Brave Family Allowed A Giant Huntsman Spider To Live In Their Home For A Year

For more than 365 days, Jake Gray and his household permitted a giant huntsman spider to live in their Cairns home in Far North Queensland. The creature, now named Charlotte, had been seen a year ago when little but has grown to a monstrous size twelve months later. 

While it’s alleged that Charlotte enjoys going from room to room eating bugs, she isn’t the first scary spider to be found in unfortunate places. 

Gray shared a photo of the giant huntsman online and captioned it: “Check out this big girl. The mighty huntsman.” He seemed to be coping well with the arachnid living on his property, but then people in the comments of his post weren’t that excited about the size of the spider. Someone asked: “Is this a jungle?”

Another wrote: “I’d have to move house and buy new stuff. It’s all charlottes now.” A third stated: “Bruh that’s the spider’s house now, make sure they have a copy of the deed.”

A fourth insisted they would never visit Australia and that no money is enough to have them visit the god-forsaken land. A fifth stated: “When people ask me why I left Australia. This. This is why. You don’t know real fear till you wake up at 4 a.m., and one of these dudes is staring at you from your ceiling.” 

Fellow Queenslanders shared similar stories, with one woman finding a banded huntsman in her car. 

She wrote: “A few years ago, while driving to school on the Gold Coast, my son in the backseat said to his brother in the front, ‘what’s that behind your head?’ I looked and stopped the car and we all got out screaming. I picked up the spider with my daughter’s blanket and threw it onto the grass.” Another woman said she was driving in her car when she saw a menacing shadow crawling through her window.

She wrote: “I nearly crashed, the poor guys at the produce place had to get it out for me. It’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

One Queensland woman also said she walked into her laundry to use the bathroom only to find a two-huntsman near the toilet. “They gave me a heart attack and forced me to go and pee on the back lawn. Luckily it was late at night! I hate spiders.” However, there are reportedly more than 155 different species of a huntsman in Australia. They are primarily large, long-legged, and colored grey or brown with banded legs.