Since we’re approaching Halloween, I decided to share one of the scariest babysitting experiences of my early teenage years… well, it was scary at the time. Now we all look back and laugh at it.
First, a little background. I am the oldest child in my family; I have 3 sisters and 2 brothers, but I grew up with one sister, Jenni, and one brother, Shaun (my family dynamic is a little complicated, but that’s a story for a later date). I am six years older than Shaun and seven years older than Jenni, so it kind of worked out that from the time I was about twelve years old, most of our Christmas, Spring, and Summer breaks from school, it was just the three of us at home during the day while my parents were at work. My dad worked a swing shift at a factory, so sometimes he would be home during the day, but on the days when both parents were working, the set up worked out well for everyone involved. My parents didn’t have to worry about finding someone to watch the younger two kids during the day, and I got an allowance of $20 a week for babysitting. At the time I thought I was getting paid pretty well, now that I have children and I know how much a sitter actually costs, I realize my parents clearly came out on the better end of the deal. No hard feelings though.
Most of the time, our days were uneventful. This particular day, I believe it was during summer break, started like any other, we woke up at our various times, my brother ate his brunch of BBQ chips and Dr. Pepper while watching the Power Rangers, my sister sat at the coffee table in the living room drawing on her note pad, and I sat in the recliner and pretended that I wasn’t interested in my brother’s shows. This also happened to be a day when my dad was home, but he had just gotten off the night shift, so he was in his bedroom sleeping. This always added an interesting dynamic to our days, because although we have a very loving dad, waking him up while he was sleeping, was like waking a bear out of hibernation. It only took once, and we never wanted it to happen again. He always closed the bedroom door, and turned a box fan on high to try and drown out any noise that we would make, but we still tried to keep things quiet.
As the morning closed in on early afternoon, I decided I probably needed to feed Shaun and Jenni some kind of “real” food for lunch. My parents always got super crabby with me if I let them eat chips and snack cakes all day. I walked into the kitchen—and stopped dead in my tracks. There it was. A spider on the kitchen floor. This was no regular spider, I’m still convinced to this day that it was a hairless tarantula. This thing was huge. And it was right in front of me. Now is a good time to mention that I’ve never liked spiders. I’m still not a big fan of them, but early-teenage-Sarah was terrified of them. I know spiders serve a purpose in the world, but I’ve never been completely clear on which ones can kill me and which ones just want to eat bugs, so a good rule for me was to just stay away from them. But there was no staying away from this one. It was in our kitchen. Where did it come from? How do I get it out of here? Should I call mom? Do I wake up dad? Ohmygosh we’re all going to die. I needed to remove the spider, but how? I walked back into the living room and calmly alerted Shaun and Jenni to the situation in the kitchen, or I might’ve run back into the living room and done a freak-out dance while I jumped in a chair… it was too long ago for me to remember exactly what happened. Either way, it was a mistake. Terrifying young children is never a good way to keep things calm and quiet. Nobody wanted to enter the kitchen, much less get close enough to this thing to touch it. This is where being the oldest child was a bad thing; I now had two kids relying on me to find a way to fix this situation, and I had no idea what we were going to do. At this point we were huddled in a circle in the living room floor, “Ok, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said as calmly as I could, “we’re going to throw something at it and scare it away.” After a few minutes of deliberation, we decided throwing shoes would be our best option. This seemed like a solid plan for all of us. We looked into the kitchen to see if the spider was still there, he hadn’t moved. Deep breath. Here we go.
We made our way down the hall toward our bedrooms with a modified army crawl, I’m honestly not sure why we decided to crawl, but I distinctly remember this happening. Maybe we thought it was the quietest way to get there, or maybe we were so scared our legs stopped working, I have no idea. The original plan was for us to each gather as many shoes as we could carry and meet back in the hall. We reached Shaun’s room first, he contemplated going in his room alone, but he decided to stay with the group instead of breaking off. I understood. Jenni and I shared a room, and we had a lot more shoes than Shaun did, it made more sense to use our shoes. Plus, safety in numbers. We each held out our tshirts and filled them full of shoes like make-shift baskets; while we felt like this was the best way to gather as much ammo as possible, it made crawling back to the kitchen impossible. Instead, we opted for a crouched tip toe walk back. Again, I’m not sure why we didn’t just walk normally.
As we made our way back into the living room, I briefly looked in the kitchen. The spider had not moved. We piled up our shoes along the threshold where the living room carpet met the kitchen linoleum, and we lined up behind them.
It was time.
I threw the first shoe. It hit a cabinet behind the spider and landed on the floor next to him. The spider didn’t move. Jenni threw the next shoe. It landed closer to the spider and slid toward him, but it still did not move. Shaun was up next, he also got close to the spider, but it still wasn’t budging. Time for a new plan. We decided to throw as many shoes as fast as we could. Jenni and I both played softball, so I was fairly confident this plan was going to work. I was wrong— a shoe is very different than a softball and a spider is much smaller than a softball glove. Also, this spider was scared of nothing. It never moved. What kind of creature doesn’t move when it’s being attacked??!! Time for Plan C: avoid the kitchen at all costs until dad wakes up. Sure, this meant no one would eat or drink anything for the next few hours, but we were all willing to make the sacrifice.
The rest of the afternoon was tense. Periodically, one of us (always me) would check on the spider… it never moved.
When my dad finally woke up at around 3:00, we frantically filled him in on everything that happened. He was skeptical of our story, but he went to the kitchen to confront the giant spider anyway—it was gone!! Our shoes were scattered on the floor with no sign of the spider. Was it a trick? We wondered if the spider was hiding in one of the shoes but it wasn’t. It was just gone. This only increases my dad’s skepticism. We were in disbelief. The spider stayed in the exact same place for hours, but the minute dad woke up, it vanished.
To this day, I’m convinced that generations of giant ghost spiders are living somewhere in the walls of my parents’ house.
I should probably tell them that… I guess if they ever read this, they’ll know.