For the past few weeks I have been, on and off, searching for the origin of the myth that the average person swallows 8 spiders per year in their sleep. (Note: Lemmino already did the exact same thing as me in a very well made and carefully researched video he uploaded this October, which you can watch here.) First, I should note that there is little doubt that this is a myth, and that it is not true. As Scientific American (and Lemmino in his aforementioned video) have noted, this claim "flies in the face of both spider and human biology, which makes it highly unlikely that a spider would ever end up in your mouth." So I'm not gonna focus on that. Instead I will try to find out where this myth originated. Lemmino and fellow YouTuber CGPGrey have already done that, and I think their videos, Lemmino's especially, are pretty clear proof that the source long cited by Snopes (Lisa Holst's purported "article" in "PC Professional" magazine) doesn't exist and was made up by Snopes' webmasters. So I will try to tackle a different question than either Lemmino or CGPGrey did: where did this myth come from?
So I searched a bunch of online databases, including Highbeam and the Google Books archive, to find the oldest books/articles I could regarding this claim. My searches have identified the probable origin of this myth as a 1990 article in the magazine Cornell Engineer, published by the Cornell University School of Engineering. (That said, I recognize that this may have originated earlier, but I don't think there's much of a chance.)
Here are some things that have since become even clearer than the origin of this myth as a result of these searches:
1. This claim has many variations: it seems to have originated, for example, as a claim about the # of spiders swallowed in one's lifetime. This is true not only of the original 1990 article, but also of multiple other articles repeating the myth from 1999, 1999 again, and 2002, among others. That said, there are others claiming it is "eight per year", but there is also at least one source claiming that the average person swallows 8 spiders every day. Granted, it's a fiction book, but still, I would expect published authors to be a little more careful. BTW, one of the 1999 articles cited above cites this webpage listing "useless facts" as the source for the claim, so we know this page was publicizing the claim since at least 1999.
There are also different versions of the myth with different #s of spiders other than 8. For example, alternative numbers of spiders cited include 7, 4, and 10.
2. Many articles and books cite the claim as though it were fact. (E.g. 1, 2) Others cite it more skeptically, like a 1997 Chicago Sun-Times article where a journalist actually called an entomologist at the Field Museum to ask him whether this was true or not. Also, in 2001, the LA Times reported that "The San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, which investigates urban folk tales, says it is not true that "the average person swallows eight spiders a year." Someone made up the stat as a joke, and it quickly became gospel on the Internet." Still others cite it but make it clear that it's an internet legend and/or they just read it in an email, so it might not be true: 1, 2, 3.
haha lemmino
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