I think most of us would agree that spiders are kind of scary, but here's a fear of the arachnid taken to the extreme. A man set his house on fire trying to kill a spider. You read that correctly. A man in Seattle set his house aflame, causing some $60,000 in damage and displacing a family, all because he wanted to kill an itsy bitsy spider. You may be wondering to yourself, how does one go about burning down one's own house in an attempt to kill a spider? How does that happen, exactly? Well I'm glad you asked, because there's an important lesson here for us all to learn.
The unnamed man tried to kill the spider with fire. Specifically, he used a can of spray paint and a lighter in his laundry room. You see, the spider was about to climb into the wall, and the man wanted to stop it. What if it succeeded in escaping into the wall and then laid a bunch of little spider eggs?!? I guess that's why he didn't go with a more traditional spider-killing method, like, say, smashing it with his shoe or a rolled-up newspaper.
Instead, he lit the wall on fire, and the flames traveled up to the ceiling and into the attic. He tried to douse the flames with water but failed. Then he ran out of the house.
"There are safer, more effective ways to kill a spider than using fire," says Kyle Moore of the Seattle Fire Department. "Fire is not the method to use to kill a spider." To which I would add: no shit. You guys, better to let a spider escape into a wall than to burn that wall down. Yes, even if the end result is a hundred spider babies. Don't fight fire with fire, and don't fight spiders with fire, either.
We're just glad no one was hurt in this debacle.
What do you usually use to kill spiders? I prefer my bare fingers. (Kidding.)
Image © Alasdair Thomson