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Spiders freak out neighborhood with half-mile long web

Posted at 4:39 PM, Nov 24, 2015
and last updated 2015-11-24 16:39:20-05

North Memphis, Tenn. – If you’re scared of spiders, one’s enough. Two? That’s cause for a squishing party. Thousands? Millions? Time to really freak out.

That’s the predicament residents in one North Memphis, Tennessee, neighborhood find themselves in after thousands — or more — spiders began invading their homes.

“It’s like a horror movie,” resident Debra Lewis told CNN affiliate WMC in Memphis.

The spiders are coming from a nearly half-mile-long web, part of what Memphis Zoo Curator Steve Reichling told the station is a natural “mass dispersal” of harmless, beneficial arachnids.

Try telling that to Lewis and her neighbors Frances Ward and Ida Morris.

“They’re just in the air; they’re flying everywhere. They all on the house, on the side of the windows,” Lewis said.

Ward: “When I got up this morning, it was like spiders all over my door; they were coming in my house.”

“You can’t even sit in her house because they’re all on the wall, on the door,” Lewis said. “We been killing spiders for about an hour now.”

Reichling says the creepy-crawlies are harmless sheet web spiders.

On Twitter, the editor-in-chief of the Memphis Business Journal called for immediate civic action.

“The most important story right now is this North Memphis spider infestation,” Greg Akers wrote. “Has anyone made an app tracking it’s movements yet?”

It’s apparently all part of a carefully planned spider invasion. Last month, thousands of spiders took over a bridge in Ohio. Last year, another spider army forced a family out of their St. Peters, Missouri, home.

We learned they can cross oceans. They’re sneaking onto our jetliners. And recent media reports from Australia even had spiders falling from the sky.