Here’s How Many Spiders You Swallow Each Year While Sleeping

You’ve heard about this swallowing spiders while you sleep thing right? And supposedly it’s just part of sleeping.

Ewwwwwww! Chalk this up as something I just don’t want to know. Except, how true it really?

Supposedly, we swallow an average of eight spiders each year. It’s when we’re sleeping that these creatures casually enter our mouths and then die after we automatically swallow.

Again, ew!

Okay, so let me get this straight. This means that in our lifetime we swallow hundreds. Come on now this feels like a total urban legend don’t you think? I mean that’s nuts.

Well are you ready for this? According to the How Stuff Works website this is a total urban legend made up by a journalist.

Here’s How it All Went Down and Why.

According to How Stuff Works, a journalist wrote an article claiming we swallow up to eight spiders a year and did this just to see what would happen. Would it go viral? How would we react?

According to the Burke Museum the article was purposely written without facts or science backing it up, proving that urban legends spread far and wide very easily.

For a sleeping person to swallow even one live spider would involve so many highly unlikely circumstances that for practical purposes we can rule out the possibility. No such case is on formal record anywhere in scientific or medical literature. This very widespread urban legend has no basis in fact.

So no, we’re not swallowing spiders while we sleep. They’re afraid of big, breathing, snoring, moving around humans.