For many people, Fall is the best time of the year. There’s the crisp air, football, crunchy leaves, and of course, pumpkin spice everything. But, the cooler temperatures can lead to something that many people aren’t fond of — unwanted pests in the home. Most people do not enjoy when they find a spider lurking in their home, but we wanted to see just exactly how Americans feel about the eight-legged creatures.

So we decided to conduct a survey on spiders and some of the fears and general thoughts surrounding them. We asked around 1,000 people from throughout the United States and after analyzing the data, we came up with some pretty interesting results.

Take a look below:

The first question we asked in the survey was on the most frightening pests in general. Interestingly, the most frightening pest for most people is actually a snake. Spiders are second, followed by wasps.

When broken down by male and female, the results are a little different. Men are more scared of snakes and wasps than women, and women are more scared of spiders than men.

Looking at the data by age groups, Baby Boomers are significantly more afraid of snakes than Millennials. On the other hand, Baby Boomers are the least afraid of spiders out of any age group.



Next, we asked about a general fear level of spiders on a 1 to 10 scale, with 1 being the least afraid. When averaged, most people fell within a 4 – 6 rating. Women were, on average, 1.3 times more scared than men.



Generation X-ers were the most scared out of any age group. Baby Boomers and up were the least afraid.

Most people said that the worst place to find a spider was on your body or in your hair at 41%. The next was in your bed at 30%, followed by while driving or in the car at 13%.



When analyzed by gender, the results were fairly similar. However, men said that the worst place to find a spider was in their bed at a significantly higher rate than women, 37% compared to 27%.



As far as ways to deal with a spider, it was nearly a tie between using a shoe/stepping on a them and with the first thing they can get their hands on. Interesting, almost 1 out of 5 people say they don’t kill spiders — they trap and release them.



Breaking it down by how different regions of the country deal with spiders, the South was the biggest user of shoes. The West and the Northeast led when it came to trapping and releasing spiders.

We also wanted to ask some more unusual questions to see how people would respond or act in the future. One of them we asked was if they would consider moving if their house had a significant problem. Overall, nearly 43% of all respondents said they would consider it. About 1 of out 2 women said they would consider moving.

Next, we asked if a person would be willing to living a house ‘full of spiders’ if the rent or mortgage was paid in full for a year. The majority of people said they would not, but it was surprising to see that over 25% of all respondents said they would do it. Interestingly, about a third of men said they would.

When asked if they’ve ever lost sleep after finding a spider in their home, about 1 in 5 people said that they did. Following the trend of the rest of the survey, more women said they had lost sleep over it than men.

Finally, just to get a little silly, we asked about what the most frightening life-sized pest would be. Specifically, we asked what would be the scariest pest to physically fight. The results were actually very similar to the question on the scariest pest in general. Most people would not like to fight snakes, followed by spiders and then wasps.

Overall, this time of year can bring more pests into homes, and it’s clear that people have a variety of opinions on them. This survey data revealed a number of fascinating insights on how Americans deal with spiders and what they would do in unique situations.

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