Man Lets A Spider The Size Of A Dinner Plate Live In His Home For A Year

For those of us who are terrified of spiders, nothing is quite as chilling as the Hunstman spider. The giant arachnid is large enough to make anyone’s skin crawl in absolute horror.

And yet, one man in Australia was happy to let a Huntsman spider live in his home for a whole year!

Jake Gray, the man with the Huntsman spider for a roommate, shared photos of the giant arachnid on his Facebook page. He cited how he’d watched her grow in size over the entire year – and it’s scary! The spider has gotten to an uncomfortable size – she takes up a sizable portion of the wall. That is definitely not something I’d be okay with. And neither were a lot of the other Facebook users who saw and commented on Gray’s post.

Photo: Facebook / Jake Gray

Gray didn’t seem to mind his spider roommate in the slightest, but there were plenty of people who were bothered by it. One person wrote, “that’s the spider’s house now,” while someone else stated that Gray should begin charging the spider rent given her sheer size. Personally, I say he should evict the spider roommate. But Gray doesn’t seem to mind at all.

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He has been living with the spider inside his house, which is located in Cairns, Far North Queensland, since 2019. And the spider has really grown – she’s now the size of a dinner plate. But luckily for him, Hunstman spiders are quite docile despite their foreboding presence. They are normally quite shy and prefer to run away when they feel threatened, rather than stay and fight. And that is a good thing because besides being so huge, the Huntsman spiders can possess venom that can be painful.

The Huntsman spider is quite common in Australia as there are more than 155 different species of the spider habituating on the large island continent. They’re quite big and hairy and do possess some venom that can be harmful to humans. Thankfully, they’re quite shy for the large beasts that they are, so they don’t like interacting with people much. In fact, most Huntsman spiders prefer to be live quiet and peaceful lives. They mostly live outside beneath leaves or loose bark on trees, or inside the crevices of rocks. Of course, trying to share a habitat with humans can be a little tricky sometimes, as one man found out when a Huntsman spider decided to set up shop inside his headphones!

Not too long ago, Australian resident, Olly Hurst, had the fright of his life when he picked up his noise-canceling headphones. He put them on, completely unaware of the horror hidden within…until he felt a tickling sensation in his ear.

He took them off and was surprised to find that there was a large Huntsman spider resting comfortably on the inside of the headphones. Eeek! Hurst shared the video on his Instagram and there were plenty of comments flooding the post. One user wrote, “nope, nope nope……I would be doing a dance and firing those ear muffs as far away from me as I could throw them!” Can’t say that we’d be arguing that!

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