Q. What’s worse than seeing a massive huntsman disappear into a dark corner of your car?
A. Having it reappear on the windscreen in front of you as you’re driving!
Spiders are scary at the best of times, so imagine how you’d react if one jumped out at you while driving down the road.
Melbourne DJ Nath Jennings filmed this exact situation and the video has gone viral on TikTok for all the reasons you’d expect.
The video uploaded to his TikTok with the caption ‘How would you react?’ shows a giant huntsman spider on the inside of the windscreen right in front of Nath’s girlfriend Millie as she is driving.
Millie’s holding her jumper to her mouth – and for good reason. Those spiders like to jump!
Nath zooms into the leggy arachnid and you can see its eyes and fangs glowing before he pans to his friends laughing in the back seat.
“Don’t,” you can hear Millie say, “It will jump at you!”
@nathjennings Spiders 🥶 #spiders #driving #scary #phobia #huntsman #australia #freaky #spider #car #spook #drive ♬ La Canelera – Los Capos De Mexico
How would you react?
One brave commenter said, “Perfectly fine. He can stay there. I don’t mind spiders”. But the rest reacted like most sane people would in that situation.
“OHH HEELL NAAAHHHHH.”
“I would cry and jump out of that car.”
“i would crash.”
“omg this happened to my dad and uncle and they both jumped out of the car while it was moving.”
“At that point [just] burn the whole car.”
Terrifying and funny at the same time
Nath told us they knew the huntsman was harmless and wasn’t going to hurt them or bite them, but what made the situation so scary was the thought of the spider dropping onto Millie’s lap or jumping onto her face and causing an accident.
It turns out the spider had been hiding out for months waiting to pounce.
Nath said he and Millie had first seen the huntsman several months ago when it appeared in the back windscreen of the car also while they were driving. They searched for it but couldn’t find it.
Nerves of steel
The footage in the TikTok video happened recently when Nath, Millie and their friends Jamie and Keith were heading out to a restaurant to celebrate Jamie’s birthday.
“Millie kept pretty cool,” said Nath. “Because she knew the spider was in the car, it wasn’t like an unexpected thing, but it was still a shock.”
It was only an 8 minute drive, so when the huntsman appeared, they decided to keep driving, knowing they’d be at their destination soon enough.
Then the spider made its way across the windscreen and sat right above Nath for a good five minutes, basically the rest of the trip.
“I’m sitting there thinking, if this thing just falls, if this thing drops onto my leg,” remembered Nath. “Even just talking about it again it gives me creepy crawlies. It’s not nice.”
Thankfully the huntsman stayed stuck to the windscreen above Nath and didn’t go further. When they go to their destination, Nath flew out of the car. “I was like, nah, my heart was beating, I got out of there as quick as I could.”
Their friend Keith collected the spider in a cardboard box and released it into the wilds.
“We found the humour of it,” said Nath. “It’s a harmless animal to us but it’s still pretty crazy.”
(All images used with permission – www.nathjenings.com)
