It’s the stuff of nightmares.
A street in Memphis, Tennessee, has been taken over by millions of spiders which have weaved a web hundreds of metres long.
Residents woke up to the 600-metre-long frothy white substance layering their houses and gardens last week, and it has given them the heebie-jeebies.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Frances Ward told WMC Action News. “It’s like a horror movie. Never seen nothing like this before.”
“They’re in the air, flying everywhere. They all on the house (sic), on the side of the windows.”
The spider web stretched hundreds of metres and contained millions of spiders.
Another resident, Debra Lewis, said that they were struggling to be in their own homes.
“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.”
Experts have reassured the locals that the eight-legged creatures are nothing to worry about, and Memphis Zoo curator Steve Reichling reckons that they’ve probably been there the entire time.
“It could be juveniles, millions, in a big emergence event, or adults of a tiny species, probably a sheetweb spider… leaving for some reason possibly knowable only to them,” he said.
“In fields and meadows, there are often literally millions of spiders doing their thing, unseen and unappreciated by us.”
And, as annoying as they are, Reichling says that the spiders’ presence is a sure sign that everything is working well in the ecosystem.
