Bon appetit! Do we really eat 8 spiders a year while we sleep?

The claim has been floating around from mouth to mouth or on the Internet for over 20 years: Spiders seem to find open mouths attractive at night, crawl in... and are then accidentally swallowed.
Delicious, right? You know that when you brush your teeth in the morning you first have to pull a spider leg out from between your teeth. But where does this knowledge actually come from? Let's start looking for clues!

Do spiders find mouths attractive?

This is unlikely to happen. The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture emphasizes that not a single case of this ever happening has been officially documented in the scientific or medical literature. Millions of people have watched another person sleep; then why is there not a single eyewitness account of a spider trying to get into the sleeper's mouth?

How do spiders perceive us?

Spiders have up to 8 eyes, but no ears. Instead, they perceive their environment through vibrations that they feel with their highly sensitive legs. And now there lies a person: a huge mountain that moves, has a very loud heartbeat for spiders, breathes and possibly even snores.

For spiders this only means one thing: stay away! Our sleeping bodies aren't exactly a welcoming part of their environment, and there's really no reason for a spider to crawl into the roaring cave of this constant draft mountain.

The sources of the myth

The myth probably became widespread in 1999 , when the widely read news site “The Guardian” published a list of 50 facts worth knowing (see HERE ). As point 12, they write “ The average person eats eight spiders in their lifetime after they crawl into their mouth while they sleep .”

Many sites claim that the myth first in a 1993 article about how readily people accept information they read on the Internet as fact, no matter how ridiculous it seems. The author used the fictional statistic about spiders as a far-fetched example, only to watch it quickly spread across the internet as fact.

But it goes even earlier than that: In 1992, Things to stress over ” in Cornell Engineer magazine, Margot Anne-Stephanie Vigeant wrote The average person swallows eight in his lifetime Spiders in your sleep. What if all eight show up tonight? “

Have you noticed? Back then the myth was “8 spiders in a lifetime,” not “8 spiders a year.”

Supposedly the “fact” even appeared in the book “ Insect Fact and Folklore in 1954 , but there is not a word about spiders in the book… which is no surprise, because the book is about insects (6 legs). , not about arachnids (8 legs).

Looking for a magazine

Let's concentrate on the year 1993 , because the name of a magazine and an author is often mentioned: “PC Professional” and Lisa Birgit Holst.

To make a long story short: There was no magazine with the name at the time, and there is no mention of Lisa Birgit Holst anywhere... except for our colleagues at Snopes ! And now it gets interesting: Did your colleagues fall for a hoax themselves?

Who is Lisa Birgit Holst?

The colleagues at Snopes wrote back in 2001:

In a 1993 article in PC Professional, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of "facts" circulated via email and how easily they were accepted as true by gullible recipients. To illustrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous "facts," including the above-quoted statistic about the average person swallowing eight spiders a year, which she took from a collection of common misconceptions published in a 1954 book was printed on insect folklore. It's a delicious irony that Holst's spread of this false "fact" has led to it becoming one of the most widespread pieces of misinformation on the Internet.

Source: Snopes

Have you seen it?
Snopes even writes about the book from 1954, which didn't say this. What's going on there? The simple solution: The colleagues were trolling at the time. 😉

On a separate page (see HERE ) they explain this to younger readers:
In the early years of the Internet, Snopes liked to "troll" and therefore created this "Easter Egg" in April 2001 as a wink to its regular readers. They write accordingly: “ You may have noticed that “PC Professional” and the columnist Lisa Birgit Holst do not exist ”.

The columnist's name, which many readers have successfully figured out, is an anagram of the phrase "This is a big troll."

So “Lisa Birgit Holst” was purely an invention of Snopes.

Conclusion

So the true origins of this claim are still obscure. The only thing that is certain is that back in 1992 it was claimed that we eat spiders in our sleep. But there are no witnesses that this ever happened, no evidence, no scientific research. All logic also speaks against it; it would absolutely contradict the behavior of spiders.

The claim is therefore an unproven myth. You can sleep peacefully again... as long as the mating mites on your face don't bother you.