Spiders

[00:00:05] Good evening. I'm Ben, and welcome to the show where you and I gather around this campfire to hear some of our fellow campers scariest experiences. Whether you're a new or returning camper, I'm glad you're here. [00:00:19] Most towns all have that one place, the house everyone whispers about, the one kids dare each other to approach after dark. [00:00:28] But sometimes those stories aren't just old rumors or local legends. [00:00:34] Sometimes the truth is stranger, far more unsettling than anything kids could make up. [00:00:43] And every so often I get one of these stories. But this one lodged itself inside my brain. Not because it's the scariest or most gruesome, but because it just feels so real, tangled in just enough grit that makes me second guess every edge of the story. [00:01:02] It's the kind of story that'll stick with you when you're driving home late at night, passing this place in your town. [00:01:10] Tonight's story takes us back to a remote college town in the late 80s, where a crumbling farmhouse hidden in an overgrown citrus grove became the center of a quiet, creeping nightmare. [00:01:22] Now, without further ado, do you want to hear a ghost story? [00:01:29] It was the fall semester of 1987. [00:01:31] I was attending a small college tucked away in a town so remote it barely even registered on the maps. [00:01:38] Honestly, if it hadn't been for the school, I doubt anyone ever would have a reason to drive through this town at all. [00:01:46] The college itself seems sat like an island in the middle of open land, acres and acres of old citrus groves that had long fallen into disrepair. [00:01:57] The trees were all once part of a booming orange farm, but just one brutal winter years ago had devastated the entire orchard. [00:02:06] An unexpected frost swept through, killing almost all the trees. [00:02:13] Many crews came to clean out the grove. [00:02:15] Chainsaws were buzzing for weeks as they cut the brittle trunks and hauled away the remains. [00:02:21] That's when the house was discovered. [00:02:24] Hidden far beneath the overgrowth of the dead citrus trees, the structure looked like it had been swallowed by time. [00:02:31] Its once pink exterior was almost entirely sun bleached and peeling, leaving behind a patchy skin of cracked paint. [00:02:40] Part of the roof had caved in, and the front porch sagged so severely I doubt it could hold up the weight of a moth, let alone a person. [00:02:48] Why the workers hadn't demolished it immediately was beyond me. [00:02:53] Maybe they were waiting for permits. [00:02:55] Maybe it was some sort of historical landmark. Or maybe, though I didn't like to admit it, there was something about the house that nobody wanted to mess with. [00:03:07] One morning just after sunrise, I was driving past the house on my way to my early morning 8am class. The air was still gray, the kind of morning where the sky can't decide if it wants to wake up or go back to bed. [00:03:20] As I rounded the bend near the old grove, my eyes caught something strange. [00:03:26] A light flickering from one of the windows in the house. [00:03:31] When I noticed a shadow creeping past the curtain, I slowed down for just a second, mainly out of curiosity. [00:03:39] Maybe there was a worker inside, or maybe a squatter. [00:03:44] But it wasn't until I drove a few yards past the house that it really hit me. [00:03:49] There was no possibility that the house had electricity, and the light did not look like a candle. [00:03:54] Still, I shook it off. [00:03:57] My thoughts were more preoccupied with the tests I had that afternoon. [00:04:00] Calc 2. [00:04:01] I told myself it was probably just a trick of the light, maybe just a reflection of my headlights. Maybe it was nothing at all. [00:04:09] But in the back of my mind I knew something was off about the house. [00:04:14] Several weeks passed, and I kept a casual eye on the slow destruction of the citrus grove. [00:04:19] Day by day, the landscape changed. [00:04:23] The once quiet fields now buzzed with grinding machinery. [00:04:27] The trees were slowly gnawed down to stumps, the roots unearthed like bones. [00:04:33] The trees were slowly gnawed down to the stumps and the roots unearthed like bones. [00:04:39] There wasn't a day that the air wasn't filled with the scent of mulch. [00:04:43] One afternoon I found myself stuck behind a slow tractor, hauling a rusted wood chipper. The road had narrowed, jam packed on both sides by debris and dust. [00:04:55] The machine sputtered ahead of me, forcing me to stop directly across from the house. [00:05:01] I glanced over at it, and that's when I saw her. [00:05:05] The front door that was normally shut was now hanging open on its hinges. [00:05:11] Standing just inside the house was was a little old lady, still as a statue. [00:05:17] Her flowery dress looked like it came from the 1950s. [00:05:21] A single, gnarled hand gripped a crooked cane, and atop her head rose her towering beehive hairdo. So tall, so stiff it must have brushed the top of the doorway. But it wasn't her appearance that unnerved me. It was the way she vacantly stared at the door. Her eyes didn't blink. They didn't move, just fixed on me, like she'd been waiting for someone to stop and look. [00:05:48] I don't know how long I sat there, caught in her gaze. [00:05:51] It could have been seconds, could have been hours. [00:05:55] But the sharp flare of a horn from the car behind me snapped me out of this trance. [00:06:00] Startled, I pressed on the gas. [00:06:03] But before I could Round the curve and lose sight of the house. I stole one last glance out my window. [00:06:10] The woman was gone. [00:06:11] Just empty air and the dull creak of the porch swing swaying in the wind. [00:06:17] It was a Thursday, just before finals. When I drove past the house again, something was different this time. The road in front of it was half blocked. Two police patrol cars were parked at odd angles in the overgrown lot. There were lights flashing. A cornered van was parked off to the side. [00:06:36] The back opened to reveal the gurney inside. I slowed down to crawl to have a look, thinking how sad it must have been that this homeless woman had died. [00:06:44] When I saw another vehicle. A simple white truck with faded lettering. Pest Control. [00:06:50] The man stepped out. But this wasn't your average exterminator. He was dressed in a full body protective suit, like something out of a Hazmat response team. [00:07:02] The visor on his helmet caught the reflection of the police light as he lifted a heavy canister from the truck bed. [00:07:08] Then I realized that whatever was in the house wasn't just a dead old lady. [00:07:12] The next morning, I found an article in the local newspaper. The headline was forgettable, but the story underneath was anything but. [00:07:23] They had found the body of a woman inside the house. [00:07:27] Estimated time of death eight years earlier. [00:07:31] Cause of death multiple spider bites. [00:07:35] Venomous. [00:07:37] More than 1 million black widow spiders had infested the home. [00:07:42] They'd woven themselves into the wallpaper, nested beneath the floorboards, and pulsed through the rotting walls like veins. [00:07:50] Her body had been discovered seated upright in a decaying armchair near the window. [00:07:56] The same one I had seen the flickering light just days before. [00:08:00] The same one I think I saw weeks ago. [00:08:04] Her impressive beehive hairdo had been hiding over 50 spiders alone. [00:08:10] The infestation was so severe, so saturated with venom and rot, that her remains had to be fumigated before the coroner's team could even attempt to to remove her body. [00:08:21] After the story broke, rumors began to spread. Some whispered that the old woman hadn't just tolerated the spiders. Rather, she kept them, cared for them the way others might keep a cat or a parakeet. [00:08:35] She let them roam free, fed them, named them. [00:08:40] However, over time, they bred to the thousands and hid in the crawl spaces and cracks of her crumbling house. [00:08:46] And unfortunately, they turned on her. [00:08:50] The house had been hidden in the orange grove for over 30 years. [00:08:53] She had no family, no visitors, no witnesses. [00:08:59] Just the spiders to keep her company. [00:09:02] Not long after, the house was finally leveled. The land was cleared, flattened, and a small strip mall went up in its place. [00:09:10] Businesses moved in Only to close a few months later. [00:09:15] Business after business. [00:09:17] Nothing stuck. The tenants all constantly complained of black widow infestations. [00:09:23] Some found nests in storage rooms, others in the vents. [00:09:27] Others swore they saw webs stretching across from ceiling tile to ceiling tile overnight. A few claimed to have even been bitten by the spiders that weren't there when they'd locked up the night before. [00:09:40] Even customers of the businesses started talking. [00:09:42] A bite to the ankle after browsing a discount shoe store. [00:09:46] A web strung across the dressing room mirror. A dark, skittering shape glimpsed beneath the shelves. [00:09:52] Eventually, the mall stood empty at night. Some say you can still see a shape in the glass, particularly in the far left unit where the house stood. [00:10:04] The shape? The outline of an old woman with a giant head of hair and something crawling around her head like a living crown. [00:10:15] Spiders, they say. Even after the orange grove was taken out, the house torn down, and the new building put up, they say these spiders never left. [00:10:26] And apparently neither did she. [00:10:29] Thank you Christina for allowing me to share your story. [00:10:33] This story really did it for me. It wasn't just your imagery, but the loneliness underneath it. [00:10:40] The story of a house forgotten, a woman who roams around unseen, only to be seen by her spiders. [00:10:49] It makes me wonder how many places are like this in real life. Places that have been swallowed by time. [00:10:55] Places where something once lived. And maybe he still does. [00:10:59] Well, if you have any places like this in your hometown, let me know. [00:11:05] With that, I want to give a special welcome to our newest patron, a lost camper, Bessie Bowen. [00:11:11] Thank you for supporting the show. [00:11:14] It genuinely means the world to me. I have no other announcements, but if you would like your own, shout out the end of an episode or access to our camp's monthly bonus episodes, head over to patreon.com do you want to hear a ghost story? But as always, I am just glad to have you all as campers on this journey. Please keep sharing the show with anyone you think might like these stories or someone you're just trying to scare. If you're enjoying the show, please leave a review. [00:11:40] I would love to hear from you. [00:11:42] Until next time.