Invasion By 6,000 Brown Recluse Spiders Run Family Out Of Half Million Dollar Home

Covering the infested home

"Susan Trost testified she was walking through her new home, exploring it on her first day there, when she noticed a large, stringy web wrapped around one of the light fixtures.

It hadn’t been there on the walk-through date.

Neither had the webs in the bar area in the basement. In the kitchen, she tugged on a piece of loose wallpaper, and a spider skittered behind it.

She thought the home probably just needed a thorough cleaning, so she got to work.

In the following days, she saw spiders and their webs every day. They were in the mini blinds, the air registers, the pantry ceiling, the fireplace. Their exoskeletons were falling from the can lights. Once when she was showering, she dodged a spider as it fell from the ceiling and washed down the drain.

A month after living in the home, her 4-year-old son screamed frantically from the basement, and Trost saw a spider, about the size of a half dollar, inches from his foot.

Instead of smashing it, Trost trapped it in a plastic bag and looked it up on the Internet. It was a brown recluse.

Trost testified she contacted a pest control company that came in on a weekly basis, spraying the interior and exterior and setting down sticky traps.

Since brown recluse spiders often live behind walls, she hired someone to come in and remove drywall so the exterminator could spray behind it.

She hired another company to remove the insulation from the attic and put down a pesticide powder.

“After the attic treatment, it seemed to help for quite a while, although we were still capturing them,” she testifiedd. “It just was a decline; they weren’t gone.”

 At a jury trial in St. Charles County in October 2011, Jamel Sandidge, a biology professor at the University of Kansas, described the brown recluse problem at the Trost home as “immense,” between 4,500 and 6,000 spiders.

Most troubling was the fact, Sandidge testified, that those calculations were made in the wintertime, when the spiders are least active."

This is a story about how they got majorly screwed by State Farm Insurance as well. Go here for the rest of the story:  http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/extreme-case-of-brown-recluse-spiders-drives-owners-from-weldon/article_02e0dcb3-a772-5c47-84ce-ede4e21df346.html