…”Do NOT look the spider directly in the eyes.”…
(Male) This nightmare is probably more weird than scary but it’s more than a little weird. I went on a hayride but it wasn’t a traditional hayride in the fall around Halloween. This was during the summer, in the bright afternoon sunlight. There wasn’t even really any hay. And it didn’t take place on a farm but in a junkyard in a run down industrial part of a city. There were chain link fences around the whole area with loops of razor wire at the top. At no point did I even get the sense I was anywhere else but in a decrepit junkyard and I was riding around in a hay wagon with a couple dozen bored folks all being dragged by a coughing diesel tractor.
But there were some attempts at scary things, though they felt more than a little like they’d all been thrown together out of parts on hand at the junkyard. At some point we were shown the mandibles of a huge spider. They were easily as long as my arm and covered with coarse bristles of hair. These were genuinely terrifying because they actually looked real. We were told that for some reason the spiders in the junkyard grew to tremendous sizes and had done so for decades. They didn’t need a junkyard dog with so many of these huge spiders roaming the place. In fact, they couldn’t keep a dog alive on the premises.
Then the ride was just about over and the tractor turned the last corner toward the double wide that was the main office. And I don’t know if I just didn’t notice it before or if it just wasn’t there before but beside the mobile home was a giant spider. It was easily as large as the trailer itself. The spider was black and covered with dusty hairs. It looked very old and very tired and very much the worse for wear. However, unlike all the other scary things we’d been shown, the giant spider actually looked real. There was a large hand painted sign that said “Do NOT look the spider directly in the eyes.” So of course I looked at the spider’s eyes. It had a cluster of eyeballs, probably more like a housefly and come to think of it, they really looked most like a cluster of huge frog eggs. Each round eye glared back like it was trying to hypnotize. Then all of a sudden two of the spider’s arms reach into the bed of the wagon and snatch up the guy who was sitting next to me. We’d struck up a conversation during the tour and had been trading wisecracks back and forth about the exhibits. The spider grabbed him under his arms and effortlessly lifted him out of the truck. He was spun around, tied up with web and the spider started sucking out his juices. I was amazed that the ancient creature could move so fast. All of us in the wagon were in an uproar but the tour guide said, “It’s his own fault. He shouldn’t have looked her in the eyes.”