Kansas Family Unknowing Living with 2,000 Venomous Spiders For Years – With a Surprising Result

A Kansas family shared their 19th-century home with over 2,000 brown recluse spiders for five and a half years, and what scientists discovered challenges decades of medical misdiagnosis.

There’s something in your house right now. Maybe it’s behind that picture frame on the wall, tucked into the corner of your bedroom closet, or nestled in the void space between your walls. The Barger family of Lenexa, Kansas didn’t know they were sharing their 19th-century limestone farmhouse with thousands of eight-legged roommates until the summer of 2001, after living there since 1996.

The Discovery

The Bargers moved into their old haunted farmhouse outside Kansas City looking for fresh air and country living. They noticed spiders from time to time. Maybe one a week crawling across a wall or floor. Nothing unusual for an old house. The family of four – two parents and their children, ages 8 and 13 when they moved in – went about their lives in the sprawling historic home.

By mid-June 2001, after five and a half years in the house, they finally realized these weren’t just ordinary house spiders. Someone collected a few specimens, and Bryan Cutler from the University of Kansas confirmed what the Bargers had been casually encountering: Loxosceles reclusa. The brown recluse spider.

Diane Barger contacted Rick Vetter, a staff research associate in the entomology department at the University of California, Riverside and an internationally recognized spider expert. He asked the family to do something extraordinary: count every spider they could find for the next six months.

The Great Spider Hunt

Every night, Diane and her husband spent up to two hours capturing spiders in jars. It became a contest between them. Their best single night produced a haul of 37 spiders.

Diane started tallying the spiders in mid-June 2001 and contacted Vetter on July 5. With the exception of the first 34 specimens, all spiders were recorded by size – large, medium, and small – per night. Many spiders had to be killed to prevent escape, but whenever possible, specimens were preserved in alcohol and shipped to Vetter in California for verification and study.

The six-month collection effort produced specific numbers: 842 spiders caught on sticky traps and 1,213 collected by hand. Of the hand-collected specimens, 323 were classified as large, 255 as medium, and 601 as small.

By November 2001, the Bargers had collected 2,055 brown recluse spiders from their occupied home.

What Didn’t Happen

Despite spending months hunting through every corner of their house, despite hours of close contact with thousands of spiders, despite living surrounded by these creatures for five and a half years, not a single member of the Barger family was ever bitten.

The researchers estimated that spiders with bodies measuring around 5 millimeters in length or larger were capable of envenomation – injecting venom through a bite. Based on the size distribution of captured spiders, they conservatively estimated at least 400 spiders in the home were large enough to bite and inject venom.

During collection, there were close calls. A brown recluse ended up on someone’s arm while they were loading bedding. Still no injuries.

The family took one precaution: they moved their beds away from the walls so the spiders couldn’t join them under the covers.

Understanding the Brown Recluse

Brown recluse spiders are hunting spiders that wander at night searching for prey. Females create retreats where they hide and ambush prey – silk mats spun in hidden locations like wall voids or behind picture frames. Once they establish themselves in a home, they’re extremely difficult to remove because they spend so much time concealed in furniture, small crevices, and corners that typically go unnoticed.

The natural range of brown recluse spiders is limited to a specific geographic area: from southeastern Nebraska to Texas, east to southernmost Ohio and Georgia.

When brown recluse bites do occur, they’re rarely as serious as commonly portrayed. Some bites produce only localized redness and swelling. Severe necrosis – tissue death – probably occurs in less than 10 percent of cases and may result more from bacterial infection of the wound than from the spider’s venom.

The Medical Mystery

The study’s publication in the November 2002 issue of the Journal of Medical Entomology revealed something that deeply concerned Vetter and his colleagues: physicians across the United States were diagnosing thousands of “brown recluse spider bites” in areas where these spiders don’t even live.

In 1990 in South Carolina, 940 physicians responding to a survey reported 478 brown recluse spider bites in the state for that year. South Carolina sits outside the native range of brown recluse spiders. An arachnologist in South Carolina searched intensively for brown recluses for five years and never found a single specimen, nor did anyone bring him one.

In 2000, doctors in the 21 counties under the jurisdiction of the Tampa Poison Control Center diagnosed 95 brown recluse spider bites. According to Florida’s arachnologists, no brown recluses have ever been found in those 21 counties.

Vetter tracked brown recluse bites reported in California for three years. He scoured records and talked to hundreds of people. He found evidence of only eight brown recluse spiders in the entire state. During that same period, he was informed of 120 California bite diagnoses.

What’s Really Happening

Current research shows that many medical conditions manifest in skin lesions that get misdiagnosed as brown recluse bites. The actual causes of wounds attributed to brown recluse bites may be infections, other bug bites, diabetes complications, or bed sores. Some conditions misdiagnosed as brown recluse bites can kill if not treated properly – Lyme disease, anthrax, and necrotizing bacterial infections.

The researchers noted that for bite diagnoses in areas without brown recluse populations to be accurate, those regions would need to support hundreds to thousands of brown recluse spiders. In contrast, verified finds in areas outside the spiders’ range typically number fewer than 10 per state.

The study concluded that in areas outside brown recluse territory, more proof of spider involvement – specifically, verification of Loxosceles spiders at the alleged bite location – should be required before wounds are attributed to brown recluse spiders.

Other Infested Homes

The Journal of Medical Entomology study included two other Midwestern families. Additional collections from more typically infested homes in Missouri and Oklahoma in 2001 yielded 45 and 30 brown recluse spiders respectively. Despite these infestations, no bites occurred to the inhabitants of those homes either.

Living with Spiders

The Bargers learned to share their Kansas home with their arachnid neighbors. Diane Barger noted that the spiders become dormant in wintertime and don’t bother anyone, though she planned to resume hunting them when spring arrived.

The previous occupant had lived in the Barger home for 20 years before the family moved in, and the house was never vacant as far as could be determined. The spider population had been growing undisturbed for decades.

Brown recluse spiders can survive for many months without feeding. Females need to mate only once to progressively produce offspring throughout their lifespans. Brown recluse spiders can live several years.

During the collection period, the researchers observed a decrease in large and medium spiders from early to late season, probably resulting from natural demographic changes through the season and the removal of larger specimens that were easier to detect and capture. Small spiderlings appeared far more often on sticky traps than in manual searches, which makes sense because traps catch what humans can’t see.

Vetter’s research revealed a pattern: when one brown recluse is found, or even allegedly found, in an area where they’re not known to live, it often results in exaggerated media coverage, an overzealous public response, and many additional bite diagnoses by both doctors and the general public. The Kansas study demonstrated that this reaction to even one spider is far out of proportion to the actual threat these spiders pose.

The Barger family’s experience proves that brown recluse spiders, despite their fearsome reputation and venomous capability, generally avoid contact with humans. After living among thousands of these spiders for years, after hunting them nightly for months, the family remained completely unharmed.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.