Woman Captures Nightmarish Encounter With Spider on Camera: 'Screaming'

A woman in France shared hair-raising footage of her terrifying encounter with a spider.

Arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, affects anywhere between 3.5 and 11.4 percent of the global population, according to a 2022 study published in the journal Scientific Data.

Yet the chances of encountering a spider capable of serious harm are low. In 2017, research featured in Toxicon, the scientific journal of toxinology, found that less than 0.5 percent of spider species are capable of causing severe envenomation in humans.

Unfortunately, rationality tends to go out of the window when it comes to dealing with a phobia. Marie from Savoie, in France, has had a phobia of spiders for as long as she can remember. "I don't know when it started," she told Newsweek.

She does know when it most recently reared its head though—during the recording of a light-hearted video she was making for social media.

"I filmed myself singing for my private story on Instagram," she explained. "It was only supposed to be for my friends."

However, things took an unexpected turn when she decided to look through one of her sketchbooks. A budding artist, Marie was vacationing at her mom's house at the time and, as the resulting clip shows, appeared to be in a buoyant mood as she prepared to sit down and draw.

Unfortunately, as the video also reveals, a spider lurking within the sketchbook had other ideas.

"I just wanted to draw so I took my drawing pouch and opened it," she said. "Then the spider appeared and scared me."

Even the word "scared" represents something of an understatement given her reaction. "I was screaming a lot," Marie admitted. In the video, the spider can be seen emerging from the spine of the sketchbook and momentarily touching Marie's hand as it scurries across the page and out of view

Marie, for her part, is understandably terrified and repeatedly screams in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has ever encountered unwanted spiders and other creepy crawlies.

When asked if she could identify the large spider that appeared by her hand on the clip, Marie offered a blunt response. "That was not my priority," she said. "It was just a huge black spider."

Whatever the species might have been, the incident put Marie off doing any artwork for the next few days.

"I left my wallet two days before taking it back," she said.

And even then, she took extra precautions to ensure she avoided another arachnid encounter. "I asked my father to look inside to make sure the spider was not in there anymore," she said.

Thankfully, the coast was clear and, even more thankfully still, Marie has been able to laugh about what happened.

When she showed the video to her friends, they reacted with hysterics. That was enough to convince her to share the clip online.

"They told me to put the video on TikTok," she said. "So I listened to them."

The clip was uploaded under the handle @_emji._ and has been liked over 544,000 times since being posted and commented on over 3,300 times. At the time of writing, it had been watched over 4 million times. When asked to explain the video's popularity, Marie attributed it to her reaction. "I don't know," she said. Maybe it's because I am ridiculous."

Ridiculous or not, her video might just have a few people opening books a little more carefully in the future. Just in case.

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