Hiding the Horror

Photos by John Michaels



In Western civilization, arachnophobia is a mainstream disorder. According to one British study1, more than half of all women and nearly a fifth of all men are scared of spiders. For most of these people, arachnids never rise above an icky annoyance. But for a small minority, the dread is so intense that it manifests in rituals that seriously affect one’s day-to-day life. Even more troubling, extreme arachnophobia can be a direct route to the worst sort of agoraphobia: a crippling preoccupation with the enemy invading the sanctuary of home via countless imperceptibly tiny chinks and gaps. Fortunately, it’s a curable condition.

It was only a few years ago that I came to appreciate the severity of my own arachnophobia. Although I could tolerate tiny spiders, anything larger than an average-size black widow activated instant terror: My hands moistened with sweat, my heart raced, and my skin twitched in anticipation of contact. More important, I would do anything to get away. A photograph, or even a one-second glimpse of a spider on TV, could conjure these reactions. Webs and cartoon spiders were also triggers. I’ve worked desk jobs where the adrenaline jolt from a simple Google image search for “tarantula” replaced my afternoon caffeine fix.

There’s no mystery to how I acquired this affliction. The culprit was The Brady Bunch. Specifically, “Pass the Tabu” (season 4, episode 2), when the gang goes to Hawaii and a tarantula crawls up a bedspread toward a terrified Peter Brady. This aired when I was three, and although I don’t remember the rest of the episode, the scene is an indelible part of my childhood. One of my earliest memories is of trying to fall asleep in my old bedroom in Troy, New York, waiting for the tarantula to come creep-crawling up my blanket. Normally, an event even this innocuous would precipitate a lifelong trauma—point A to my present point B. But in between these points, I took a detour from my fear that I still can’t fully explain.

In the summer of 1985, I spent a month camping in the jungles of Panama. I was 16 and had been accepted into the School for Field Studies (SFS), a Massachusetts-based undergraduate environmental study-abroad program. SFS offered rigorous on-site research intertwined with rugged physical challenges. After meeting our American instructors in Panama City, my group traveled by train and boat to an inlet east of Lago Gatún. We pitched camp in a clearing, ate a lot of Spam and mangos, drank hot cola, and learned how to survive in an alien ecosystem.

We set up camp adjacent to the jungle, and our minders hacked a winding pathway through foliage so dense it made the trail seem like a covered hedge maze or a leafy hallway. Workdays began with a walk through this cool, murky passage. A five-minute stroll led to an open field and, from there, the sites of our research. Returning to camp in the afternoon, it was impossible to ignore the huge web just to the left of the entrance to the path. A hairless spider—definitely not a tarantula but still gigantic, with legs like jointed knitting needles—dangled in the dead center of the web. It never moved, except to sway when the wind caught its web. One of us had named it Mike. Every day we would greet Mike, usually with a machete salute, as we headed back to camp. Returning from the field on our last day, I noticed that Mike was missing from his web. My field partner and I paused and laughed and dared each other to step back into the hallway. It seemed like a trap from a horror movie. But after a few laughs we continued on. It wasn’t that scary.

Why would it be? SFS paperwork included warnings about the local fauna. We learned that large wolf spiders could inflict a painful bite, but they weren’t fatal. We’d also been warned not to shake any trees, lest one dislodge a Goliath bird-eater tarantula (so named by a 19th-century explorer who allegedly witnessed one devour a hummingbird). In the vast pantheon of jungle-dwelling creepy-crawlies, however, spiders ranked somewhere in the middle. They were scarier than the scorpion I dislodged from my boot, but nowhere near as chilling as a half-glimpsed slither of a monster python, or waist-high anthills, or howler monkeys whose distant, inhuman shrieks brought conversation to a nervous halt. When I returned home at the end of the month and greeted my mother, I said, “Well, I guess I’m not scared of spiders anymore.”


1 Davey, Graham, Phobias: a Handbook of Theory, Research, and Treatment, (London: Wiley, 2000).