Memphis Suburb Infested With Millions Of Spiders — Webs Covering Half-A-Mile Likened To ‘Horror Movie’ [Video]

A suburban neighborhood in North Memphis, Tennessee, has been overrun with millions of spiders. The spiders have spun webs covering half-a-mile of surrounding fields. After having occupied the fields, the spiders have also taken over the streets and invaded homes.

WMC reports that residents in the affected neighborhoods — May Street and Chelsea Avenue — compared the infestation to a “horror movie.”

Photos and videos of the infestation posted online show fields covered with white substance that looks like dew or frost.

A horrified resident, Frances Ward, told local news station WMC, “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s like a horror movie. They’re in the air, flying everywhere. They all on the house, on the side of the windows.”

Steve Reichling, a Memphis zoo curator, said the spiders have always been in the fields but have only recently multiplied and dispersed out.

“It’s a mass dispersal of the millions of tiny spiders that have always been in that field unnoticed till now,” he said. “It could be juveniles — millions — in a big emergence event, or adults of a tiny species – probably a sheetweb spider — leaving for some reason possibly knowable only to them.”

He tried to downplay the incident, saying that “there are often literally millions of spiders doing their thing, unseen and unappreciated by us. I would not want to live in a world where such things were no longer possible. The presence of these spiders tells us that all is well with nature at that location.”

But residents have found it difficult to “appreciate” the invasion of their homes by web-spinning arachnids. They are struggling to keep the spiders out of their homes.

“I’ve seen about 20 on my porch just in the last day,” resident Ida Morris said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0fGrHnEWIc

Debris Lewis, a resident, urged the local authorities to “[c]lean this area up and spray for these spiders and make it safe. There are kids running around. A spider could bite the kids or anything.”

“You can’t even sit in her [Ida Morris] house because they’re all on the wall, on the door. We been killing spiders for about an hour now,” she said.

The latest incident could be linked to recent reports of sightings of web-like fibers falling from the sky by residents in certain areas of Texas, Arizona, and Ohio. The appearance of huge white fibers floating down from the skies sparked fears of HAARP weather manipulation experiments after some residents claimed they saw the webs falling from the sky soon after USAF planes were seen passing overhead.

The webs were dubbed “chemtrail webs” by HAARP conspiracy theorists who claimed they were the “‘undesired end products’ of heavy chemtrail spraying from military aircraft.”

“My trees are covered with webs again… I think the spiders eat the chem-webs, thinking it is spider silk protein (which they can recycle), but instead it is an inorganic, metallic, poison, which causes them to die quickly.”

Although, scientists tried to calm fears by informing residents that the “mysterious” white fibers were harmless web spun by migrating spiders, conspiracy theorists and doomsday rumor mongers spread rumors that the government could be using the mysterious “chemtrail web” substance to run secret tests of bio-warfare systems designed to spread deadly infections, such as plague and Ebola.

But the spiders and webs were also sighted last November by residents of Cape Breton in Canada.

Professor Rob Bennet, an expert at the Royal British Columbia Museum, identified the spiders at the time as sheetweb weaver spiders.

“For some reason, mostly unknown, these types of spiders are known to do these mass dispersal events. The spiders decide collectively that it’s time to leave that area,” he said.

Bennet explained that the spiders migrate by “casting a web net to catch the wind and float away in a process known as ballooning.”

But many across North America say they have witnessed the phenomenon only in recent years and wondered why they haven’t seen such mass migration of spiders before.

[Image via Brad Wofford/Wikimedia]