• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Giant Spiders (Ukraine, Peru, Cumbria & Elsewhere)

A

Anonymous

Guest
the giant spider of the ukraine

has anybody heard of this supposdly true story,if so could anybody shed light on this because it is frighting and i would love to find news on the matter[it was in articles around the world] or even better pictures .i be very gratefal if somebody does:D
 
I have heard of it, it is in a book that I have, The UnXplained - Strange Encounters published by Parragon.

The story basically says about how a guy is found dead in the elevator of a block of flats. He had 2 puncture wounds in his neck and lost around 1 and a half litres of blood. Later a 13 year old girl was trapped in a lift in the same block of flats. She was heard screaming but by the time she was rescued she was dead. Local residents feared a vamp was on the loose and didn't use the elevators anymore.

A russian detective and a sergant, rode up and down in one of the lifts to try and find out what had been happening. Hey carried pistols, flashlights and two-way radios with them. Three days after they started, the lift stopped and the lights went out, they used the radio to call for help and put the torches on.
 
argh I hit a key by accident and the second part vanishes :( will write the rest soon.

lucydru
 
I think you're leaving us hanging deliberately!!

What happened next?

I think you should tell the whole story in episodes...
 
So What Happened???!?!?

No doubt they were eaten by Spiders etc but it would be nice to hear how.

By the by - on the subject of giant insects in general - I remember being told by a biology teacher when young that there was a limit on insect size because of the way they breath - unsure of the precise mechanics but I don't think that they can get much bigger than they actually are... if you see what I mean!
 
If I remember correctly, they don't use lungs, just small holes in the exo-skeleton which depend upon air pressure to work. Therefore, anything much bigger then a tarantula is going to have asthma big time.

Also, the leg design doesn't support much more weight.

Anyway, come on, I want to know the end of the story. Someone light a bonfire, and pass me a marshmallow. It's good, this.
 
A spider appeared with a head roughly the size of an orange. One of the guys was scared of 3 things, the dark, inclosed spaces and you guessed it spiders. It's legs were about 3 feet long (90cm roughly). The spider dropped down and landed on the sergants face and bit him. The detective got his gun out and shot at it twice, missing the first time and shooting a leg off the second time. The spider retreated. When they were rescued the sergant was dead and the detective was truamatized.

Thats the story. But I just noticed something in the book that is puzzling. It said it had 6 yes six legs, arachnids (spiders) have 8.
So was it really a spider or some insect???

lucydru
 
I thought spiders did have lungs though... that's why they scurry around for ages and then have to stop for a bit, just long enough to be walloped with a shoe... erm, I mean placed gently between a glass and piece of cardboard...
 
Dunno then. Maybe it's insects that have them hole things (I got a very high grade in biology, I'll have you know). Ventricles? Or is that in the heart?

I will look it up and post in a smug fashion.
 
also at the end of the story, the russien army came in and flamethowered the spider and found out it had baby's.you say spiders cant get bigger then they can get,i think they can get bigger.aka the big house spiders.
also i have heard that spiders breave out of their legs so they cannot drown.
 
Has anyone actually found anything on the net about this subject or is all the info we have about if from one book?

lucydru
 
the bigger the better the smaller the lesser

This is something I don't quite follow:

Why would the insect never get any bigger than it "should"??????????????????????

I have seen this "theory" explained on tv before, not very well I might add.

Surely if the spider was that big then it's legs would be relative in size and thus able to support it.

Supposedly it would be crushed beneath it's own weight!!!!

But if that's the case then how on earth did dinosaurs walk around?

Nature however will always find a way.

By the way surely the only two ways into a lift are through the doors(normal way) or the emergency trap door in the ceiling.

I assume that the spider came through the trap door?!
knowing what had happened to the other people, being in their shoes I think I would have emptied the magazine of my gun into the thing coming through the trap door.
 
Has anyone got any new info about this subject, or is all the information we have about it from one book?

I am asking as I am starting to wonder if this is more of an urban legend. More information about this subject from different sources would counter claim my idea. So anymore information would be greatly recieved.

lucydru
 
i am doing a lot of research on this subject now so hopefully i will come up with something also spiders breath out of their legs and apparently they cannot drown.
 
Well, thats one country off my holiday list (actually it was never on it), 'cos I'm scared s***less by spiders. Big ones, little ones, medium ones. They are evil and should never have been created!
 
well for anybody who asnt got the book,at the end the authorties quickly hushed up the iincident and a version of the story got out on the internet and turkish newspapers but was annocuced a exaggeration.it was clamied that the giant spider was a deformed black widow which was mutated from the radioactive fallout.also reports say the russien troops came in the elevator and flamedthrowed the beast and disscoved it laid eggs.

well one of my freinds who live there said to me it is possible,like for the example the kids who grew 3 arms and legs from the fallout.im still trying to find imformation and no pictures yet.[possible kgb reports]
and also spiders breath out of their legs and cannot drown
 
Giant spiders of Windscale

Way back in FT 26 there's a story from the Daily Express dated 30 June 1978 about some giant spiders found by a forestry worker near the Windscale plant in Cumbria. It was implied that they were radioactive mutuations. The forestry workers' name was Michael King if anyone wants to follow it up. I can't find any updates to this soo......:)
 
Cumbria! Thats to close to home. I don't live in Cumbria but I mean, it's in the same country as the giant spiders...urgh!

Could these Giant spiders possibly be an experiment and so much of an accident!?
 
Re: Giant spiders of Windscale

Tubal Cain said:
giant spiders found by a forestry worker near the Windscale plant in Cumbria. It was implied that they were radioactive mutuations.

Living almost on top of the Windscale plant (now called Sellafield) and having worked there for 12 years I can tell you that no-one round here remembers giant spiders specifically, although the wildlife around here is quite interesting. Nothing to do with radiation exposure (these tabloid journalists - morons, all) but more to do with the climate (coastal, warm, plenty of water from the mountains, a lot of sun in summer). Last year I found a beetle in the kitchen that I tried to trap in a whiskey glass - it didn't fit, as it was about 2 inches long. Someone said it was a june bug (is this right?) I kept it in a sandwich box for a day or so then let it go. We do have one of the ubiquitous ABCs, though, which has been sighted a couple of times on the screes at Wastwater (damn, and I was drinking there on Friday!)
 
Spider sh*t

Big_Al said:
By the by - on the subject of giant insects in general - I remember being told by a biology teacher when young that there was a limit on insect size because of the way they breath - unsure of the precise mechanics but I don't think that they can get much bigger than they actually are... if you see what I mean!

I think that's right, although I don't know the details. The biggest spider alive today is the bird-eating spider (prev. post) at 11.5 inches across, and the longest insect the stick insect (up to 14 inches long). I don't know what the limit on insect size is, but I do know that there were pretty big beasts on earth in the Jurassic period - dragonflies with 3ft wingspans, cockroaches the size of rats.

However, my view on the Ukraine spider: Utter garbage (not meaning to offend anyone here - this is just my opinion). Not a grain of truth in it. The reasons I know it's bull are:-

> An insect with a head the size of an orange would be 150X bigger than the largest known insect alive today. That's like finding a snake weighing 50 tonnes or an elephant 70ft tall or a dog the size of a bread van. It doesn't happen.
> A head the size of an orange would indicate a much bigger leg-span than 3 feet.
> Something that size could not exist in a lift shaft - what would it eat?
> Spiders don't kill their prey and then run away.
> Spiders can't stop lifts, or switch off lights.
> They don't suck blood, either.
> To catch a murderer, you don't go up and down in a lift for 3 days. Unless you're real lazy.
> Radios don't work in lifts.
> Even Russian detectives can't see in the dark
> You don't fire a gun in a lift unless you're mad or suicidal. Especially if the lights are out.
> Who got the missing leg?
> Spiders can't disappear from a closed lift, unless it pressed the button and opened the door. Something that big couldn't climb a wall.
> Radiation doesn't make things bigger, it makes them dead.
> You don't use flame throwers on something the size of a dog - it's called overkill.
> You most certainly don't use flame throwers in a lift, or even in a building.

As I say - this is just my view on the matter! Others might think different.
 
Insects "breathe" by absorbing oxygen directly through their skin/carapace. This places a limit on their size, if the insect's too big then no oxygen can diffuse into the centre of it's body and that area will be starved of oxygen and die.
I'm pretty sure that that's the mechanism and although it places a constraint on insects on land in certain ares of the ocean off antractica where the lower temp of the water allows more oxygen to dissolve there are some crustaceans (same kind of family as insects) which can become quite enormous. There was a giant woodlouse type sea thing found that was about a foot long if i remember rightly.
 
Ok I should of put that the cover on the ceiling of the lift had rusted away. Thats how the spider got it. I can't say about the other bits you mentioned since my knowledge of spiders is pretty much non-excistant.

As for the lift, I'm guessing it was old an in need of much repair as it did get stuck between floors on other occasions. This would also give reason to the lights inside it going out.

lucydru
 
this spider story is getting bigger then i thought
keep posting i like a truth behind it
 
> An insect with a head the size of an orange would be 150X bigger than the largest known insect alive today. That's like finding a snake weighing 50 tonnes or an elephant 70ft tall or a dog the size of a bread van. It doesn't happen.






and what about the giant scquid (15 to 24 meters long)

not saying i believe this "storry" but i think you cant say an(for this matter) insect cannot grow this big
 
A squid is not an insect (or an arachnid like the spider), or even an arthropod (it is a mollusc - a close relative, but no cigar-shaped flying object!). Arthropods ARE restricted in size by simple laws of physics. You do have half a point though in that all families of animals can grow bigger in water than on land, but even here there are still restrictions.

To be more explicit, a giant spider would have two options for death:

1) have an exoskeleton thin enough to be able to move, which would then break, or

2)have a thick exoskeleton that would not break, but which would be too heavy for old itsy-bitsy to lift.

And nobody suggest it had evolved a super-light super-strong form of chitin. Unless you have evidence of course?
 
Back
Top