Sydney police say a man was left “quite embarrassed” after several neighbours mistook his efforts to kill a spider for a domestic violence incident.

Around 2am on Sunday several police cars rushed to an apartment in the northern suburb of Wollstonecraft, responding to reports of a woman screaming hysterically, a man yelling, “I’m going to kill you, you’re dead”, and furniture being thrown.

A man police described as “out of breath and rather flushed” answered the door and the local area command’s Facebook page documented the exchange that followed.

“Where’s your wife?” an officer asked.

“I don’t have one,” the man replied.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” he pressed.

“I don’t have one,” he said.

Police told the man neighbours had heard the screams, the threats to kill, the dull thud of flung furniture. “Come on mate, what have you done to her?” the officer asked.

“It was a spider,” the man replied sheepishly. “A really big one.”

“What about the woman screaming?”

“Yeah sorry, that was me,” he said. “I really, really hate spiders.”

The commotion was down to the man frantically chasing the spider around his apartment with a can of insect spray, police said.

They inspected the unit just to be sure, finding nobody injured. “Other than the spider,” officers added.

It’s not the first time a spider has sparked alarm. Another arachnophobe set a service station in Michigan on fire in September after he tried to scare a spider away from his petrol tank using a lighter, with predictable results.

Yet another, this one an assistant prosecutor in West Virginia, found himself in hot water in October after pulling a gun and threatening to shoot fake spiders arrayed in his office as Halloween decorations.

