Do You Really Swallow 8 Spiders a Year in Your Sleep?

Last updated 2026-08-22

It's one of the most-repeated "fun facts" in circulation: the average person supposedly swallows eight spiders a year while asleep. Every credentialed source that has actually checked this says it's false. That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is where the false claim is said to have come from — a specific writer, a specific magazine, a specific date — and what happens when you actually go looking for that magazine.

The claim

The average person unknowingly swallows a specific number of live spiders per year while sleeping — most commonly stated as eight, though four, "20 in a lifetime," and "a pound over a lifetime" all circulate too.

Source trail

Nearly every page that debunks this claim also explains where it came from, and nearly all of them tell the same story: in 1993, a columnist named Lisa Holst wrote a piece in a computer magazine called PC Professional about how readily people believe chain-email "facts," and invented the eight-spiders statistic herself as a demonstration. That story itself traces to one place — Snopes.com — and Snopes has since said, on its own site, that the writer and the magazine it cited do not exist.

What's confirmed

• The claim is false, and a real spider curator's own institutional page states this plainly. The Burke Museum's own "Spider Myths" page, fetched directly (checked 2026-08-22), written by Rod Crawford, the museum's Curator of Arachnids, states: "No such case is on formal record anywhere in scientific or medical literature," and that for a sleeping person to swallow even one live spider "would involve so many highly unlikely circumstances that for practical purposes we can rule out the possibility."
• Named spider and insect experts independently give the same biological reason, in their own words. Scientific American's own article by Annie Sneed, fetched directly (checked 2026-08-22, dated April 15, 2014), quotes Crawford again: "Vibrations are a big slice of spiders' sensory universe. A sleeping person is not something a spider would willingly approach." The same article quotes Bill Shear, a biology professor at Hampden-Sydney College and former president of the American Arachnological Society, on why spiders ignore us at all: "We're so large that we're really just part of the landscape." Neither expert was independently re-confirmed by us beyond this one article, but the article itself was fetched and read directly, not taken from a summary of it.
• Snopes' own current page states the underlying statistic was invented on purpose, not discovered. Snopes' fact-check page, "Do People Swallow Eight Spiders Per Year?" — confirmed via direct search-result extraction of the live page after a direct fetch attempt returned an access error (see "What isn't," below) — states the eight-spiders figure "was not only made up out of whole cloth, it was invented as an example of the absurd things people will believe simply because they come across them on the Internet," attributing the invention to "a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst."
• Snopes' own separate page states that the writer and magazine it just cited do not exist. Snopes maintains a second page, titled simply "Lisa Birgit Holst" — again confirmed via direct search-result extraction of the live page — which states outright that "'PC Professional' and columnist Lisa Birgit Holst do not exist," and that her full name is an anagram of the sentence "This is a big troll." Snopes says this was planted in April 2001 as an in-joke for "long-time readers... familiar with trolling we engaged in during the early days of the internet." Snopes founder David Mikkelson did not publicly confirm the anagram was deliberate until August 2021 — twenty years after the citation had already spread as if it were a real source, per an independent account of the reveal (see below).
• Independent researchers, working separately from Snopes, could not find the magazine either. A blogger at eightspiders.blogspot.com, fetched directly (checked 2026-08-22), reports contacting the Library of Congress directly — "they do not have, in their records, any magazines with the title 'PC Professional'" — and calling the real British magazine PC Pro directly, which said it "never changed their name and... never heard of Lisa Holst or PC Professional Magazine." A separate investigation by the video essayist LEMMiNO, "The Eight Spiders," fetched directly (checked 2026-08-22), independently reaches the same dead end, and adds that several real magazines actually named "PC Professional" or close variants did exist internationally — in Sweden (1992), Germany (PC Professionell, 1991), and Italy (PC Professionale, 1991) — but none of them, on LEMMiNO's own check, contain the spider claim. A trade publication, Pest Management Professional, fetched directly (checked 2026-08-22), independently reports the same anagram finding and states plainly that Snopes "claimed to have trolled their readers... and ironically ended up spreading misinformation in the process."
• The number itself doesn't agree from one debunking page to the next — including on the same page that debunks it. The Burke Museum's own page states the myth as "you unknowingly swallow an average of four live spiders in your sleep each year" — not eight — while separately noting other circulating versions claim "20 in your lifetime" or "a pound of spiders" over a lifetime, and pointing out the arithmetic problem this creates on its own: four a year for a lifetime would very quickly exceed twenty. Ripley's Believe It or Not's own page on the myth, fetched directly (checked 2026-08-22, dated December 6, 2023), makes the same point about a different pair of numbers: "quite a jump" separates "eight spiders a year" from "eight spiders in a lifetime," two versions that circulate simultaneously as if they were the same claim.
• The oldest trace of the myth anyone has actually located predates 1993's supposed publication date by less than the citation implies, and comes from a different medium entirely. LEMMiNO's own investigation, fetched directly (checked 2026-08-22), states an archived Usenet newsgroup discussion from early 1997 is "the oldest verifiable mention of the myth I've been able to track down" — a real, locatable trace, just not the 1993 magazine everyone credits, and four years later than the date usually given.

What isn't

• We could not independently fetch Snopes' own two pages directly. Both snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/ and snopes.com/lisa-birgit-holst/ returned an access-denied response on every direct fetch attempt this session. The quotes attributed to Snopes above come from direct extraction of the live page's own text through a search tool, not from a saved copy or a third party's paraphrase — but we could not render and read the page ourselves the way we did for the Burke Museum and Scientific American sources, so we're flagging the difference in method rather than treating both as equally verified.
• Whether the number "eight" specifically was ever really in whatever the original 1993 document was — if one exists at all — cannot be confirmed, because no one has produced the document. Every source we found, including Snopes itself, agrees the underlying article has never surfaced. A 2009 book, Don't Swallow Your Gum!, is reported by LEMMiNO to include a passage claiming to quote the Holst article directly — but LEMMiNO's own assessment, which we have not independently re-checked against the book itself, is that the quote's vagueness suggests it "was likely invented" after the fact, not copied from a real source.
• A separate claim that the myth traces to a 1990 Cornell Engineer magazine article, predating the 1993 date by three years, rests on one blog and was not independently confirmed by us. We did not locate or fetch a copy of this alleged article ourselves, and found no second source corroborating it. It's named here as an unresolved lead, not a fact.
• Whether Snopes' fabricated citation was a deliberate trap for plagiarizing sites or just an in-joke that got out of hand is not settled by anything we found. An Ask MetaFilter discussion thread on this exact question (ask.metafilter.com/146671/, "Paging Lisa Birgit Holst") returned an access-denied response on every direct fetch attempt this session, so it's named rather than linked. What we could confirm of its contents, reported secondhand only, is that the participants don't reach agreement — one commenter suggests the fake citation was meant to catch copyright violators who repeat sourced facts without checking them, another points out Snopes has a separate, clearly labeled section for intentionally fictional teaching examples and this page was never filed there. We report the disagreement rather than picking a side neither source settles, and flag that we did not read the thread ourselves.
• An early print appearance often cited — a 1997 Chicago Sun-Times column that reportedly checked the claim with a Field Museum entomologist — was not independently fetched by us. Multiple secondary sources describe this column consistently by title, author, and date, but the original text wasn't available for us to read and quote directly, so its specific content isn't asserted here beyond what's already independently confirmed above.

Verdict

No spider-swallowing case is on record anywhere in scientific or medical literature, and named arachnologists give a consistent, specific biological reason why: a sleeping person's heartbeat, breathing and snoring are exactly the vibrations a spider is built to avoid, not approach. That part of the myth is settled. What isn't settled is the story nearly every debunking page tells about where the false number came from — a named writer and a named 1993 magazine that no one, including the fact-checking site that first named them, has ever produced. The number itself doesn't even survive contact with its own debunkers: the Burke Museum's own page states "four," not "eight," while citing other versions again. The tidy story of "one writer invented this fact to prove a point about misinformation" is itself a fact that spread the same way the spider claim did — repeated by page after page, sourced only to the page before it.

Same shape as our brief on goldfish memory: a popular myth turns out to be false, but the specific story people tell about how the myth began or spread has its own unverified soft spots that the debunking pages themselves rarely check. Also related: did knights need a crane to mount their horse?, another case where tracing a claim to its printed origin turns up a different date and source than the one usually named, and was there really a room called a vomitorium for vomiting?, where the academic article most other sites lean on for the myth's origin date gets a checkable fact about its own key example wrong. Also related: are daddy long-legs the most venomous spiders in the world?, another false arachnid claim where the sources debunking it turn out not to agree with each other once read directly. A fourth: was the spinach-iron myth really caused by a misplaced decimal point?, where the tidy "here's the real explanation" story turns out to have no documented source either, and the doctor who spread it admitted as much when asked directly. A fifth, and the rare case where the strange claim actually holds up: are "rat kings" — rats fused together by their tails — actually real?, where named museum specimens and a scientist's own 2021 fieldwork confirm the phenomenon, even though he leaned on Wikipedia rather than his own research to say how rare it is. A sixth: do Twinkies really last forever?, where the myth's most confident-sounding detail — a named comedian, a named decade — turns out to be just as unsourced as the eight spiders' named writer and named magazine. A seventh: did Thomas Crapper invent the flush toilet?, where a named soldiers'-slang origin story turns out to be just as unattributed as the eight-spiders anagram it was traced back to. An eighth: did Mrs. O'Leary's cow really start the Great Chicago Fire?, where the myth itself is confirmed fiction but the reporter's own confession to inventing it gets three different dates, decades apart, across the sources that report it. A ninth: was Walt Disney's body really cryogenically frozen?, where the quote most often used to debunk the myth turns out to misstate its own key timing fact by a factor of two. More research briefs.