You’ve hear about this swallowing spiders while we sleep thing right? I know, ewwwwwww.
Supposedly, we swallow on average eight spiders annually as these little legged creatures casually enter our mouths when their open and then die as we swallow them while sleeping.
This would mean in our lifetime we swallow, on average, hundreds of spiders. Come on now this feels like a total urban legend and guess what, it not only is an urban legend, it’s one that a journalist purposely made up according to the How Stuff Works website.
Here’s how it all went down and why.
According to How Stuff Works, a journalist wrote an article claiming we swallow up to eight spiders a year and did so just to see what would happen and how people would react. It went viral and proved how easily we believe things we read.
According to the Burke Museum the article was purposely written without facts or science backing anything up and most definitely proved it’s point that urban legends spread far and wide very easily.
For a sleeping person to swallow even one live spider would involve so many highly unlikely circumstances that for practical purposes we can rule out the possibility. No such case is on formal record anywhere in scientific or medical literature. This very widespread urban legend has no basis in fact.
The moral? No, we’re not swallowing spiders while we sleep. They’re afraid of big, breathing, snoring, moving around humans and their ‘spidey-sense’ if you will actually scares them away from roaming all over us and dropping into our mouths to die.
