Friday, October 30, 2020

Urban Legend of the Week

 People Swallow an Average of Eight Spiders a Year While Sleeping


 

FALSE 

I decided to go with this famous spider swallowing urban legend, for this Halloween edition of "This Week's Urban Legend", just because I've heard it so often and so many people seem to have accepted it as a scientifically proven fact. I've even seen it offered up as trivia on TV. Often times, it's shared as an attempt to make people feel uneasy. "It's  just one of those unpleasant truths we've gotta accept".

Fortunately, we don't gotta accept it, because it isn't actually true. It's a fake statistic that was actually made up and sent out via email in the 90s for the purpose of demonstrating how easily people accept whatever absurd information they read on the Internet. Ironically, it's proven its own point, by becoming one of the most widely circulated pieces of misinformation. In actuality, it's highly improbable that a spider will make its way into your mouth while you're asleep once in your lifetime, let alone eight times in a year. This person trolled, just to show how easily people are trolled, and YOU fell for it, didn't you?

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