Chicken-Eating Spiders...No, Really

I'm sure no one remembers this post. The memory of the dinner (or, more accurately, the dinner conversation) is burned on my brain in letters of fire, because this was the first time I met someone who had personally seen huge-ass spiders in their natural habitat. So whereas before, my knowledge was theoretical, nature-channel knowledge, now it was urban legend knowledge--the spiders had happened to a friend of mine when he was visiting a foreign country. And I knew another friend whose childhood vacation home was infested with big roaming spiders she could hear walking on their hardwood floors. The spiders were closing in.

At the time I comforted myself by joking with my girlfriends about how the spiders might eat chickens. Oh, how we laughed. What a funny image. We laughed until we cried.

Well, the spiders in Peru actually do eat chickens. I can hear the spider saying, "Who's laughing now, girls?"

The spiders, they scare me. Excuse me, I have to go rent Arachnophobia.