The Spider War

In 2005 my family and I moved into half of a duplex in what's thought of as Lake Country in Wisconsin - the far western suburbs outside Milwaukee where small ponds and lakes are seemingly everywhere. And in fact there was a small pond behind the house where we would watch ducks and geese swim. We also frequently saw deer, or wild turkeys, we could hear coyotes and their pups howling when the sun went down, and one winter there were foxes. What we weren't expecting was wildlife on the inside as well, in the form of a thriving colony of spiders.

We didn't notice them at first. It was clear that no one had lived in the house for a while. It smelled a bit musty, and there were some cobwebs and dust down in the basement, but we did the standard pre-move in clean, then unpacked our stuff and settled in.

My wife and in-laws weren't used to having a basement, since they weren't from the Midwest. I had always lived in a house with one, and so I became the default person to go down there because, shockingly, it was cool, dark, and damp down there. Since the washer and dryer were down there I had to go down every few days, and I quickly noticed that even though we had just cleaned up down there, cobwebs accumulated awfully quick. I would head down with some items to wash and walk face first into some web, or feel some on my hand as I turned the corner, or there would be one or more spiders who had spun webs in the washtub down there. I'd clean the webs out, but the next time I went down, there would be more.

That may not sound unusual or problematic, except the spiders started coming up from downstairs. We started finding them just outside the basement door, in the kitchen. Worse, they started aggressively invading the stairwell itself. Small webs on the riser of the steps. Spiders on the walls of the stairway, spinning strands all the way down. Most alarming were the ones that were right above the basement door. I got into the habit of opening the door first and waiting a second before going down, since sometimes spiders would descend right where my head would have been.

Does that sound like an ambush? It certainly felt that way.

Oddly, it wasn't just one kind of size of spider. There were little tiny white or clear ones that were almost invisible on the white walls and ceiling of the stairway, and also large brown or black ones that blended in with dark wood of the stairs. Harmless but annoying ones and big, hairy, ancient suckers that must have been down there for some time.

Hydra

As I got rid of them, it seemed only more would come. Like the ancient Greek legend of the multi-headed hydra. Hecules would cut off one head, but two more would sprout from the stump. I could get rid of 5, 10 spiders a day and there would be just as many on the steps the next day, or even the same day. It seemed there were endless waves of them, and I wondered if at some point the God King of All Spiders would be in the stairwell, waiting for me, swearing revenge for me wiping out dozens of its children or people.

But dozens were just the beginning. The spiders kept coming. I started keeping count, and started going down there every day, sure that I'd find a nest, or a hole somewhere letting them in from outside. I never found the nest or the hole, and over the months I cleaned every square inch of that basement. Every nook and cranny. I opened up every box we had down there, expecting spiders to come teeming out. None ever did. The boxes had all been sealed well, and I resealed them to prevent a colony from starting.

What did they eat? I assume they ate each other. One of the frustrating things about them is that when they came into the kitchen, if there were any ants or fruit flies or anything in there, the little bastards made no effort to catch them. They just hung around by the ceiling.

Where did they come from? Maybe the floor drain or the washtub drain. I never knew. What I did know was that I was soon killing ON AVERAGE 15 a day. Every day. Sometimes more than 20. A few times it was 30.

I only had the really big ones for a short while. Big by Midwestern standards, not Southern or worse, Australian standards. They weren't the size of your hand or a wallet. No, the biggest ones were probably the size of a quarter or a bit bigger. But they were hard and hairy. Too big to catch, too big to crush, and they fought back if I tried. I really didn't want those to get upstairs. They would terrify my wife and our young child, and they might have been big enough to make him sick if one bit him.

So, those nightmares had to burn, courtesy of my grill lighter. My wife wasn't too thrilled with that idea, and they were big enough that she could smell them burning upstairs. They were also big enough that I could hear them make crackling sounds, as well as a little high pitching noise I'd have to equate with cooking a lobster. People who like eating lobster say that's the sound of gases being released from the creature's joints as you cook it. Others say that's the lobster screaming. Maybe that sound was the spider screaming. They were big enough that in theory, they could be heard. Part of me felt bad about that. But at the same time, clearly, this was war.

Months in, I had killed hundreds of them. The big monsters were gone, but their minions still came up, wave after wave, 15 a day. For two years.

Headway made

For two years more spiders came up those stairs every day. Do the math. Better yet, I'll do it for you. 2 years is 730 days, times an average of 15 spiders. Sure, I was only seeing 5 or so for a little while, but later I was seeing 20 or more. So the average was still 15 a day. That's 10,590 spiders, killed manually. I don't know how many generations of how many spiders that was, but I was feeling a bit like the main character in "I Am Legend," the original novel by Richard Matheson, not the movie with Will Smith. If you want the movie comparison, it would be the first adaptation, "Last Man on Earth", with Vincent Price. Either way, I was beginning to feel like I was venturing into the spiders' territory, as far as they were concerned, and for them I was the boogeyman, a force of nature who had preyed upon them for longer than they could remember. The Great Bringer of Death. I wondered if they had a language, and what my name would be in that language. Given their mandibles, it would probably sound like chittering, or maybe the screeching I heard as the big ones burned.

Finally, at the end of the second year or beginning of the third, there started to be fewer of them. Maybe 10 a day. Then maybe back to 5 again. Until finally, in winter, I went a day with none. No spiders at all. Later, there were two days without spiders, then three. Soon it became weeks without a single one, though I still checked from time to time, not wanting them to get a foothold and start the war again.

After 10 years, we finally moved, and as I cleared out the basement, I learned that there was a crack in the foundation. They were probably coming in from there. There were also carpenter ants in the foundation, which didn't get into the upper house. The spiders may have been eating them. And maybe the spiders were keeping the ants at bay, until I killed so many of the spiders that the ants were able to feast on the bones of the house. It's all speculation. But that's the story of the war.