“Come on mate, what have you done to her?”
Police were questioning a “flushed” and “out of breath” man who had answered the door to a flat in Wollstonecraft, a small harborside suburb of Sydney, Australia.
The booming sounds of a man shouting “I’m going to kill you” and a “woman screaming hysterically” had earlier echoed through the apartment block, sometime before 2.00am, Saturday November 21. The commotion disturbed neighbors, who were quick to alert the local police force.
“Where’s your wife?” asked one of the policemen.
“I don’t have one,” the homeowner responded, after inhaling some air.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” the officer continued.
“I don’t have one,” he said.
Unsatisfied, the same policeman pressed: “We had a report of a domestic and a women screaming, where is she?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I live alone,” the man protested.
The officers then told the man that neighbors had heard death threats, screams and the crash of furniture being flung around the apartment.
“It was a spider,” the man tentatively explained.
“A really big one.”
Incredulous, the policeman asked: “What about the women screaming?”
“Yeah sorry that was me,” he said. “I really, really hate spiders.”
It appeared to police that the man was in fact alone in the apartment, and was responsible for both the “womanly” screams and the threats to kill. They were not aimed at a woman, but an eight-legged arachnid.
The police investigated the man’s claims, further searching the trashed apartment; all they came up with was a “rather large” spider.
After deliberating, police concluded that the disturbance was indeed caused by an arachnophobic man wildly chasing a spider around his home, while desperately clutching a can of Mortein insect spray.
After an awkward pause broken by relieved laughter, the police left.
The morning after, the local force posted a transcript of the bizarre conversation to their Facebook Page.