Grandmother Vacuumed a Spider. After One Trip, She Noticed the ‘Lint is Moving’

Insects are terrifying, even though they are essential for the planet. Many are venomous, a lot bite, and some are just tiny, creepy crawlies. While most people would squish bugs, Keith (@keith2747) has a grandmother who would refuse to do just that. But because she refused to smack a spider, her house may actually be on the verge of an infestation.

“So, you have to understand that if you suck up a spider in the vacuum, it’s still alive in there,” Keith told TikTok. His video was captioned ‘Don’t vacuum spiders.’

“My grandmother would always do that,” he explained, presumably using the vacuum cleaner to catch spiders. “She thought it was cruel to take their life, so she would just suck it up and leave them there.” More people could afford to show mercy to insects that don’t mean them any harm. But his grandmother’s mercy may have backfired.

Keith explained that they had an upcoming family trip. Right before it, his grandmother found a “hideous-looking spider” and used the vacuum cleaner to suck it up. It was out of sight, out of mind for Grandmother. She didn’t even dispose of the spider that was in her cleaning tool before heading out on the trip.

She returned from the trip a while after. The grandmother began unpacking without her glasses on. But then, she noticed something strange—there was lint all over the bed. Perhaps while she was packing, some of her clothes shed lint on the bed?

Worse than a haunted house

Grandmother paid no mind to it and started washing the dishes and doing the laundry. But as she turned her head to the bedroom, she noticed that there was now lint in the hallway. She didn’t see the lint in the hallway when she entered the bedroom, making the situation extremely strange.

“She puts her glasses on and finally realizes that the lint is moving,” Keith explained. Is her house haunted? Because there’s no way on earth it would make sense for lint to move on its own.

But no—it wasn’t possessed lint, and her house wasn’t haunted. Instead, it was a bunch of baby hobo spiders.

“Obviously, it had given birth during the trip, and those were its babies that were absolutely covering the closet. They were all over the bedroom and now spreading throughout the house,” Keith said. If forced to pick between a haunted house and a house filled with biting spiders, perhaps most people would opt to have no house at all.

Don’t leave a spider unattended

Keith’s story trended on TikTok, with commenters laughing uncontrollably at the scenario. One commenter compared his grandmother’s spider situation to soot sprites from the movie Spirited Away. They’re small, fuzzy balls of soot that have eyes and a life of their own. But unlike hobo spiders, they don’t bite.

Another commenter assumed that the grandmother, in fear, would just grab the vacuum cleaner all over again. She could never bear to hurt those poor souls!

Someone else joked, “Nothing can live in a vacuum. There’s no air.” If the grandmother could conjure up outer space using her vacuum, that’s entirely possible. But vacuum cleaners aren’t the best places to lay eggs for spiders either. It’s a dirty environment without food and water—but it’s not impossible for eggs to hatch in there. If the survivors found their way out of the vacuum, they would thrive.

The moral of the story is, of course, never to leave spiders in vacuum cleaners. Don’t just step on them either—because they might have hatchlings on them, which would only make matters worse. Instead, catch the spider and dump it out of the house—it’s a failsafe way to prevent a spider invasion.

(featured images: Erik Karits, keith2747, Tima Miroshnichenko)

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