Aaarrrggghhhh! Is that a black widow?!

Hi morgandrake, This is a hideous thing to have inside of your home. We get spiders here, and inside the house at times, too, but nothing of this nature. It's best to get rid of these types of invaders, as you just never know ... Very creepy!

That is am ugly spider. Kind of looks like one Id seen in my House but we don't have black widows here in Minnesota that I know of. Mine was some type of wood spider though I think. Good luck with this. Hope it has left. HAPPY POSTINGS FROM GRANDPA BOB !!~

Oh my husband used to not let me kill spiders because he said they brought good luck. But then we started seeing Black Widows and they are deadly so now he kills at least those ones. We live out in the country, practically in the woods so we see a lot of spiders. Actually we see a lot of different bugs around here. outside mostly but some of them do make their way into our house. Ughhh. :)

If it was a black widow, no offense to your wife, but I'm glad you killed it. Those things are poisonous. She must have a big heart for creepy crawlers. : )

Yikes..yup, hate to say it but that sure looks like a black widow..found a picture myself. I generally don't kill spiders either, not because of any totem thing--my totem is the wolf (also like bears and owls)..but because of my great-grandmother always said killing spiders were bad luck. Did you finally whack it or maybe somehow scoop it up and just toss it outside? Here's the pic I found of the black widow

How awesome, and still quite scary if the spider would really be a Black Widow. From checking on Wikipedia i guess its a genuine Black Widow. Interesting that the Black Widows venom is 15 times more potent than Rattlesnakes, its also much more potent than Coralsnakes and Cobras. However it seldom happens that they can deliver a lethal dose since the needles used to deliver the venom approximately 1mm long (.04 inch). Besides that a bite very rarely leads to fatality when the victims are in good health.

I dunno i have never seen one of those spiders up close and personal before, I live in canada and i think that its too cold here for them to live thank goodness! I dont like the little spiders we have here, i'd probably freak out if i seen a BIG OLE SPIDER that big!! jumpins. I tend not to kill spiders either, i usually flush them in the toilet, that way i'm not killing them the water is, but i think i wouldnt mind squishing that one.. if i could stand the mess it would make EW.

That definately looks like a black widow to me! Yikes! Spiders are definately not my totem animal!

Did you know that the bug spray has to hit the under belly of the spider to kill it? Did you turn it over to look for the hour glass shape on the under belly to really find out if it was a black widow? If it did bite you, the odds are that it would just hurt or sting and that would be the end of it. You have to be either bit by a bunch of them or be a little baby or a sick old person to have a really bad reaction to the bite. Or allergic to them. The Brown Recluse spider is the one that will really zap you. It zaps everyone no matter how tough you are. The stuff it injects into you can eat the flesh down to the bone and then some. I saw it almost eat all the flesh off this guys leg. It was really gross. Another neighbor was bit on the stomach and it ate a huge hole all the way through to the inner guts before the doctors could finally stop it. It took months of skin and muscle grafts to put him sort of back together. We have a lot of the little buggers here in the South!