UK Spider
A real-life experience which occurred when I was a student in Huddersfield in 1988 :
I lived in a shared house with another student and his girlfriend - we lived in a terraced house with a sloping field down towards the back door.
Next door to us lived a lovely large yorkshire lady who would play with the rather large spiders she found in the back vegetable plot, apparently so that her kids wouldn't be scared in the way that we were, both of us being rather arachnophobic..
The spiders in the back garden were large, black and fluffy, with large, berry-sized bodies. She would make these spiders run up and down her arms, something that gave us the willies.
Inevitably these spiders would sometime turn up in our rooms, and occasionally our beds. The student living below me in the "lounge" room woke me up one night to tell me that he was moving into his girlfriend's room temporarily as he had just woken up to find himself being crawled on by two of these spiders. This gave us both nightmares as you can imagine, but nothing like the next thing to happen.
One day, mid afternoon I think, the guy below came upstairs to my room - he was white and shaking. He said there was a large spider in his room, on the back of a T-shirt which was hanging over a chair just inside the door, behind the sofa.
I thought I'd take a look - there, on the back of the black shirt was a spider that literally almost spanned the back of the T-shirt. It wasn't a black, fluffy spider like the ones from the garden, it was brownish, and had a large oval body, with long, spindly legs. I would estimate the breadth across the spider to be around 8 inches.
We were absolutely petrified, but also stunned that a spider of this size could turn up in Huddersfield. We went for the lady next door, and I fetched a piece of aluminium tubing from a camp bed upstairs.
Even the arachnophilic lady next door was surprised at the size of the spider. Whilst we cowered in the kitchen, looking through the door, she took a clumsy swipe at the spider on the shirt with the aluminium tubing, and knocked the shirt onto the floor. The spider promptly vanished under the furniture, never to be seen again. Needless to say, it was quite some time before my friend used the room again, and we both walked in fear through the room when we went for our post at the front door.
I have no idea where such a spider could come from - the spiders in the back garden seemed unusually large, but this was an enormous specimen, far bigger than the British record. There was a shop about 25 yards away, but this didn't look like a banana spider - it seemed to be rather spindly-legged.