How likely are poisonous spider bites?
Dear Straight Dope: My household has had a recent rash of giant man-eating spider attacks (as is common in early fall) that only I, recently knighted Sir Mikey the Spiderslayer, have been able to neutralize. Prompted by the insistence of my girlfriend that she had once been bitten by a spider and developed itchy welts and a rash, and that her father had captured the monster which he identified as the poisonous hobo spider, I hit the e-books and searched several sites over as many hours and gathered what information I could about these spiders. I did this because I was skeptical of dangerous spiders around these parts (I live 30 miles east of Seattle) as we dwell thousands of miles away from the range of the brown recluse and the black widow (reportedly the only dangerous spiders in the U.S.). I identified the spiders we saw as giant house spiders or common house spiders, deemed “completely harmless” in all sites from which I culled information. I also have heard somewhere that “spider
