anyone in her area if they could help her.
She begged:
Is there Anyone that could remove this from my house?? Now!???
Which, judging from the amount of question marks and exclamation marks in that one statement, was Laree’s way of getting the message across to her neighbours that this was pretty damn urgent.
Underneath the post, the woman explained that the spider was roughly the ‘size of your hand’ – although I’m not sure what hands she’s referring to because the crawly definitely looks a lot larger than that – and that she didn’t have a container big enough to capture it.
‘When I went near it with the phone light, it [came] at me raising it fangs and legs. hell nahhhh!,’ she wrote. Which is completely fair and I’m in complete agreement with her; if that thing was coming anywhere near me I’d be getting the hell out of dodge too.
Dozens of people responded to her request, some practically: ‘get a broom and sweep him out,’ and some altogether more dramatic: ‘Probably easier to burn your house down at this point’. One person joked she should get the spider to ‘pay rent,’ while another advised her to run ‘far far away’.
Laree later edited the post to update everyone that the spider had been ‘safely removed’ – although the details of this removal are not known.
Did she eventually find a container big enough to fit it in? Did she get a broom and sweep it away? Or did she, more drastically, set her entire house on fire?
Probably not seeing as though she said she’d ‘safely’ removed it, but you never know I guess.
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).