I Was Almost Eaten By A Human-Sized Spider

Practically.

The other night I was getting ready for bed at around 10:30ish and picked up a pile of clothes off of the floor when ALL OF A SUDDEN a behemoth of a spider came galloping out from beneath the pile and sprinted across the rug and under our bed. I literally screamed. Like, not shrieked or eeked. I fucking screamed. Of note is that Dave, a seasoned veteran attuned to my tendency to sometimes.... overreact, didn't even come into the room or inquire from the other room what the trouble was.

I am - 9 times out of 10 - the one who "takes care of" spiders or creepy bug issues in our home. But that night, I wasn't even considering being the one to rid our home of the biggest spider I've ever seen. No-effing-way. Nope.

This thing was the freaking My Buddy of spiders - pretty much life-size and wearing overalls. (Unrelated sidebar: You should know that as a child, I had the My Buddy and Mallory had the Kid Sister. Telling? #BigSistersGetWhatTheyWant #AlsoIWasATomboy #WhatupMatchboxCars?!) There was not a chance that we were getting close enough to it to swat it with a shoe or some other hard surface, because we'd be risking losing our hands to this predator's most-likely-ferocious piranha teeth.

So we had two choices:  Either surrender our entire apartment to the pseudo-tarantula or find a way to 86 it without getting near it.

We went for the latter. Once we had it cornered under our bed, Dave fetched the vacuum cleaner and set out chasing the Cloverfield spider around beneath our bed with the hose attachment of the vacuum till he managed to suck it up.

Size-wise, this pic makes it look a little bigger than it really is. But each of those legs is over half an inch long and its body looked like the size of a yellow jacket. SO. It probably could have eaten and digested me in a matter of minutes.

Probably.

Does this picture give you the weirds like it gives me the weirds? What was a spider that size doing inside my home? And - more importantly - does it have any buddies hanging out in any other nooks and crannies that I should know about? Creatures this size don't just get a free ride in this apartment. I WILL start charging rent.