April 18, 2025 • 30 mins
Over the decades, stories have trickled in from all across the globe. Places both far, and unnervingly near… of truly horrifying things, with far too many legs for comfort.
The simple question is, are you afraid of spiders?
Written by Neil McRobert and produced by Richard MacLean Smith
Find us at youtube.com/@unexplainedpod, tiktok.com/@unexplainedpodcast, twitter @unexplainedpod, facebook.com/unexplainedpodcast or www.unexplainedpodcast.com for more info. Thank you for listening.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
In April two thousand and four, a photograph of monsters
began to circulate online, first through email, then across early
social platforms. Unlike the blurred, half obscured images typically offered
as evidence a weird phenomena, this photo was crisp and
clear and seemingly irrefutable, and what it showed looked too
(00:28):
awful to be real. Two things, in fact, two things
sharing sixteen hairy segmented legs twisted round each other in
skin crawling entwinement, being held aloft by two US soldiers
stationed and Bagdad. In two thousand and four, a pair
of monstrous, pale spiders, each seemingly large enough to dwarf
(00:53):
the hand holding them. They seemed to resemble the terrifying
face hugger of the Alien movies more than any normal iraknet.
They were said to be camel spiders fabled a rachnids
of the Middle Eastern desert, tales of which spread among
military personnel in the area during both the First and
second invasion of Iraq. The email was said to originate
(01:16):
from American soldiers stationed in Baghdad, and was sent, according
to the writer, to give you a better idea of
what our troops are dealing with. As the image continued
to scurry across the internet, wilder claims soon attached themselves
to the unnerving looking creature. They were capable of huge
(01:36):
vertical leaps. It was set high enough for them to
reach the underside of the dromedary camel for which they
were named. Once attached to the belly of the camel,
they would bite deep into it and lay eggs under
the skin. According to online comments, they could run it
up to twenty five miles per hour, and most unnervingly,
(01:58):
they were said to make an all screaming sound as
they did. Accounts rolled in of spiders actively chasing down
human victims and injecting them with anastetizing venom. When they
incapacitate their prey. The story is set. They don't just
suck out your juices, they also feed on your flesh.
(02:22):
The viral camel spider photo was a horror story borne
from an arachnophobe's worse nightmares, but thankfully, in this instance
at least, there is cause for reassurance. Camel spiders are
real and native to Iraq. The pair and the photograph
are also genuine, but they've been unnaturally inflated through a
(02:43):
trick of camera perspective. In truth, the biggest specimens don't
exceed a five inch legspan. Neither do they run particularly fast,
nor do they scream, and any minor trace of venom
they possess is no use to them, as their teeth
are far too short to break skin. They lay their
eggs in the soil, not in any living creature, let
(03:06):
alone something as hard to reach as a camel. As
their ability to jump great heights is also entirely fictitious.
In short, the viral photograph is an illusion, and the
claims that accrue to it are nothing but urban legend.
Even if the camel spiders were as large as they
look in the photo, they would still be smaller than
(03:29):
known arachnids like the goliath bird eater or the giant huntsman.
An arachnophobe, it seems, can traveled to Iraq without too
much cause for concern. But over the decades many stories
have trickled in from other corners of the globe, places
both far to some but unnervingly near to others, of
(03:51):
truly horrifying things with far too many legs for comfort.
You're listening to unexplained, and I am Richard McLean Smith.
Back in nineteen forty two, during the Second World War,
(04:13):
deep in the Owen Stanley Mountains of southeastern Papa, New Guinea,
an Australian soldier steps into the bush to answer a
call of nature. The soldier is one of the many
thousands of Australian and Japanese forces fighting along the Kokoda Trail,
a single file track that runs for sixty miles through
(04:34):
the mountains. The air is chokingly thick and baking hot
gnats buzz all about. Armed with a small shovel, the
soldier steps into the thick undergrowth in search of a quiet,
secluded spot. Having finished relieving himself, he realized with the
jolt that he was crouched close to a vast patch
(04:57):
of some kind of weblike substance. It was soft like
cotton and blanketed everywhere from the ground up to about
six feet of the surrounding tree trunks. With the mixture
of curiosity and nerves, the soldier tracked the extent of
the netting, which spread ten to fifteen feet either side
(05:17):
of his position, turning to face the dense center of it.
With marrow freezing horror, he saw the thing that had
created it. Less than two feet from his face hung
an enormous spider. The body alone was the size of
a small dog. It was pitch black and covered in oily,
(05:38):
iridescent hairs. Its legs were not long like a tarantulasah,
but short and stubby. Mesmerized, and more than a little
stunned with fear, the man stared at the spider for
a few moments before backing slowly away and running back
to camp. This story was first revealed to the world
(06:06):
in two thousand and one by Debbie and Peter Hines,
a wife and husband team of cryptoseologists. The soldier in
question was the father of one of Debbie's childhood friends,
who had terrified them with the story when they were young.
The Hines offer no verifying evidence or even names or
(06:26):
exact locations. Perhaps it would be easy to dismiss the
account outright as another tall tale born of war, But
then came the intriguing phone call made to a late
night radio station just a few years later. It was
back on August sixth, two thousand and five, that a
(06:47):
young man named Craig called into the radio show Coast
to Coast FM, where he proceeded to recount his own
grandfather's wartime encounter with a massive spider, also in Papa
New Guinea. Craig's grandfather was stationed in the capital city,
Port Moresby, when he is said to have gone on
(07:08):
a trek into the nearby rainforest. There, he apparently came
across another vast web, in the center of which was
a spider with a leg span of at least three
to four feet that would make the creature at least
four times the size of the largest known spider on
the planet. Unlike the species apparently spotted near the Cacoda Trail,
(07:34):
this one was smooth rather than hairy, and glimmered as
striking emerald green in the dappled sunlight. Craig's grandfather was
said to have been so frightened by the spider that
he quickly drew his machete and hacked it to death.
(07:56):
The Pacific island of Papa New Guinea remains one of
the world's least explored land masses. Its highlands are cloaked
in dense rainforest with little or no access for vehicles.
The remoteness and pristine conditions of the country's forests have
preserved an amazing degree of biodiversity and unique ecosystems. If
(08:18):
there was the possibility of a gigantic species of arachnet
living unrecognized somewhere on Earth, there are few habitats more
congenial than Papa New Guinea. Maybe the only place more
likely is the Congo Basin, a vast swathe of true,
unexplored wilderness of rivers and rainforest and hidden lakes the
(08:40):
size of small countries. It's long been romanticized as the
last lost world on Earth and the home for unknown
species or those thought long extinct, such as the apparent
relict Saurupont, Maclay and Bembe, as featured in Season eight,
episode ten, Not All Who Wander. In nineteen thirty eight,
(09:04):
married explorers Marguerite and Reginald Lloyd were driving in the
interior of the Congo Basin. They had settled in what
was then Rhodesia as part of the European expansion into Africa,
and had come to the Congo to explore its mysteries.
Their ramshackle Ford truck rattled down the pock marked jungle track,
(09:27):
hemmed in on both sides by a thick wall of
dark jungle green. Suddenly, Reginald slammed on the brakes. A
dozen feet ahead, something was emerging from the forest. For
a few seconds, the couple watched charmed, assuming that they
were privileged to the rare sight of a large jungle
(09:50):
cat or perhaps a monkey, walking on all fours. Only
as their eyes took in the weird, acute angles of
the creature's men limbs did they recoil in horror. It
was a huge spider with a leg span easily exceeding
four feet. Reginald twisted in his seat frantically trying to
(10:13):
reach his camera, but by the time he turned back,
the spider had vanished. In the weblike way that these
stories strink together through the years, The Lloyd's daughter, Margaret,
would later tell the story to William Gibbons, a cryptozoologist
with particular interest in unknown African megafauna. In the nineteen nineties,
(10:37):
William Gibbons traveled to the Congo and Cameroon in search
of Mackelay and Bembey. While meeting with members of the
Bakar tribe, he mentioned the Lloyd sighting of the spider
sixty years earlier. Apparently, the Bakar responded affirmatively, without surprise
or amusement. Oh yes, they told Gibbons the large spider
(11:00):
did certainly exist. In their language, it was known as
Cuba fufi, or the great spider. The Cuba fufi had
apparently once been a common and well known threat, similar
(11:20):
in shape to a tarantula, only much much larger. It
had a large, hairy body covered in dense brown fur,
with a noticeable purple cast to its abdomen. The leg
span was truly fearsome, upwards of five feet in total,
large enough to overpower and drag away antelope, birds, and
(11:44):
sadly also children that are said to be its prey.
According to the Bakar community, the Cuba fufi typically make
their den in the hollows beneath trees, camouflaging the entrance
with roots and leaves. They then say an intricate network
of webs to slow down passing prey and alert the
(12:05):
spider to the presence of a meal. Once summoned, the
Tuba fufi launches itself from its nest like a trapdoor spider.
The Bakhar told Gibbons that the spider had once been
common to the area, but deforestation and encroaching farmland had
driven them further into the forest's interior. Nonetheless, sightings have
(12:27):
apparently continued across the years, with anecdotes and accounts of
spiders venturing out to drag stray dogs, and, if the
stories are to be believed, even people screaming into the jungle.
The deep forests of Central Africa and Papa New Guinea
have long been filled with monsters. In the Western imagination,
(12:50):
it seems half logical that if a giant, unknown arachnid
did exist, that's where it would be. The same cannot
be said for the modern urbanized United States, however. Nonetheless,
one of the most intriguing encounters with an oversized spider
is said to have taken place in the small city
(13:11):
of Leesville, Louisiana, in nineteen forty eight. It was a
cool evening when forty eight year old William Sladen accompanied
his wife Pearl, and their three children to church. The
youngest of the children was Richard, only six years old. Together,
they walked north along Highway one seventy one, chattering amiably
(13:34):
until they reached a dip in the road. Suddenly, William
Sladen stood ramrod still and held out his hands to
stop his family proceeding any further. The children obeyed, and
young Richard watched the road ahead for whatever threat had
so clearly spoot his grandfather. He heard a rustling in
(13:55):
the overgrown ditch at the side of the highway. Then
he looked on with disbelief and dawning horror as something
terrifying emerged from it. As Richard described it to his
son Todd fifty years later, it was a huge spider,
the size of a washed up, hairy and black. As
(14:17):
it crossed the road, the Sladen family watched in utter silence.
No one said a word. The spider crossed the asphalt
in a stately, unhurried fashion, eventually disappearing into the brush
on the western side of the highway. The family didn't
daret a cross where the spider had been. They simply
(14:39):
turned around and went home. Richard says that only once
did he and his brothers ask their grandfather what it
was they had seen. William's blunt response was that it
was simply a very large spider. This apparent, straight and
(15:00):
terrifying episode was never discussed again, but Richard would tell
his own son that he suspected the old man knew
more than he was letting on. I always had the
impression that Grandpa was familiar with it. He said that
he had seen one before. He was a man who'd
lived deep in the woods, building makeshift towns to facilitate
(15:20):
the logging industry. Maybe he saw things in those woods
he didn't talk about to us kids, another piece of
rural folklore. Perhaps the memory of a child inflating a
roaming tarantula into a gargantuan monster. Maybe. But in twenty nineteen,
nearly seventy years after Richard's experience, a sergeant stationed at
(15:44):
Louisiana's Fort Polk gave a series of strange first hand reports.
The soldier going by the handle, Sergeant S wrote a
prominent cryptozoologist, Carl Schucker, detailing encounters he and his colleagues
had had with an especially enormous species of spider at
the base, which is situated only eight miles from the
(16:06):
Leesville town limits. Sergeant S's first apparent sighting was in
two thousand and five, when he was part of d
Company in the one hundred and first Airborne Division based
at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. In the early spring, he
traveled to Fort Polk for complex field training. In the
(16:27):
early evening. The sergeant was walking with another soldier, whom
he refers to as Sergeant Becky. They were making their
way from the company dorms to the motorple, a short
journey that took them on a dirt road cutting through
a thickly wooded area. It was approaching dark, and both
held flashlights to illuminate the shadowy path. Sergeant Becky was
(16:51):
walking ten feet ahead when she suddenly screamed and tripped,
falling to the road. When Sergeant s ran up to
help her, he caught sight of something in its torchlight,
a large hairy shape on the edge of the tree line,
no more than four feet from the prone Becky. It
was a mottled color, he said, with white and gray
(17:12):
bristles and raised ridges and bumps running down the sides
of its head and abdomen. The creature's head was roughly
three feet from the ground and covered in eyes. It
raised a pair of spinly prying appendages. Then, as the
two soldiers looked on it splayed its other legs as
(17:33):
if preparing to pounce forward. Sergeantes could see visible fangs
surrounded by a three to four inch mouth In a panic,
he set two with the butt of his carbine rifle,
swinging wildly at the thing's head while kicking and screaming
at the top of his lungs. Sergeant S claimed that
(18:04):
he later reported details to Karlshuka about the spider's eyes,
how his flashlight illuminated the eye tube like shining a
light into a bottle filled with clear jelly. The spider
backed away several feet, at which point the sergeant reversed
its weapon and fired a round of bullets directly at
its face. The creature is then said to have responded
(18:27):
with a foul smelling liquid from somewhere close to its mouth.
It fanned out like a liquid shot from a nozzle
and instantly turned to mist, which settled on both Sergeant
S and Becky's clothing. Under onslaught, the huge spider finally
beat a clumsy retreat into the bush, crashing into the
(18:47):
trees as it stumbled away. After only a few feet,
it was rendered invisible among the shadows and leaves. As
Sergeant S pulled the still screaming Becky to her feet,
his foot landed on a ropelike filament which stuck to
his boot strongly enough that he had to cut it
away with a knife. After reporting the incident, the sergeant
(19:11):
claims that he was accompanied back to the area for
an inspection, during which they found more of the sticky
weblike substance surrounding a half a meter hole the pit as.
The sergeant described it at a sort of circular thatched
cover hinged with some kind of glue. He described it
(19:33):
as a construction of small sticks and leaves arranged in
a symmetrical radial pattern. It was an interesting and specific detail,
considering that the car tribe similar descriptions of trapped or
like constructions apparently created by the tube fufi. A strong
skunk like scent persisted in the air and remained in
(19:56):
the soldier's clothing for days. A member of senior leadership
recognized the scent on them and ordered his men to
find bottles of ammonia and simple green degreasa. He ordered
Sergeant s and Becky to wash their hands and faces immediately,
and warned them to wash both themselves and their uniforms
(20:18):
several more times. If you don't get the smell out,
They were told, she'll come after you. The senior officer
did not elaborate further. It was a few nights later
when Sergeant S and a few of his fellow troops
were awoken by the sound of something traversing the corrugated
(20:38):
roof of their sleeping quarters. It sounded at first like
brain drops, though with a strange hesitant rhythm. When it
abruptly stopped above them, the men, including a very nervous
Sergeant S, went outside to have a look. One of
the men was boosted up to the roof to check
(20:58):
it out, but he found nothing elsewhere in the barracks.
On the same night as the strange sounds on the roof,
another soldier was said to have been woken by the
sound of something tapping at the window. He looked up
(21:19):
to see what he first took to be an old,
bearded man wearing large goggles, peering in at the sleeping
men from the doorway. The soldier hurriedly rushed outside to investigate,
only to watch the strange figure crawl away, rapidly, scale
a ten foot fence, and disappear into the woods. Two
(21:40):
years later, in the spring of two thousand and seven,
Sergeant S was back at Fort Polk for another pre
deployment exercise. Late one afternoon, the sergeant set out for
a run on the nearby Alligator Lake Loop in the
company of two other soldiers. As they jogged down the
wide dirt road that circled the water, one of the
(22:02):
group began to suffer from heat exhaustion. They stopped and
settled her in the shade while Sergeantes ran to fetch
a medic on the return journey. As the sergeant led
the medic toward his colleague, the medic stepped in something
sticky on the ground. He pulled off his shoe to
find a strange fibrous material clinging to the bottom of
(22:26):
it and stretching across the path. Had there not been
so much of it, he would have said it was
some kind of spider's web. Sergeantes broke off to relieve
himself in the bushes. He suddenly became aware of movement
in the leaves on the other side of the trail.
Staring out toward a trembling leaf, he was certain he
(22:49):
could see something dark peeking out at the foliage. The
medic saw it too. The sergeant later described it as
being covered in bristles, with two pebble like eyes, each
three to four inches in circumference. Surrounded by smaller orbs.
He believed he saw its fangs too. As soon as
(23:11):
the sergeant moved, it was said to have scurried away
into the bush, and the men didn't hang around to
find out more. Later in the week, the sergeant was
back out on a late night exercise. It took place
on the edge of the training ground, where a mock
village had been built to allow troops to practice urban combat.
(23:33):
That night, the sergeant was positioned in the top story
window of a makeshift wooden house when he spotted a
friend passing on the street below smoking a cigarette. The
sergeant yelled for him to stop, then stepped onto the
roof and jumped down to join him. He lit one
up for himself, enjoying the brief moment of respite under
(23:55):
the stars. As the pair began to talk, the friend
so he went very quiet as he looked over the
sergeant's shoulder. Sergeantes, following his friend's gates, looked up to
see a familiar shape walking across the roof of the house.
According to s its legs were easily six feet apart,
(24:18):
with a torso roughly one foot thick and two feet long.
The sergeant threw rocks at the roof until the spider
skitted away and once more disappeared into the gloom of
the woods beyond. The supposed encounter in the training village
(24:41):
was Sergeant S's last apparent encounter with giant spiders at
Fort Polk, Louisiana. He did, however, follow up his story
with some observations. First, he proposed that the creatures he
saw on his second trip to Fort Polk may have
been female, as to understanding the female spiders tend to
(25:02):
be larger and more aggressive. Second, he wondered if the
spiders hunted by scent and if it had been actively
seeking him in the makeshift building on the edge of
the training ground, having identified him from its urine near
Alligator Lake. And lastly, he pointed out that he was
not alone in his awareness of the spiders, and that
(25:25):
local troops often made jokes about their existence and warned
new recruits never to venture into the woods alone. He
also pointed out that when he apparently reported each of
his encounters up the chain of command, the leadership professed
not to believe his story and accused him repeatedly of
(25:46):
misidentifying a dog with severe mange. He was allegedly warned
that his career would suffer were he to pursue the
issue any further. To the best of his knowledge, he writes,
no official or port was ever put on the record.
There is something so universally arresting about the concept of
(26:08):
a giant spider that it has wriggled its way into
both ancient myth and contemporary entertainment across the globe. From
a Nancy Trickster of West African folk tales and the
Jaragumo spider demon of Japanese law to Tolkien's Hideous Shelop
and Aragoic from the Harry Potter universe, giant spiders clearly
(26:32):
pull at some fundamental aspect of the human imagination. Accepted
science asserts that the real thing is impossible. However, due
to the particular construction of a spider's respiratory system, there
are thought to be firm limits on how large they
can really grow. Spiders do not breathe through their mouths
(26:54):
like other animals. Instead, they get their oxygen through their
skin in what is non as an open respiratory system.
Through a network of tubes called trakia, oxygen is transferred
to their tissue. It's a process of slow diffusion throughout
the body, which rapidly becomes less efficient as the spider
(27:16):
increases in size. This then should put to bed any
notion of the three, four or five foot specimens said
to have been glimpsed as they scamper across the back
roads of the world, and yet apparent sightings persist. In
twenty thirteen, a video was uploaded to YouTube from a
(27:39):
trail cam in Mozambique. It claims to be footage of
a Cuba fufi or the East African equivalent, appearing to
approach a watering hole. The short film is grainy and unclear,
but there is definite movement across the right hand side
of the screen. When the film is enhanced and the
(28:01):
contrast inverted, it does appear to show something at least
the size of a large dog, but with a far
greater number of spinly legs, skittering briskly across the ground.
It's there one moment, then gone the next, and like
any encounter with large spiders glimpsed from the corner of
(28:23):
the eye, it's hard not to wonder exactly where it
might be right now. This episode was written by Neil
McRobert and produced by me Richard McLean Smith. Neil is
(28:44):
the creator and host of his own brilliant podcast called
Talking Scared, in which he discusses the craft of horror,
writing with everyone from Ta Nanerieve Do to the God
of Horror himself, Stephen King. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard
(29:05):
McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music,
are also produced by me Richard mccleinsmith. Unexplained. The book
and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can
purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
(29:27):
your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with
any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own
you'd like to share. You can find out more at
Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us online through Twitter
at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward
(29:48):
Slash Unexplained Podcast last
In April two thousand and four, a photograph of monsters
began to circulate online, first through email, then across early
social platforms. Unlike the blurred, half obscured images typically offered
as evidence a weird phenomena, this photo was crisp and
clear and seemingly irrefutable, and what it showed looked too
(00:28):
awful to be real. Two things, in fact, two things
sharing sixteen hairy segmented legs twisted round each other in
skin crawling entwinement, being held aloft by two US soldiers
stationed and Bagdad. In two thousand and four, a pair
of monstrous, pale spiders, each seemingly large enough to dwarf
(00:53):
the hand holding them. They seemed to resemble the terrifying
face hugger of the Alien movies more than any normal iraknet.
They were said to be camel spiders fabled a rachnids
of the Middle Eastern desert, tales of which spread among
military personnel in the area during both the First and
second invasion of Iraq. The email was said to originate
(01:16):
from American soldiers stationed in Baghdad, and was sent, according
to the writer, to give you a better idea of
what our troops are dealing with. As the image continued
to scurry across the internet, wilder claims soon attached themselves
to the unnerving looking creature. They were capable of huge
(01:36):
vertical leaps. It was set high enough for them to
reach the underside of the dromedary camel for which they
were named. Once attached to the belly of the camel,
they would bite deep into it and lay eggs under
the skin. According to online comments, they could run it
up to twenty five miles per hour, and most unnervingly,
(01:58):
they were said to make an all screaming sound as
they did. Accounts rolled in of spiders actively chasing down
human victims and injecting them with anastetizing venom. When they
incapacitate their prey. The story is set. They don't just
suck out your juices, they also feed on your flesh.
(02:22):
The viral camel spider photo was a horror story borne
from an arachnophobe's worse nightmares, but thankfully, in this instance
at least, there is cause for reassurance. Camel spiders are
real and native to Iraq. The pair and the photograph
are also genuine, but they've been unnaturally inflated through a
(02:43):
trick of camera perspective. In truth, the biggest specimens don't
exceed a five inch legspan. Neither do they run particularly fast,
nor do they scream, and any minor trace of venom
they possess is no use to them, as their teeth
are far too short to break skin. They lay their
eggs in the soil, not in any living creature, let
(03:06):
alone something as hard to reach as a camel. As
their ability to jump great heights is also entirely fictitious.
In short, the viral photograph is an illusion, and the
claims that accrue to it are nothing but urban legend.
Even if the camel spiders were as large as they
look in the photo, they would still be smaller than
(03:29):
known arachnids like the goliath bird eater or the giant huntsman.
An arachnophobe, it seems, can traveled to Iraq without too
much cause for concern. But over the decades many stories
have trickled in from other corners of the globe, places
both far to some but unnervingly near to others, of
(03:51):
truly horrifying things with far too many legs for comfort.
You're listening to unexplained, and I am Richard McLean Smith.
Back in nineteen forty two, during the Second World War,
(04:13):
deep in the Owen Stanley Mountains of southeastern Papa, New Guinea,
an Australian soldier steps into the bush to answer a
call of nature. The soldier is one of the many
thousands of Australian and Japanese forces fighting along the Kokoda Trail,
a single file track that runs for sixty miles through
(04:34):
the mountains. The air is chokingly thick and baking hot
gnats buzz all about. Armed with a small shovel, the
soldier steps into the thick undergrowth in search of a quiet,
secluded spot. Having finished relieving himself, he realized with the
jolt that he was crouched close to a vast patch
(04:57):
of some kind of weblike substance. It was soft like
cotton and blanketed everywhere from the ground up to about
six feet of the surrounding tree trunks. With the mixture
of curiosity and nerves, the soldier tracked the extent of
the netting, which spread ten to fifteen feet either side
(05:17):
of his position, turning to face the dense center of it.
With marrow freezing horror, he saw the thing that had
created it. Less than two feet from his face hung
an enormous spider. The body alone was the size of
a small dog. It was pitch black and covered in oily,
(05:38):
iridescent hairs. Its legs were not long like a tarantulasah,
but short and stubby. Mesmerized, and more than a little
stunned with fear, the man stared at the spider for
a few moments before backing slowly away and running back
to camp. This story was first revealed to the world
(06:06):
in two thousand and one by Debbie and Peter Hines,
a wife and husband team of cryptoseologists. The soldier in
question was the father of one of Debbie's childhood friends,
who had terrified them with the story when they were young.
The Hines offer no verifying evidence or even names or
(06:26):
exact locations. Perhaps it would be easy to dismiss the
account outright as another tall tale born of war, But
then came the intriguing phone call made to a late
night radio station just a few years later. It was
back on August sixth, two thousand and five, that a
(06:47):
young man named Craig called into the radio show Coast
to Coast FM, where he proceeded to recount his own
grandfather's wartime encounter with a massive spider, also in Papa
New Guinea. Craig's grandfather was stationed in the capital city,
Port Moresby, when he is said to have gone on
(07:08):
a trek into the nearby rainforest. There, he apparently came
across another vast web, in the center of which was
a spider with a leg span of at least three
to four feet that would make the creature at least
four times the size of the largest known spider on
the planet. Unlike the species apparently spotted near the Cacoda Trail,
(07:34):
this one was smooth rather than hairy, and glimmered as
striking emerald green in the dappled sunlight. Craig's grandfather was
said to have been so frightened by the spider that
he quickly drew his machete and hacked it to death.
(07:56):
The Pacific island of Papa New Guinea remains one of
the world's least explored land masses. Its highlands are cloaked
in dense rainforest with little or no access for vehicles.
The remoteness and pristine conditions of the country's forests have
preserved an amazing degree of biodiversity and unique ecosystems. If
(08:18):
there was the possibility of a gigantic species of arachnet
living unrecognized somewhere on Earth, there are few habitats more
congenial than Papa New Guinea. Maybe the only place more
likely is the Congo Basin, a vast swathe of true,
unexplored wilderness of rivers and rainforest and hidden lakes the
(08:40):
size of small countries. It's long been romanticized as the
last lost world on Earth and the home for unknown
species or those thought long extinct, such as the apparent
relict Saurupont, Maclay and Bembe, as featured in Season eight,
episode ten, Not All Who Wander. In nineteen thirty eight,
(09:04):
married explorers Marguerite and Reginald Lloyd were driving in the
interior of the Congo Basin. They had settled in what
was then Rhodesia as part of the European expansion into Africa,
and had come to the Congo to explore its mysteries.
Their ramshackle Ford truck rattled down the pock marked jungle track,
(09:27):
hemmed in on both sides by a thick wall of
dark jungle green. Suddenly, Reginald slammed on the brakes. A
dozen feet ahead, something was emerging from the forest. For
a few seconds, the couple watched charmed, assuming that they
were privileged to the rare sight of a large jungle
(09:50):
cat or perhaps a monkey, walking on all fours. Only
as their eyes took in the weird, acute angles of
the creature's men limbs did they recoil in horror. It
was a huge spider with a leg span easily exceeding
four feet. Reginald twisted in his seat frantically trying to
(10:13):
reach his camera, but by the time he turned back,
the spider had vanished. In the weblike way that these
stories strink together through the years, The Lloyd's daughter, Margaret,
would later tell the story to William Gibbons, a cryptozoologist
with particular interest in unknown African megafauna. In the nineteen nineties,
(10:37):
William Gibbons traveled to the Congo and Cameroon in search
of Mackelay and Bembey. While meeting with members of the
Bakar tribe, he mentioned the Lloyd sighting of the spider
sixty years earlier. Apparently, the Bakar responded affirmatively, without surprise
or amusement. Oh yes, they told Gibbons the large spider
(11:00):
did certainly exist. In their language, it was known as
Cuba fufi, or the great spider. The Cuba fufi had
apparently once been a common and well known threat, similar
(11:20):
in shape to a tarantula, only much much larger. It
had a large, hairy body covered in dense brown fur,
with a noticeable purple cast to its abdomen. The leg
span was truly fearsome, upwards of five feet in total,
large enough to overpower and drag away antelope, birds, and
(11:44):
sadly also children that are said to be its prey.
According to the Bakar community, the Cuba fufi typically make
their den in the hollows beneath trees, camouflaging the entrance
with roots and leaves. They then say an intricate network
of webs to slow down passing prey and alert the
(12:05):
spider to the presence of a meal. Once summoned, the
Tuba fufi launches itself from its nest like a trapdoor spider.
The Bakhar told Gibbons that the spider had once been
common to the area, but deforestation and encroaching farmland had
driven them further into the forest's interior. Nonetheless, sightings have
(12:27):
apparently continued across the years, with anecdotes and accounts of
spiders venturing out to drag stray dogs, and, if the
stories are to be believed, even people screaming into the jungle.
The deep forests of Central Africa and Papa New Guinea
have long been filled with monsters. In the Western imagination,
(12:50):
it seems half logical that if a giant, unknown arachnid
did exist, that's where it would be. The same cannot
be said for the modern urbanized United States, however. Nonetheless,
one of the most intriguing encounters with an oversized spider
is said to have taken place in the small city
(13:11):
of Leesville, Louisiana, in nineteen forty eight. It was a
cool evening when forty eight year old William Sladen accompanied
his wife Pearl, and their three children to church. The
youngest of the children was Richard, only six years old. Together,
they walked north along Highway one seventy one, chattering amiably
(13:34):
until they reached a dip in the road. Suddenly, William
Sladen stood ramrod still and held out his hands to
stop his family proceeding any further. The children obeyed, and
young Richard watched the road ahead for whatever threat had
so clearly spoot his grandfather. He heard a rustling in
(13:55):
the overgrown ditch at the side of the highway. Then
he looked on with disbelief and dawning horror as something
terrifying emerged from it. As Richard described it to his
son Todd fifty years later, it was a huge spider,
the size of a washed up, hairy and black. As
(14:17):
it crossed the road, the Sladen family watched in utter silence.
No one said a word. The spider crossed the asphalt
in a stately, unhurried fashion, eventually disappearing into the brush
on the western side of the highway. The family didn't
daret a cross where the spider had been. They simply
(14:39):
turned around and went home. Richard says that only once
did he and his brothers ask their grandfather what it
was they had seen. William's blunt response was that it
was simply a very large spider. This apparent, straight and
(15:00):
terrifying episode was never discussed again, but Richard would tell
his own son that he suspected the old man knew
more than he was letting on. I always had the
impression that Grandpa was familiar with it. He said that
he had seen one before. He was a man who'd
lived deep in the woods, building makeshift towns to facilitate
(15:20):
the logging industry. Maybe he saw things in those woods
he didn't talk about to us kids, another piece of
rural folklore. Perhaps the memory of a child inflating a
roaming tarantula into a gargantuan monster. Maybe. But in twenty nineteen,
nearly seventy years after Richard's experience, a sergeant stationed at
(15:44):
Louisiana's Fort Polk gave a series of strange first hand reports.
The soldier going by the handle, Sergeant S wrote a
prominent cryptozoologist, Carl Schucker, detailing encounters he and his colleagues
had had with an especially enormous species of spider at
the base, which is situated only eight miles from the
(16:06):
Leesville town limits. Sergeant S's first apparent sighting was in
two thousand and five, when he was part of d
Company in the one hundred and first Airborne Division based
at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. In the early spring, he
traveled to Fort Polk for complex field training. In the
(16:27):
early evening. The sergeant was walking with another soldier, whom
he refers to as Sergeant Becky. They were making their
way from the company dorms to the motorple, a short
journey that took them on a dirt road cutting through
a thickly wooded area. It was approaching dark, and both
held flashlights to illuminate the shadowy path. Sergeant Becky was
(16:51):
walking ten feet ahead when she suddenly screamed and tripped,
falling to the road. When Sergeant s ran up to
help her, he caught sight of something in its torchlight,
a large hairy shape on the edge of the tree line,
no more than four feet from the prone Becky. It
was a mottled color, he said, with white and gray
(17:12):
bristles and raised ridges and bumps running down the sides
of its head and abdomen. The creature's head was roughly
three feet from the ground and covered in eyes. It
raised a pair of spinly prying appendages. Then, as the
two soldiers looked on it splayed its other legs as
(17:33):
if preparing to pounce forward. Sergeantes could see visible fangs
surrounded by a three to four inch mouth In a panic,
he set two with the butt of his carbine rifle,
swinging wildly at the thing's head while kicking and screaming
at the top of his lungs. Sergeant S claimed that
(18:04):
he later reported details to Karlshuka about the spider's eyes,
how his flashlight illuminated the eye tube like shining a
light into a bottle filled with clear jelly. The spider
backed away several feet, at which point the sergeant reversed
its weapon and fired a round of bullets directly at
its face. The creature is then said to have responded
(18:27):
with a foul smelling liquid from somewhere close to its mouth.
It fanned out like a liquid shot from a nozzle
and instantly turned to mist, which settled on both Sergeant
S and Becky's clothing. Under onslaught, the huge spider finally
beat a clumsy retreat into the bush, crashing into the
(18:47):
trees as it stumbled away. After only a few feet,
it was rendered invisible among the shadows and leaves. As
Sergeant S pulled the still screaming Becky to her feet,
his foot landed on a ropelike filament which stuck to
his boot strongly enough that he had to cut it
away with a knife. After reporting the incident, the sergeant
(19:11):
claims that he was accompanied back to the area for
an inspection, during which they found more of the sticky
weblike substance surrounding a half a meter hole the pit as.
The sergeant described it at a sort of circular thatched
cover hinged with some kind of glue. He described it
(19:33):
as a construction of small sticks and leaves arranged in
a symmetrical radial pattern. It was an interesting and specific detail,
considering that the car tribe similar descriptions of trapped or
like constructions apparently created by the tube fufi. A strong
skunk like scent persisted in the air and remained in
(19:56):
the soldier's clothing for days. A member of senior leadership
recognized the scent on them and ordered his men to
find bottles of ammonia and simple green degreasa. He ordered
Sergeant s and Becky to wash their hands and faces immediately,
and warned them to wash both themselves and their uniforms
(20:18):
several more times. If you don't get the smell out,
They were told, she'll come after you. The senior officer
did not elaborate further. It was a few nights later
when Sergeant S and a few of his fellow troops
were awoken by the sound of something traversing the corrugated
(20:38):
roof of their sleeping quarters. It sounded at first like
brain drops, though with a strange hesitant rhythm. When it
abruptly stopped above them, the men, including a very nervous
Sergeant S, went outside to have a look. One of
the men was boosted up to the roof to check
(20:58):
it out, but he found nothing elsewhere in the barracks.
On the same night as the strange sounds on the roof,
another soldier was said to have been woken by the
sound of something tapping at the window. He looked up
(21:19):
to see what he first took to be an old,
bearded man wearing large goggles, peering in at the sleeping
men from the doorway. The soldier hurriedly rushed outside to investigate,
only to watch the strange figure crawl away, rapidly, scale
a ten foot fence, and disappear into the woods. Two
(21:40):
years later, in the spring of two thousand and seven,
Sergeant S was back at Fort Polk for another pre
deployment exercise. Late one afternoon, the sergeant set out for
a run on the nearby Alligator Lake Loop in the
company of two other soldiers. As they jogged down the
wide dirt road that circled the water, one of the
(22:02):
group began to suffer from heat exhaustion. They stopped and
settled her in the shade while Sergeantes ran to fetch
a medic on the return journey. As the sergeant led
the medic toward his colleague, the medic stepped in something
sticky on the ground. He pulled off his shoe to
find a strange fibrous material clinging to the bottom of
(22:26):
it and stretching across the path. Had there not been
so much of it, he would have said it was
some kind of spider's web. Sergeantes broke off to relieve
himself in the bushes. He suddenly became aware of movement
in the leaves on the other side of the trail.
Staring out toward a trembling leaf, he was certain he
(22:49):
could see something dark peeking out at the foliage. The
medic saw it too. The sergeant later described it as
being covered in bristles, with two pebble like eyes, each
three to four inches in circumference. Surrounded by smaller orbs.
He believed he saw its fangs too. As soon as
(23:11):
the sergeant moved, it was said to have scurried away
into the bush, and the men didn't hang around to
find out more. Later in the week, the sergeant was
back out on a late night exercise. It took place
on the edge of the training ground, where a mock
village had been built to allow troops to practice urban combat.
(23:33):
That night, the sergeant was positioned in the top story
window of a makeshift wooden house when he spotted a
friend passing on the street below smoking a cigarette. The
sergeant yelled for him to stop, then stepped onto the
roof and jumped down to join him. He lit one
up for himself, enjoying the brief moment of respite under
(23:55):
the stars. As the pair began to talk, the friend
so he went very quiet as he looked over the
sergeant's shoulder. Sergeantes, following his friend's gates, looked up to
see a familiar shape walking across the roof of the house.
According to s its legs were easily six feet apart,
(24:18):
with a torso roughly one foot thick and two feet long.
The sergeant threw rocks at the roof until the spider
skitted away and once more disappeared into the gloom of
the woods beyond. The supposed encounter in the training village
(24:41):
was Sergeant S's last apparent encounter with giant spiders at
Fort Polk, Louisiana. He did, however, follow up his story
with some observations. First, he proposed that the creatures he
saw on his second trip to Fort Polk may have
been female, as to understanding the female spiders tend to
(25:02):
be larger and more aggressive. Second, he wondered if the
spiders hunted by scent and if it had been actively
seeking him in the makeshift building on the edge of
the training ground, having identified him from its urine near
Alligator Lake. And lastly, he pointed out that he was
not alone in his awareness of the spiders, and that
(25:25):
local troops often made jokes about their existence and warned
new recruits never to venture into the woods alone. He
also pointed out that when he apparently reported each of
his encounters up the chain of command, the leadership professed
not to believe his story and accused him repeatedly of
(25:46):
misidentifying a dog with severe mange. He was allegedly warned
that his career would suffer were he to pursue the
issue any further. To the best of his knowledge, he writes,
no official or port was ever put on the record.
There is something so universally arresting about the concept of
(26:08):
a giant spider that it has wriggled its way into
both ancient myth and contemporary entertainment across the globe. From
a Nancy Trickster of West African folk tales and the
Jaragumo spider demon of Japanese law to Tolkien's Hideous Shelop
and Aragoic from the Harry Potter universe, giant spiders clearly
(26:32):
pull at some fundamental aspect of the human imagination. Accepted
science asserts that the real thing is impossible. However, due
to the particular construction of a spider's respiratory system, there
are thought to be firm limits on how large they
can really grow. Spiders do not breathe through their mouths
(26:54):
like other animals. Instead, they get their oxygen through their
skin in what is non as an open respiratory system.
Through a network of tubes called trakia, oxygen is transferred
to their tissue. It's a process of slow diffusion throughout
the body, which rapidly becomes less efficient as the spider
(27:16):
increases in size. This then should put to bed any
notion of the three, four or five foot specimens said
to have been glimpsed as they scamper across the back
roads of the world, and yet apparent sightings persist. In
twenty thirteen, a video was uploaded to YouTube from a
(27:39):
trail cam in Mozambique. It claims to be footage of
a Cuba fufi or the East African equivalent, appearing to
approach a watering hole. The short film is grainy and unclear,
but there is definite movement across the right hand side
of the screen. When the film is enhanced and the
(28:01):
contrast inverted, it does appear to show something at least
the size of a large dog, but with a far
greater number of spinly legs, skittering briskly across the ground.
It's there one moment, then gone the next, and like
any encounter with large spiders glimpsed from the corner of
(28:23):
the eye, it's hard not to wonder exactly where it
might be right now. This episode was written by Neil
McRobert and produced by me Richard McLean Smith. Neil is
(28:44):
the creator and host of his own brilliant podcast called
Talking Scared, in which he discusses the craft of horror,
writing with everyone from Ta Nanerieve Do to the God
of Horror himself, Stephen King. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard
(29:05):
McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music,
are also produced by me Richard mccleinsmith. Unexplained. The book
and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can
purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
(29:27):
your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with
any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own
you'd like to share. You can find out more at
Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us online through Twitter
at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward
(29:48):
Slash Unexplained Podcast last
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