GUEST BLOGGER ALAN FRISWELL: Scary Spider Stories #1 - Attack of the Camel Spider

Alan first came to my notice when he turned up at our stall at last November's Unconvention. He was clutching a box that had once held a plastic Christmas Tree. He thrust it at me, and said "Here's your mermaid".

I vaguely remembered Richard F having said that one of his mates had offered to make us a feegee mermaid, but I had forgotten all about it. Sad to say, so many people offer to do stuff for us, and then fail to deliver, that I had got into the habit of treating all such offers cum grano salis, but the advent of Alan shows that I should not be such a cynical old sod. Now he has become a guest blogger..

Apocryphal tales, particularly those of a frightening or gruesome nature, have become an inherent part of our contemporary folkloric culture. Seemingly a continuation of the Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories while roasting chestnuts on the fire at Christmas, the recounting of fearsome fables finds a cosy, even comforting resonance with afficionados of the ghoulish and ghastly (and that’s me, by the way).

Accounts of werewolves, vampires and forest phantoms, told to earlier, more superstitious peoples have evolved and transmogrified into the ostensibly more credible, but no less grotesque urban myths of psychopathic hitchhikers, breast implants that explode at high altitudes and babies in microwave ovens.

The one unifying factor in all these tales of course, is the fact that, despite supposedly all being based on real incidents and factual accounts, there is very rarely - if ever - real nuts-and-bolts evidence to support any of them, and most importantly - never any witnesses who can claim to have personally experienced them.

Now I’m going to present the following story as openly and honestly as I can, and perhaps you can make up your own minds as to whether it is simply another example of a twice-told tale that has gotten out of hand, or perhaps that even the creepiest urban legends might, on occasion, have some basis in truth.

So let’s talk about camel spiders.

While it is a member of the arachnid family, the camel spider isn’t actually a true spider at all, belonging to the order solifugae, meaning: “Those who hide from the sun.” With over 1000 species, these creatures are to be found in the Middle east, Mexico and the Southwest United States. Also known as the wind spider, the sun spider and the wind scorpion, the camel spider is thus named because it is principally a desert dweller, making it’s home in shaded areas way from the arid heat. It’s main diet consists of insects, lizards and scorpions, and will routinely consume so much food, that it’s body will swell up like a balloon, rendering it incapable of movement.

This animal has become an almost legendary beast, more fitting perhaps for a crypto zoological classification than that of an ordinary creature, with horrific stories of it’s depredations and super-normal physical abilities that qualify it more as a mini-monster, than the comparatively innocuous creature that it actually is.

We are told that camel spiders can:

Run at 30 MPH; jump five feet in the air; produce a hellish scream like a kettle full of boiling tyrannosaurus urine; chase people at great speed across the sand; kill camels with their deadly venom and rip their stomachs open before eating them; have jaws that can cut through tin cans; prove almost impossible to kill, and worst of all, inject sleeping humans with their anesthetizing poison and dine on the unfortunate victim, chewing away great chunks of flesh.

In actual fact, camel spiders are quite fast, but their top speed is about 10 MPH. They may be able to jump small distances, but no one has ever filmed one jumping five feet. They have no real scream, but some species can produce a buzzing or hissing sound. As the troops in Iraq have found, camel spiders will run towards you in the desert, but this is only to get into the shade provided by your shadow, and not because it has designs on your blood. They would never attack an animal that is beyond it’s ability to subdue, so camels, needless to say, are safely off the menu. It is true that they have powerful jaws - or chelicera - but why would one ever attack a tin can? The toughness of these creatures is well documented, and in truth, they are hard little buggers, but even so, you don’t need kryptonite to take one out.

So what about the last, and most grisly legend to be attributed to the camel spider - that of creeping up on sleeping humans, and after anesthetizing them with their venom, feasting at leisure on their raw flesh?

Well that’s where the story begins…..

Regular blog readers will already know about my brother-in-law Alfie, and his encounter with a mysterious sea-creature while night-fishing in the Red Sea. Well, while he was in Saudi Arabia, Alfie had another run-in, so to speak with another example of zoological strangeness, and while perhaps not as spectacular, or indeed frightening as having a sea-monster emerge from the ocean right next to your boat, this particular experience was far more macabre.

The Saudi laws regarding alcohol are strict, and very comprehensive. Basically it’s illegal, and that’s the end of it. At least that’s the official line. An understanding of the cultural differences of workers from the west and other parts of the world have precipitated a ‘tolerance’ of sorts, in that as long as you strictly indulge any alcoholic proclivities behind closed doors, and don’t make a nuisance of yourself, then a ‘blind eye’ will generally be turned. As can be imagined, Alfie and his mates took full advantage of this loophole in the local judicial system, staging wild mash-ups on regular occasions.

The main problem was obtaining the alcohol in the first place, as they certainly couldn’t import it. One of the hotel workers used to smuggle in bottles of beer from some unknown source, but a couple of Arab tradesmen in the town, seeing a huge market for bootleg booze, had embarked -at the risk of severe punishment - on a sideline of ‘home brew’ production, which they manufactured in three steel drums in their attic room, hopefully away from the long arm - and lashes - of the law.

This beverage, according to Alfie, was somewhere between whiskey and weedkiller, one mouthful having the twin properties of absinthe and sulphuric acid. Needless to say, this stuff was not to be taken lightly, or as Alfie said: “If you managed to drink a whole bottle, you’ d wake up three days later feeling like your head had been kicked-in by an elephant.”

Alfie and his mates were mostly all young, single chaps who basically saw Saudi Arabia as a kind of working ‘jolly’, but mike, a slightly older guy, had family back home, and the separation would sometimes inspire periods of depression, during which he would drink heavily.

One evening, Alfie and the boys were holding one of their regular ‘sessions’, and the wine was flowing, so to speak. Mike had been over-indulging with the local brew, and to no one’s surprise, passed-out in a heap on the living-room floor. The guys carried him upstairs to his room, and laying him on his side in case he threw-up, left him to sleep it off.

The lash-up continued unabated, until about three hours later, when one of the chaps - Jerry -went up to check on Mike. I’m going to quote from Alfie here, and although of course I’m paraphrasing somewhat, it’s about as verbatim as I can make it:

“We heard Jerry come flying down the stairs, and he rushed into the room. He was frightened out of his life. He said: “It’s Mike, it’s Mike! He’s f*****g topped himself!” We never thought that Mike was suicidal, but he had been so down lately about missing his family, that being as p****d as he was, he might have hurt himself. So we all ran upstairs, and Mike was laying on the bed on his back, although we had left him on his side. The left side of the bed by his head and shoulder was soaked in blood.

We went round the side of the bed to see what kind of injury he had, and there was something moving slightly, just tucked-in under the side of his face. We got closer in, and saw that it was a camel spider that had crawled-in between the pillow and his head. These things are so common around the hotel and the aircraft plant where we worked that no one takes any notice of them.

They never bother anyone, and I couldn’t believe that they were dangerous. The thing was covered in blood, it’s body, legs, everything. It took us a moment to realise that the thing was feeding on Mike, and although I can’t remember properly, I think one of the guys threw-up. For a minute we were just stunned by what we were seeing, but someone at the back - I don’t remember who - ran out into the passageway, and came back a few seconds later with a broom from the cupboard. We gently nudged the spider way from Mike’s face, and to our surprise it didn’t move much, it fact it seemed blown-up like a little balloon.

We pushed it off the bed on to the floor, and it just laid there, as if it couldn’t move. Jerry - it might have been him who threw-up - ran downstairs and brought up his 357 Magnum. He took dead aim about two feet away from the spider, and let one go. In the small room it was like a cannon going off -my hearing in one ear was f****d-up for hours afterwards - and the spider went up like a bomb. It just exploded and it was all blood - like a shower.

We rushed over to Mike, and saw that the side of his face was partly eaten away. It was worse than any horror film that you can imagine. He had a huge wound under his left eye that was open and bleeding, and the lower part of his cheek was in bits - we could see through to his teeth.

We really thought he was dead, but carried him downstairs to the foyer, where we called an ambulance. We were really lucky as the ambulance seemed to arrive in no time, and Mike was taken to hospital. A couple of us went in the ambulance, and we had to admit that Mike had been
drinking, as the doctor wanted to give him an anaesthetic. The doctor said that it was important to clean out the wounds, and flooded them with a water/hydrogen peroxide solution. We told the doctor about the spider, and he said that although cases like this were extremely rare, they were not unheard-of. The doctor thought that Mike might have cut himself shaving or in some other way, as blood can attract camel spiders, who will feed on dead animals. A policeman came in to see what was happening, as he had seen Mike taken from the ambulance. He could see that we had been drinking but - bless him - he didn’t make an issue of it. He told us that camel spiders will never crawl on people who will move around even slightly, but as Mike was so out of it, the spider would have seen him as dead flesh, and just started eating. I don’t understand how the pain didn’t wake him up, but he must have been completely unconscious.

We said about the spider being bloated, and the policeman said that camel spiders often eat so much, that they cannot move for hours, and it made us all feel sick that the thing had been full of Mike’s blood.

Mike was pumped with antibiotics, and his wounds stitched up as well as the doctor could manage. Any infection the spider might have left cleared-up, and at the end of the day, all Mike really suffered was flesh-wounds.

Mike recovered completely, but was badly scarred. He couldn’t remember cutting himself in any way, so we could never figure out why the spider had crawled on to him in the first place. Perhaps the spider had smelt sweat and skin, and when Mike didn’t move, it just did what comes
naturally. After that, we all made sure that the rooms were clear every day, and none of us could sleep properly for a while - we used to wrap ourselves in mosquito nets.

I know that this all sounds like some weird story, but I was there - I saw it happen.”

So there it is. Alfie repeated this story to me many times over the years, and the details never changed. Nothing was ever embellished, or ‘rewritten’, and I can only believe that the tale is - at least substantially - based on true events.

Yes, it sounds like a classic apocryphal ‘camel spider’ story, but it’s a story I heard from someone who claims to have actually witnessed the whole thing. So all I can say, is make up your own minds…..

RICHARD FREEMAN: The largest known camel spider is about 5 inches across, but there have been persistent rumours of much larger ones. Could they be for real? Or are they a persistent British Armed Forces version of an Urban Legend? Even ordinary sized camnel-spiders have a very powerful bite for their size, and can snip apart tarantualas and scorpions. One could deliver a nasty bite to your fingers if provoked. But could, and would, a camel spider feed on an unconscious human it thought was dead? I'm no entomologist, so make what you will of this odd story...

I have read alot of cryptozoological and weird creature accounts. I can usualy work out if a story is fabricated. This one has a ring of truth about it. Could Mike have injuered himself in his sleep? or did the creature realy start to feed on what it thought was dead flesh.

If there are any solifugid nuts out there, let us know what you think.

GUEST BLOGGER ALAN FRISWELL: THE FORGOTTEN TALE OF THE RED SEA SERPENT

Alan first came to my notice when he turned up at our stall at last November's Unconvention. He was clutching a box that had once held a plastic Christmas Tree. He thrust it at me, and said "Here's your mermaid".

I vaguely remembered Richard F having said that one of his mates had offered to make us a feegee mermaid, but I had forgotten all about it. Sad to say, so many people offer to do stuff for us, and then fail to deliver, that I had got into the habit of treating all such offers cum grano salis, but the advent of Alan shows that I should not be such a cynical old sod. Now he has become a guest blogger..

Yes, I had a genuine cryptozoological story all along, and I had forgotten all about it.

I have known Richard F. for years, and yet this tale had somehow languished in the storeroom of my mind for all that time, and inexplicably I had never thought to mention it to him. I have heard of the putative Fortean phenomena of selective memory-loss in witnesses when reporting anomalous experiences; as if various manifestations of the ‘paranormal’ - yeah, I hate that word too - book of the damned seek to retain anonymity by ‘blocking’ the cognizable impulse of the brain to report information, so producing a form of temporary ‘amnesia’. Well I don’t know about that, but I think that it’ is more likely to be down to sunspot activity in Dagenham, or indeed the potency of the local Stella Artois. That’s my usual excuse anyway.

It all began in the 1970’s when my sister’s boyfriend Alfie - soon to become my brother-in-law -used to come round for Sunday tea. We’d all be sitting there, eating whelks or whatever, listening to the top twenty on Radio One - this of course, was in those far-off golden days when the top twenty was actually worth listening to - and generally having a jolly time.

Alfie of course, knew that I was fascinated by Harryhausen, and monsters in general, and one particular Sunday teatime, he casually said: “I saw a sea-serpent once”. My jaw fell into my plate of Lea-on-Sea cockles, or whatever seafood extravaganza my dad had purchased from
the local shellfish stall, and I tried to keep calm - I was only a kid after all.

“You saw WHAT???!!!

“Yeah, I saw a sea-serpent once, it swam right past me. Scared the living crap out of me”.

“When, where, how”?

And so, with David Essex providing backing vocals on wonderful Radio One, Alfie proceeded to relate the story of his own glimpse into one of the stranger corners of our world.

In the late 1960’s, Alfie was working near Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. He was an electrician, and had been employed by an aircraft manufacturer to install navigation and radar systems into aeroplane cockpits. He and a bunch of fellow workers were living in a local hotel, and being young
blokes away from home, had participated in various ‘adventures’, some of which were funny, and some downright terrifying.

One chap who lived upstairs in the hotel would get drunk off his face on the fiendish local brew, and take pot shots at the door with his Colt 45 automatic if anyone knocked - Alfie was amazed at how easy it was to get hold of guns in Saudi Arabia - and Alfie and his mates would bet money on who would have the ‘bottle’ to go up and knock, and brave the chances of getting their head blown off.

Alfie was always an enthusiastic sea fisherman, and so the Red Sea, which was only minutes away, naturally held a special fascination for him. The Red Sea stretches between Africa and Asia, connecting to the ocean in the south through the Gulf of Arden and Bab el Mandeb. To the north, it ends in the Sinai Peninsula, the Gulf of Aqapa, and the Gulf of Suez, which leads out to the Suez canal. It is around 1900 KM in length, and over 300 KM at it’s broadest point. Considered by some to be the most abundantly rich sea on earth, the Red Sea boasts a kaleidoscopic parade of colour and spectacle, containing more than 1100 species of fish, including rays, lion-fish, barracuda, and 44 species of shark.

All this was a dream come true to such a passionate fisherman as Alfie, and so much of his free time was spent cruising the azure waves, waiting for supper to appear.

One blisteringly hot evening, he had persuaded some of his mates to join him on a night-fishing trip. The temperature was far too high for the customary messing-around in the hotel, so the prospect of a cool ocean breeze - and a few onboard beers - was especially appealing. They set out in a fifteen-foot (four metre) boat, with a small outboard motor, and took it out about a quarter of a mile from shore. The ocean was calm, almost flat, and a huge half-moon rose above the dimming twilight. They fished for about an hour, and by now the sky was completely dark, the moon providing the only illumination. They had caught some fish, and had gutted the catch, throwing the debris overboard. One of Alfie’s mates said that he had heard a splash behind the boat, and as they listened, they could hear something about twenty feet behind them. By throwing the fish guts overboard, they had been effectively setting-up a chum line, and Alfie wondered if a shark had taken an interest in their activities. As both tiger sharks and hammerheads are resident in the Red Sea, sailors in small boats have to exercise caution, and Alfie turned his torch on to the surface of the water. He could see a disturbance of splashes and small waves that was moving closer, and they all realised that whatever it was, it was considerably larger than any shark. They had no guns on board, their only potential weapons being the knives they had used to gut the fish.

There was suddenly a huge splash, and their boat was rocked by the displacement of water. They crouched down in the boat, and as they did, an enormous head and neck rose from the sea. Alfie said: “I’ve never been so terrified in my life. I was absolutely sh****g myself. We all just sat back in the boat, and hoped it wouldn’t notice us. It was like a dinosaur. The head was about two feet long, and looked just like a giant snake. It was covered in scales, and the eyes were obviously reptilian, not like a fish at all. It never opened it’s mouth, but you could see the jaws going all the way behind its eyes like a lizard.

The neck was at least ten feet out of the water, and although I had dropped the torch, the beam fell on the neck as it went by, and you could see the muscles standing out. This thing was built like a brick sh**house, and if it had decided to attack, we’d have been finished, but the thing just swam by, as if nothing was happening. It even gave us a look as it went past, as if to say: “What’s the matter with you lot”? As it looked at us, I could see the head straight-on. It was either a giant sea-snake, or something prehistoric. The funny thing was, was that you’d think that it would smell of dead fish, or something horrible, but there was a clean, kind of antiseptic smell that came from it. As it swam away, the head slowly submerged, and it disappeared. None of us saw if there was a body behind the neck like some sort of dinosaur, or if it had a snake-like body, but we got back to shore in about ten seconds flat, and that was the last time I ever went out on the water after dark, or even in the daytime on a small boat.”

Over the years, I have repeatedly asked Alfie about the incident, and his story has never changed. He believes that whatever sort of creature it was, it was attracted by the blood and fish guts that they had thrown overboard, and luckily, when it didn’t find anything recognisably edible, went quietly on it’s way. The Red Sea is home to many large creatures, such as the sea cow and the moray eel, which can achieve a size of three metres in length, but Alfie is an experienced sea fisherman, and I have to trust that he knows what he saw. Besides, sea cows don’t stick their heads out of the water by ten feet, and Alfie swears that the thing he saw would turn any moray eel - which he has caught in the past - into cat food.

As an interesting epilogue to this story. A few months after Alfie had first told me this tale, the late lamented Amicus Films, the company responsible for some of my favourite horror flicks such as Tales From The Crypt and The Vault Of Horror, released The Land That Time Forgot,
from the story by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The production was quite a low-budget affair, with puppet techniques being employed for the dinosaurs rather than stop-motion, and the primeval world of Caprona looking more like Hyde Park than a prehistoric wasteland at the ends of the earth.

But for all that, it wasn’t so bad, with some nice sculptures and model effects, and I’ll go a long way for a dinosaur movie - or so I‘ve been told.

So anyway, it was around Easter-time when the film was released, and we were all watching a film programme - Barry Norman, I think, when what should appear but a clip from The Land That Time Forgot. In the sequence, Doug McClure and some sailors are standing on the deck of a German submarine, when a giant plesiosaur rises from the depths and attacks the men, before being repelled - and killed - by machine-gun fire. As this came on, Alfie pointed at the plesiosaur and said: “That’ s it! That’s the bastard right there! That’s exactly what it looked like!”

Over to you cryptozoology bods, I think…..