Yeah I don't trust Mikkelson's writing very much because of this Snopes article: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-

Yeah I don't trust Mikkelson's writing very much because of this Snopes article: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/ (mentioned in the article). It's not in the special section of their site marking it as satire or anything but it cites a nonexistent source ("Lisa Birgit Holst", anagram for "this is a big troll"). The weird thing is that … as far as I could tell the real origin of the "people eat eight spiders a year" thing was a 1992 campus humor column ( some notes at https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/80j3px/til_a_writer_by_the_name_of_lisa_holst_created_an/duwnw21/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/80j3px/til_a... ). That would have been a perfectly fine story to write and I'm not sure why he just made something up instead, except as some kind of quiet prank.