But frankly, the scorpions bother me a lot more. Especially when they like to hide in your laundry, and drop down onto the floor at night from your attic. You can hear them when they hit the floor.
These days, I sit back one row from a guy we call "Spider Man", because his screen saver is nothing but giant pictures of spiders, 24x7. That will give you arachnophobia faster than anything I know of.
Growing up in Oklahoma, I met plenty of Black Widow and Brown Recluse spiders. My biology teacher collected them. He was extremely annoyed with me one day when I was cleaning some stuff up in the back of the room and the biggest brown recluse I've ever seen decided to take a quick trip up my arm. I managed to catch the thing and put it in a glass container filled with a clear liquid, and he looked at me like I was an idiot and told me "You know that water won't kill those things, right?" To which I replied "Yes, that's why the container is filled with alcohol." He really wanted that thing for his collection, and was quite miffed that I had actually managed to kill the sucker, before he could get his hands on it.
The bite from a brown recluse or a black widow may be worse than a black tarantula that is bigger than your hand, but in my experience, the effect on your bowels is much larger with the tarantula.
Im actually reminded of how the other day I walked outside and one of those giant cockroaches flew down and landed on my shorts. I had my phone in one hand and a drink in the other. I started tap-dancing that thing off my leg and then it flailed around while I was trying to step on it. After the commotion ended, I realized my Ring Doorbell captured the entire moment. That is probably the most viewed tweet Ive ever posted...
Where I'm at in Chico, CA has hundred or thousands of black widows... you definitely don't put gloves on without shaking or rolling them up.
Yup, it's a real thing.
Those things are ginormous.
And they hunt tarantulas.
'Nuff said.
It's a hindbrain thing, I have it too. The rational side of my brain doesn't need the onlookers to explain to me the technique of staying calm and not flailing about; the hindbrain is incapable of listening and wants me to just fuckin' run as fast as is humanly possible.
It can be embarrassing at times...
It doesn't help that I've been stung by wasps more than once, but never by spiders.
But scorpions are even worse than wasps. They don't have the sound of their wings beating or the actual capability of flight, but they are much more alien looking -- and acting.
The thing with wasps for me was that both times I was stung, I sort of walked near a nest but wasn't really doing anything to disturb them. Or one time I was having dessert at a restaurant and a bunch of yellowjackets flew through the open window and ganged up on me and wanted my dessert and my coke (in this case they weren't aggressive but attracted to the sweet smells/tastes, I know, but still scary). However, every time I've seen scorpions, they were doing their thing, away from me, and I got the idea that unless I actually stepped on them, they'd leave me alone.
Even through they are great mosquito killers, I won't let a nest live near a place I frequent. We also have cicada killer wasps, which are very large and very inquisitive. That combination usually has me spazing out at least once a year as they dive bomb me...