Talk about a terrifying situation. An Arkansas woman has been sharing her home with venomous spiders for years now. She regularly finds brown recluse spiders across her house.
She's taken to documenting her life on social media, freaking out fans along the way.
"I think a lot of people see me still posting about the spiders two years later and think that I am up all night worried that we are going to get bitten," Sunni Son told People. "It's actually the opposite! I've never felt more calm in this journey."
In 2024, they began noticing the spiders after a tornado tore through trees on their property and damaged their roof. That's when she saw the first brown recluse.
"It's likely they were already in the home before the tornado — this is Arkansas after all — and they were displaced and disturbed, and got bold and visible in search of food," Son explains. Realizing the spiders are poisonous, se began trying to keep the infestation under control. "Recluses have shown up in every corner of our home and it's never been concentrated. There isn't a place seemingly off limits to them," Son said.
Venomous Spiders
However, the spiders don't qualify as a major infestation despite being scary.
"In our case, we may find five to six [spiders] in a single trap over a few months, and I imagine the average person would think it's time to burn the house down and start over...but we're technically not infested," she said.
The family contacted multiple spider control companies.
"Multiple pest control companies and professionals have told us that they are virtually impossible to completely eliminate," she explained. "I am a very stubborn person and did not want to believe that, so that's why I started doing everything I could to help with the situation."
Last year, sadly, Son found out how terrible one of their bites can be when a brown recluse bit her on the back.
"I wasn't aware then that their initial bites don't often hurt, so I didn't feel it bite me and figured I was in the clear," Son admits. "It was about two hours later that I started feeling severe pain. It was in the middle of my back, almost on my spine."
"The second and third days were the worst pain-wise as I had body sweats and severe joint pain," she explains. "I broke out in a full-body rash, and all my joints were swollen. My experience may sound mild or well-managed, but I have never felt as bad as I did those three days. I couldn't get out of bed for 48 hours. I cannot begin to imagine if my bite had gone necrotic."
Still, she's intent on living in the home.
