Appetite For Spiders

Appetite for spiders: Fact? Social Experiment? Origin? You may have heard or read someone say that you swallow eight spiders in your sleep. Did you believe them when you heard this? Did it freak you out? You may find comfort in the fact that this is not true. Let’s go into the mind of a spider for one second. Imagine you’re a small spider crawling inside a house, and you see a large creature. It is moving around a bit, you hear it snore, it’s chest is rising up and down from it’s breath. That’s terrifying to a spider! Spiders can sense the vibrations from all these movements and it warms them of danger. The exhale of air and the large teeth make a mouth not a great place to hide. So why would a spider climb into one? How easy would it be to accidentally swallow it? (Annie Sneed). So where did this myth Originate? Popular myth debunking website, Snopes, says it was a made up fact by Lisa Holst in an article in the magazine PC Professional in 1993 to prove how gullible people are on the internet (Snopes). Is this true however?
I originally decided an easy start to researching the spider myth would be by looking at the sources Snopes used. I ran into a problem however, I couldn’t find these sources. Instead, I found forums and websites about how these were false sources. The magazine that Snopes cited as having the made up fact doesn’t seem to exist (Mclovin). In fact, Lisa Holst doesn’t seem to have written any article about spiders. The other sources from Snopes don’t seem to give any other information as a source of the myth. Does this mean Snopes made it up? No, In fact, the earliest websites I found asking about the myth suggest it began around the year 2000. (Cecil Adams). So what does this mean? Why would Snopes give false information? Can Snopes be Trusted? My research changed directions here and turned into a hunt on why Snopes gave false information