Ohlone College
Creative Writing Stories

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Aug. 4, 1978
The Denver Rocky Mountain News ran an eyewitness account about a seven-foot Black Widow Spider whose legs got caught in manhole cover, and was run over by a city bus. Squashed so flat in fact, that arriving rescuers could not conclusively identify the corpse. The abnormally long legs on the big Black Widow initially caused identification confusion. An eyewitness stated , "I saw a red hourglass when the spider stood up in front of the bus, like maybe trying to stop the bus, or something? It was not human, and liketa scare me halfta death. It was horrible!"

Most Denver residents thought the story was a new urban myth, or National Enquirer prank. Animal Control confirmed the story without reservation, scraping it off the asphalt left no room for any arguments in their minds. There were no photos taken at the time of the accident that could corroborate or deny, but one of the Animal Control Officers said, " the spider appeared to be cross-eyed ."

Further affirmation of the Newspaper's Giant Spider Story came months later when more residents starting seeing human sized Black Widows roaming Colfax Avenue in the vicinity of KittyKat's Adult Emporium. Everyone noticed that the insect population had diminished lately, but they attributed that to a new Raid Insect Killer. Nothing the likes of this had happened since 1938 when Earthlings survived the Martian Invasion. City dwellers of all races, ethnicity's, economic and educational backgrounds, were banding together to stave off a full-blown infestation of gigantic Black Widow Spiders. They began to "hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,"3  agreeing co-existence preferable to extinction by an all-new Black Plague.

What would Stanley Cogswell think about that?

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3 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., " I Have a Dream" speech , August 28, 1963.