Posted on 03/16/2026 6:35:57 AM PDT by V_TWIN
For some people, spiders are no joke.
Arachnophobia affects between 2.7-6.1% of people and is one of the most common anxiety disorders, according to the National Institutes of Health. The wolf spider, garden spider and the house spider are most common in Tampa, Florida.
It’s unclear if New York Yankees pitcher Cam Schlittler deals with the fear, but he made sure that the insect was taken care of before a spring training game.
Schlittler called security to get a spider out of his locker before the team took on the Detroit Tigers, according to the YES Network. Schlittler didn’t pitch in the game as the Yankees fell to the Tigers, 12-1.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
He’s Gen Z so...
I would grade on the wimp to legit phobia scale using two factors:
Size of spider and whether that spider ‘looks like’ it could kill you if it bites you.
For reference only.... He’s from Massachusetts
Always dug the old school hats.
Uni with a collar......glad that went away. 😏
Part of having money is knowing you don’t have to deal with everything, that you’ve got people for that. So I say neither. He’s rich enough to know a spider in his locker doesn’t have to be his problem, “hey, Jimmy, get somebody to get this spider out of my locker alright”.
Q: What do you get when you cross a spider with a horse?
A: I don’t know.
A2: I don’t know either. But when it bites you, you can ride it to the hospital.
As you can tell...spiders are...
NOT.
My thing.
When I was six years old, I tried to crawl through a drainage pipe under a road to come out on the other side. I got maybe ten or twenty feet in, and the pipe had been getting progressively narrower, until I realized I couldn’t go any further, and was having trouble going back. While I was wiggling backwards, inch by inch, I suddenly realized there were cobwebs and stuff that had got all over my back and my hair. As I looked out the corner of my eye on my shoulder, there was a daddy longlegs.
I completely freaked out. I started screaming horribly and was bashing myself against the wall, just going nuts. I don’t know why, daddy longlegs aren’t really all that scary and are harmless, but...hey, I was six years old. I didn’t know they were harmless. I watched Johnny Quest.
My older brother who was watching, crawled in, grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me out. I was like a shot out of a cannon.
I ran, screaming down the road, leaping in the air, pirouetting, crazily beating my head and shoulders with my arms. At every turn trying to get the spider and the cobwebs off my neck and shoulder, when I looked, that dead spider was still stuck to me, solidly.
My brother laughs about it today...:)
I find spiders interesting, but if they crawl on me...hoo boy. I just can’t help it. I lived in the Philippines, and they had enormous bugs and beetles, lizards and snakes, and I had no problem with them. Just spiders. Go figure.
You can buy retro "pillbox" baseball hats. They even make them for newer teams that never wore them.
Spiders. Why does it always have to be spiders?
One night a few years ago, as I was going to bed, I turned on the overhead light, pulled back the covers and was going arrange the pillows, when a big black stocky spider about an inch across scurried from under the covers towards the stacked pillows at the head of the bed and disappeared under them.
Now, I wasn’t making a sound, but when I saw that spider scurry and disappear to a certain unknown hideaway under my mattress, my mind was screaming “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
See, if that spider makes it under the pillows to the edge of the mattress and disappears between it and the wall it is lost to me.
I wouldn’t have been able to sleep in that room last night if a spider that big, that had been in my bed, simply disappeared into the room.
I could have gone on a Bug Hunt, but...that late at night, with a spider that big, athletic, and experienced, I was not going to find it.
In a flash, I knew my only chance was to hope the spider was motionless under the pillows, so in desperation, as my only option, I instantly grabbed all the pillows and flung them backwards towards the center of the bed hoping to drag the spider with them and expose it.
To my astonishment, the spider did appear, but to my deep horror, it made a beeline for the edge of the mattress where it could escape to safety.
All this, from the sighting of the spider to my flinging the pillows back could not have been more than two, maybe three seconds. And here I was, seeing the spider fleeing along with any chance of my actually sleeping in the house that night.
With an audible groan, I watched the spider disappear over the edge, and knew with a terrible and absolute finality which was devoid of any second chance, that I had lost.
Then, unbelieveably, the spider reappeared, and ran directly across the mattress towards me.
Now, a normal person might think “What was under that mattress that made the spider flee back up onto the top and run directly at me?” or “What? It is attacking!”
But instead, my two thoughts were “I must eradicate that thing with predjudice!” (because I knew I would not get another chance) and “How can I kill a spider that big without squishing green, gooey spider guts all over my clean bedsheets?”
I calculated that swiping it at an oblique to lateral angle would launch it off the bed and onto the floor, where I had a chance to kill it if it were stunned or disoriented for even a second, so without even a split second of delay, I launched myself at it with my swooping cupped hand hopefully throwing it into the air against the wall, and not smearing it in a long, gooey greenish yellow streak with pieces of spider legs mixed in. Worse...smearing greenish yellow spider guts on my hand.
In a flash, I visualized seeing the guts smeared on the heel of my hand, then with smoke streaming off into the air, the spider guts begin to eat through my flesh until it hits my fifth metacarpal, which slows the flesh melting process down temporarily. Kind of the like the Alien’s guts in the movie “Aliens” that eats through the steel deck of the spaceship.
But it didn’t and there that spider was, disoriented, but only for moment, then began stumbling madly back towards the bed to try to disappear under it. I slammed my hand to the floor in front of it, blocking its way, so at a full run, it changed direction. So I thrust my hand to the carpet in front of it, and again, it changed direction, still trying to reach the dark safety under the bed.
All the while (now it is probably only about five or six seconds since I first saw the creature) I am casting about for something-ANYTHING (except my bare hand) to crush the thing. I spied a decorative bowl next to the bed that was full of a jumble of Mah Jong tiles, so I grabbed on, and was finally able to flatten the damn thing.
Granted the innard-laden tile had to be thrown away in a secure trash receptacle along with more paper towel sections than were rationally necessary for removing the guts from the carpet, but...it was dead. I could put my head back on the pillow and sleep.
You can probably tell-I hate spiders!
Living in Florida for almost 60 years has taught me to deal with all kinds of insects/bugs...and other critters for that matter...only ones that get to me are the giant cockroaches.
Or as the realtors down here call ‘em.....”palmetto bugs”. 😂
Pinch hitter called in for the pitcher.
Pitchers can’t generally bat.
Okay. I think I have it all out of my system now!
Can if Raid. Psst. Crises averted
I now know, late in my life, that as God is my witness, Turkeys can fly.
But I had no idea Cockroaches could fly.
When I saw a cockroach fly, I was at NAS Cecil Field in Florida near Jacksonville, and was sleeping in my room in the BEQ (I was lucky enough to get a room of my own, it was a small oddly shaped room that could only fit one man!) I woke in the night to hear some odd scratching noise...it was going on in the room, and I thought “What the **** is that?”
When I turned on the light, it was the sound of the biggest cockroach I have ever seen scurrying around on the floor...I could actually HEAR it! I instinctively leaped out of bed, and wearing only boxer shorts, grabbed one of my boondockers and began chasing the thing around the small room...WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! but the blasted thing was too agile for me in my newly woken state, and I just couldn’t hit it. As it made a break to the gap under the door to escape, I nailed it.
When I hit it, the boondocker created a sickening CRACK-CRUNCH sound, and I thought “Well, that’s the end of THAT”, but as I lifted the shoe expecting to see a gooey mess, I saw a large, intact roach. For a second, it didn’t move...and then suddenly, it took to the air! It made this horrible whirring sound with its wings as it flew, and the blurring pattern of the wings seemed to create a gray sphere the size of a softball!
I can tell you, in the cramped confines of that room, it was quite unnerving!
It suddenly dropped to the floor, and ran under the door into the corridor, and I opened the door in hot pursuit in my boxers with the boondocker repeatedly striking the floor with a WHACK-WHACK-WHACK sound, but it was too fast for me and ran under the next doorway it came to!
The guy has access to baseball bats.
Wimp.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.