Marianne and I were hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, right near the Siskiyou Summit on the border between Oregon and California when she felt the bite. Of course, we’d heard of helmet spiders before, but no one had seen one in ten years. Most people figured they’d gone extinct.
Most documented cases of helmet bites had occurred in 1972. But, given the sheer fucking terrifying nature of the symptoms, stories of the spiders were a mainstay at campfires up and down the PCT. Supposedly, the spiders were also found in Hokkaido, but who knows?
What happened to Marianne was horrific. Much worse than anything described in even the most outrageous stories.
But then, her case was far from typical.
After the whole incident with Marianne, I naturally became more interested in helmet spiders. Articles are actually surprisingly hard to find, which contributes to the conspiracy theory that they were created in a government lab.
At first, most scientists dismissed the bite symptoms as the rantings of drug-crazed hippies. But after witnesses described similar effects over the course of a dozen incidents, they began to accept the accounts as likely true. This one actually came from an account of a Japanese doctor who traveled to the US to interview a victim’s widow:
Sep. 18, 1972 - Arcata, CA - Session 2
Dr. Murakami: …let’s fast-forward to the bite itself and the immediate aftermath.
Lydia: At first the bite didn’t even look bad. But then Doug and I saw the spider’s head, and it’s just like we’d heard about. The little gray top of his head really did look like a viking’s helmet. That’s when he started freaking out. Like I said, we’d heard the stories. We figured our one shot was to get him on a blanket in some shade to try to ride it out.
Dr. Murakami: How long was it before symptoms began to manifest?
Lydia: About ten minutes after the bite I noticed a change in his breathing. Not like he was struggling to breathe, but every breath was intentional, you know what I mean? Just like they say. His body wasn’t breathing automatically anymore. He had to think about each breath or else it didn’t happen. He could still talk at that point, but I noticed that if he started saying too much he’d forget to breathe and his lips started turning blue.
Dr. Murakami: At what point could you tell that your husband’s heart was affected?
Lydia: When he started counting. It wasn’t like normal counting. He’d say two digits quickly together. And then the next two after a second. And then so on. 1-2… 3-4… 5-6. Of course, we knew the stories. I knew what he was doing. Beating his own heart. Manually. After a while, he stopped counting out loud, but I could tell he was still doing it silently, inside. I’m guessing trying to also move his lips and his tongue was too much to keep track of.
Dr. Murakami: The automated mechanism to beat the heart was… no longer functioning?
Lydia: Are you playing dumb now? Come on. You know that’s what it was. And that’s sure what it fucking looked like. I mean… I wouldn’t even know how to control my own heartbeat if I tried, but suddenly he HAD to. You know, they say that the venom affects something about ALL the automated systems. The heart being the most noticeable.
Dr. Murakami: How long did this stage last?
Lydia: Maybe an hour? I think the biggest challenge was that even as he was trying to beat his own heart, he was also manually breathing. He had to think about both things at once, like playing piano with two hands. And Doug was no musician. Usually, he’d put the breath in between the numbers as he silently counted. 1-2 breath 2-4 breath. Like that.
Dr. Murakami*: Do you see any reason why this… manual beating of the heart couldn’t continue indefinitely? The venom’s effects would likely reduce in strength after a matter of hours.*
Lydia: I ask myself that every day. Like, if I’d been able to coach him a little, tell him what to do? Maybe he could have weathered the storm. Ultimately, it was his own stomach that killed him, I think. In addition to the heart and lungs, he was having to manage his own stomach, his whole digestive tract, really. Who knows what else? At some point, I heard him whisper it to me. “Lydia, I’m doing everything. I’m digesting. I can feel it all. I can’t do it anymore.” And then he threw up everywhere, and his counting got off… and then he was just… gone.
It’s natural that the government got cagey about interviews like this leaking. After all, the spiders were exceedingly rare, but their extraordinarily terrifying method of killing might cause a panic. There’s also the rumor that the government was worried some people would knowingly seek the spiders out, hoping to be bitten, basically chasing a kind of metaphysical experience.
There’s no evidence of any bites at all in the late 70s or early 80s. Then, exactly 17 years after the initial reports, you see more incidents. And then 17 years after that. And of course, this year Marianne is only one of several victims. The storytellers on the trails will tell you it’s because the CIA mixed cicada DNA in with the spiders when they bred them in their labs, but I never bought into that.
My own theory is that the 17 year cycle is just a coincidence. That the spiders have been building their massive nests for years up in the mountains, trying their best not to bite us. Honestly, I think they’ve been trying to stay as far away from people as possible.
Because this is the part where the scientists didn’t believe me. When I tried to drag Marianne to the shade after she got bitten, I leaned her up against a hollow log–a massive redwood that had fallen near the trail. And the whole thing collapsed, shattering into dust. Inside, the log was hollow, running for maybe 200 feet along the forest floor. And the whole thing was packed with helmet spiders. There must have been a hundred thousand of them.
As soon as Marianne fell through the log, they started biting her. They were all over her face, her arms, her neck. They couldn’t have been happy to have her fall right through their roof. I’m sure she got bitten at least a hundred times, maybe a thousand.
I wanted so bad to pull her out of there, but I knew what would happen to me. All I could do was slowly back away and watch. I screamed that I loved her. That I was sorry. But I have to admit, the whole time I was checking my own jeans, making sure nothing was crawling up my legs.
As the venom coursed through her, I saw her pupils pulse like a heartbeat. I’m not sure what she experienced in those last moments, but when I lie awake at night thinking about it, I imagine that her brain itself began to need manual control, that the very neurons within her ceased to be automated and demanded her direct will.
Of course, she died after only a few seconds. But I wonder if those last seconds took a thousand years inside her own thoughts as everything slowed down to the pace of manual thought.
As for me, I’m not a hiker anymore. Really, I don’t like to go outside at all. Some people say I’ll feel better in a year, after the 17-year cycle is over. I don’t think so. In my darkest dreams, I imagine the spiders finally deciding the wait is over and hitching a ride on some backpack down to the towns below. I imagine them everywhere.