'Like a horror movie': Millions of spiders swarm Tenn. neighborhood

Mary Bowerman | USA TODAY Network

If you are scared of spiders, this might sound like a nightmare.

Millions of spiders have taken over a Tennessee neighborhood in what looks like a scene from a “horror movie,” according to residents, WMC-TV reported.

A nearly half-mile-long spider web covered lawns in a north Memphis neighborhood earlier this week. Residents told WMC-TV that the spiders are hard to get rid of, and many are showing up in people's homes.

"I've never seen anything like this. It's like a horror movie[...]They're in the air, flying everywhere,” Frances Ward told the news organization on Nov. 20. “They [are] all on the house, on the side of the windows."

SPIDERS. EVERYWHERE. One Mid-South neighborhood is dealing with a creepy, crawly problem. >>https://t.co/CwuAO2T7Kh pic.twitter.com/NApy5NimbB — WMC Action News 5 (@WMCActionNews5) November 21, 2015

Memphis Zoo's Steve Reichling told WMC-TV that the invasion is from spiders that haven't been noticed.

"It's a mass dispersal of the millions of tiny spiders that have always been in that field, unnoticed until now," Reichling said. "In fields and meadows, there are often literally millions of spiders doing their thing, unseen and unappreciated by us."

This isn’t the first time a town has been taken over by small spiders. Thousands of small spiders literally “rained” down on a rural Australian town in May.

The onslaught of spiders in Australia can be explained by a migration technique called "ballooning,” Martyn Robinson, a naturalist from the Australian Museum, told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Baby spiders climb to the top of vegetation and release streams of silk that are picked up by the breeze. He said some spiders have been carried almost 1.8 miles above the ground and can travel long distances.

Robinson said during mass migrations entire fields are covered in the thin silk, which is often called "angel hair."

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