My house may be haunted, or worse yet, a portal to the underworld............

STM

Senior Member
Ok, this is just plain CREEPY. I euthanized a giant (almost 3" from leg tip to leg tip) Golden Silk Orb Weaver spider with ethyl acetate two days ago. Within 5 minutes she rolled over and stopped moving. But because she was so much bigger than any spider I have euthanized and photographed in the past, I more than doubled the amount of ethyl acetate in my kill jar and left her in there for 2 hours. I pinned her to a piece of foam board right through the middle of her cephalothorax and CA’d all of her legs to the foam board as well because a spider that big would certainly move all over the place and probably slide off of the foam board as I adjusted it. I photographed her head on with no problems. It took me 143 images focus stacked to get her completely in focus. So far so good, now comes the creepy part. This morning I wanted to just photograph her head, pedipalps and chelicerae. I put the piece of foam board back in the light tent and turned on the strobes. The modeling lights started to warm up the tent and when I turned on live view to set up the shot, all of a sudden I see her pedipalps and chelicerae start to move. Then a couple of her legs started to move. Now I am have a flashback of the movie Pet Sematary. She stopped moving just long enough to photograph her head. I cut her feet off of the foam board with an X-Acto blade and removed the pin from her cephalothorax. As soon as I pulled out the pin a large drop of clear liquid oozed out of the hole. I put her out on the back deck for the six legged little critters to have a meal. She got up and moved around in a circle 3 times than dropped over on her side and her legs folded up. She has not moved since and is clearly dead.

I am wondering if I need to get a paranormal investigator to come in and cleanse the house. I better go burn some sage! :ghost::ghost::ghost:

2020-07-02-11.06.45 ZS PMax.jpg
 
Top