hehe... I am Arachnophic (a bit) and last year when I moved into the flat felt a tickling on the back of my neck going up and down after I pulled a sweatshirt on... When I pulled the sweatshirt off there was a large spider ofn its back...

My noise was probably louder and involved a higher pitch 'eeep' closely followed by a 'didiediediedie' sort of noise as it was ground into the rented carpet (I cannot actually remember the noise I made... Although anytime I think about it, I CAN feel the neck tickling bit and shudder. Like now))...

I once saw a fried, who was retired and had a broken leg at the time, do a fairly serious leap off of a sofa when a reasonably large spider appeared at head height next to him having climbed up over the back. He wasn't even particularly scared of spiders, I think it was just the immediacy of the thing.

They are such weird and unsettling animals (nothing needs that many legs) that I think it's perfectly natural to be unsettled by them to some degree or another an not matter how much I try not to be they still creep me out.

So that's where it came from! You'll be pleased to know I carried him outside into the garden... he was rather large though!

Giant house spiders are currently running rampant in the south east. We've been getting one or two a night.

For your entertainment I refer you to my own encounters with Gerald the Mouse and Boris the Spider:

http://zencadet.livejournal.com/69207.html (The Saga of Gerald Mouse (summary) and unsuspecting Boris prelude)
http://zencadet.livejournal.com/69678.html (Boris Strikes Back!)
http://zencadet.livejournal.com/86254.html (Son of Gerald)

four inch tip to tip borises have been evicted from our house for about a fortnight... they seem slow until you try to catch them. and then they achieve spider mach ten. one was even too big for the spider catching podule on a stick. *shudder*

I am currently in Panama for work and boy, do they have big insects and arachnids here! On my first day I saw a large hairy spider - it doesn't help being only a few metres away from the rainforest!

If its any help, I probably would have screamed like a girl! :-)

I'm normally fine with spiders myself-but saw one in our kitchen a few days back that didn't look exactly, well 'English' to me. So I squished the thing. Checking online I discover that the nasty beastie was a 'false black widow' spider which is why it looked rather un-English, they apparently arrived a century ago from overseas, probably in a crate of bananas and have been booming in numbers in our suddenly milder climate (at least in the South).

And they are poisonous.
Theres me, foolishly assuming we dont have any poisonous spiders, and this ones bite can cause a very nasty swelling and quite a bit of pain apparently. Worse than a wasp sting. That makes it about as poisonous as a tarantula...

I suggest if you see any spiders that look kinda like black widows and are fairly large that you get rid of them. And watch they dont bite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steatoda_nobilis