Whitley Strieber with between two and four giant spiders

This is another of those anecdotes Whitley Strieber has told more than once, in different books. (And another great title for a surrealist painting!) The earliest version is in Breakthrough (1995), and he revisits it 21 years later in The Super Natural (2016) and then again in The Afterlife Revolution (2017).

⁂

Breakthrough (1995)

The background of this episode is that Strieber has been meditating regularly at 11:00 p.m. every night in his guest room. (This is the Gurdjieff-inspired meditation Strieber describes in many of his books, which involves focusing one's attention on various parts of one's body in turn.) Recently, when he is doing this, he will hear seven loud thumps on the roof, followed by a sense of presence, and he has come to believe that he has acquired an invisible meditation partner, or perhaps seven such partners. As this episode opens, Strieber has just been up on the roof to confirm that the thumps he has been hearing are not the work possums, birds, or any other known cause.

I climbed down off the roof and went into the room. [. . .] A moment later there was a terrific lot of noise on the roof, like a crowd jostling for position. I sat down and an instant later felt something come bursting into my mind -- also physically, bursting into me . . . hard to describe . . . like being touched on the inside.

Pictures began to flash in front of my eyes, of everybody I'd ever known, even people I'd met only briefly. [. . .] I shortly began to realize that what I was seeing here were the wrongs I had done these people. [. . .] I was getting frantic, but I couldn't make it stop. On we went, reviewing my life.

We came to a certain face -- one that I really hadn't wanted to see. With this person, I had done wrong.

"With this person" -- not "to." In other words, this person was not (or not only) a victim but an accomplice. To me, this can only mean that the wrong was sexual in nature. If you think about it, it almost goes without saying that a concerted effort would have been made to corrupt someone like Strieber, and that sex would be a natural avenue of attack.

The roof erupted in thuds, like they were stomping with rage. Then they came roaring down around me right through the beams, a crowd of racing shadows, shabby and stinking of sweat. I could see that they looked human, but they were crouching, they backed into corners, they acted like I was the wild wolf. [. . .] Then the visitors all trooped down the stairs, some of them jumping up and down on the runners, others leaping off the landing and dropping with soft thuds.

In one of the bits I have snipped out above, Strieber compares the people who are forcing this sin parade on him to wolves, then later decides they are actually more like angels. Despite Strieber's calling them "visitors" here -- his usual word for the apparent aliens with which his name is most closely associated -- these people were apparently more-or-less human.

Later Strieber, his wife Anne, and their two cats go to bed.

About two hours later I woke up to familiar, machinelike jabs to my shoulder. Once I probably would have leaped out of bed, but no more. This had happened too often, and too often there was nothing there. So I wasn't really expecting to see anybody when I opened my eyes.

I was absolutely stunned.

They were right there, and they were glaring at me. I reacted like I might have to a coiled snake, to see human faces staring at me from a position about three feet above the bed. There was light around them, and I could see that they were all men, small, wearing gray tunics except for one, whose tunic was white. [. . .] Behind them, where the raftered ceiling should have been, there was a black, starless maw. Something about that darkness really frightened me. [. . .] All I knew was that it was oppressive and lonely and big, and where was my familiar ceiling? Reality seemed plastic indeed.

The faces of these people were terrible to see. Their eyes were normally shaped but as dark as lampblack, and their stares were amazingly ferocious. [. . .] It lasted for a moment, then another. [. . .] They left abruptly, rushing away in a crowd.

"Human faces" with "normally shaped" eyes -- not grays. A bed is normally about two feet high, so "three feet above the bed" would make these people about five feet tall -- a bit short, but well within the normal human range.

After this second visitation, Strieber goes back to sleep. He is later awoken again, by sounds he at first thinks are from the cats.

When I opened my eyes, I saw dark shapes against the beams of the ceiling, which seemed to be back to normal. I thought, now what? I turned on my bedside lamp and proceeded to receive the single worst shock of a life that has sustained some fairly severe shocks.

Hanging from the ceiling were four tremendous spiders. Their bodies were gleaming black and striped in irregular bright yellow. Structurally, they were hourglass spiders. The only problem was that they were easily a foot long and their legs spanned perhaps two feet. [. . .]

The term "hourglass spider" typically refers to Cyclocosmia, a genus of extremely strange-looking trapdoor spiders which can't possible be what Strieber has in mind here. Could he be referring to the black widow, with its distinctive hourglass marking? But the name "black widow" is so very familiar that to call that species by any other name seems odd. Perhaps he simply means that the spiders had an hourglass-like shape, with a narrow waist between the cephalothorax and the abdomen? The coloration he describes suggests Argiope (pictured above), but there is nothing hourglass-like about that genus.

The largest known spider species has a leg span of one foot, so Strieber is describing something as extraordinary as a 14-foot-tall man.

The next thing I knew I was out of that bed and on my way as far as I could go barefoot in pajamas. But Anne was still back there and Anne was sound asleep.

I was afraid that they things were going to fall on us. On her. [. . .] Above her, the spiders were working, weaving what I would describe as curved hutches made of silk.

They were, in short, settling in.

"Honey," I whispered. "I think --"

What did I think?

I thought I was being punished is what I thought. Contrition? I begged them to forgive me. I would have howled contrition but I was afraid I'd upset the spiders.

Then they were gone, just like that. I grabbed Anne, I started kissing her, and then I noticed that the cats were still panicked. What was I -- stupid? I'd seen things disappear before. What if they weren't gone?

As far as I know, they're still waiting . . . for the day I die. [. . .]

It's not clear if we are to understand that the spiders disappeared because he begged them to forgive him, or if they just vanished for no apparent reason.

I spent the rest of the night reading the Bible and trying to figure out how one might truly repair a sin. Dawn came, clear and pure, and Anne got up and we had breakfast. I didn't tell her what had happened. [. . .]

I finally said to Anne, "I've seen demons."

She responded, "Here?"

"A nightmare. Mother of all nightmares."

As we shall see below, later tellings of this story don't exactly have Strieber spending the rest of the night reading the Bible!

⁂

The Super Natural (2016)

My relationship with my meditation partners continued to develop. [. . .] So I asked the question: What do I need to do to avoid the wheel of life. I want to ascend.

There is no indication in Breakthrough that he had posed this question to his meditation partners.

The answer was the most powerful moral lesson I have ever received. It began one night with a startling review of my life—the sort of thing that is supposed to happen at the moment of death, I suppose. Image after image from my life appeared before my eyes. I saw a good, honest life, flawed but pretty blameless. But then something appeared that was of interest. I was in a hotel room in Beverly Hills with a beautiful young woman. I wanted to make love to her, but I was hesitating, forcing myself not to, respecting my vow of marriage and my love for Anne.

Still, every detail of the meetings I’d had with this woman came rushing past.

I was left on that night devastated and, quite frankly, confused. I hadn’t violated my vow. I’d been tempted, yes, but no violation.

When I got up to go to bed, I discovered that it was already three. I’d been meditating for four hours. Exhausted, I collapsed into the bed and threw my arms around my beloved wife. Silently, I cried tears of gratitude that I had not broken my vow.

Anne Strieber died in 2015; presumably after her death Strieber felt more free to speak openly about such extramarital temptations than he had when he wrote Breakthrough. Is he really being more honest here, though? As he tells it in The Super Natural, Strieber was tempted but did not yield; so blameless was he that he felt "confused" as to why they were bringing the whole thing up, as he hadn't done anything wrong. In Breakthrough, on the other hand, he says "With this person I had done wrong" -- and the context strongly suggests that he felt more guilty about what had transpired with this person than about anything else he had done in his life.

The Catholic Strieber has written books called Communion and Confirmation, but never Confession. It is hardly reasonable to expect complete candor regarding something of this nature, and I don't want to make too much of an effort to guess what particular sins he may or may not have committed. Nevertheless, I think we must conclude that something happened between him and this woman. He was in a hotel room with her, and he refers in the plural to "meetings I'd had with this woman"; in Breakthrough, he felt great guilt immediately, with none of the confusion he professes in The Super Natural. Perhaps his claim of "no violation" is a simple untruth; more likely, it's some sort of Bill Clinton "define sexual relations" kind of thing. Or, just possibly, he really is so innocent that just wanting to betray his wife is about the worst thing he's ever done.

There is no reference in this version of the story to the people on the roof thumping about in rage, dropping down through the ceiling, and running downstairs.

Later, I woke up. The ceiling was gone, the roof was gone. Overhead was a blackness that I knew at once was the appalling face of infinity. Endless dark. Arrayed around the borders of this opening were seven faces peering down at me. Gentle faces. Angry faces.

Then it ended. I was fully awake. I lay there thinking about it for a time, wondering where it lay on the spectrum of reality. A dream? I thought not. But what, then?

In this version, it sounds as if the faces are up at the level of the roof or ceiling, not three feet above the bed. There is also no reference to their "rushing away in a crowd"; instead, he simply says, "Then it ended."

I went close to Anne and kissed her cheek. She cuddled against me, delighted.

I had almost betrayed her, but I had not done so. I had wanted to, though, so very badly. And it wasn’t like the incident with the gray being. That I could not control. This, I could.

Strieber alludes to a non-consensual sexual encounter with a gray alien, narrated explicitly for the first time in The Super Natural. When he says, "That I could not control. This I could," it implies that he did succumb to temptation in some way, that there was a failure of self-control.

Some time later I woke up and there, hanging over our bed, were the two most terrible creatures I had ever seen. They were spiders, each at least three feet from stem to stern. They had gleaming black abdomens that were crossed by yellow stripes like tigers. Worse, they were not stable on the ceiling, especially the one over Anne.

My impulse was to roll off that bed and run for my life. Then I thought, “Wake up, you fool, this is the mother and the father of the nightmares.”

There were four spiders in the Breakthrough version, now reduced to two -- but what they have lost in numbers they have made up in size. The Breakthrough spiders were a foot long, with a two-foot leg span; in The Super Natural, they are "three feet from stem to stern." It is unclear how this nautical term is to be understood in terms of spider anatomy, but it would be a strange way of referring to leg span, so I assume it means anteroposterior length. Either way, these spiders show a distinctly fish-like tendency to grow with each telling.

In Breakthrough, he had called the vision of the spiders the "mother of all nightmares," using a familiar idiom to indicate the most nightmarish nightmare imaginable. In this retelling, this has morphed into the bizarre not-quite-English "the mother and the father of the nightmares." Is this because there are two spiders now -- one the mother of nightmares, the other the father?

Fully awake now, I leaped out of the bed. Surely they would evaporate, will-o’-the-wisps of dream.

But no. I stood there at the foot of the bed staring at them. I was awake and they were as real as ever. I could even hear the slick clatter of their busy, complicated jaws.

Anne lay perhaps three feet beneath one of them, sound asleep. Some of its legs had come off the wooden planks of the ceiling and were scrabbling for purchase. The sound filled the room.

It looked as if it would fall on Anne, right now.

My dear God, how I wanted to run. But if I did that, then what would happen? She had said early on, “You won’t let anything happen to me, will you?” I told her that I would protect her. But how did I know that? Now, it seemed as if I was lying.

Another leg came loose and began jittering wildly. The abdomen was now tilted. I could see a stinger in it the size of a small knife. My body screamed at me to run, but I could not run, my love would not let me. On legs of lead, transfixed by terror, I approached the bed. The pulsating demon was inches from my face. I could not dare touch it, try to push it away. God only knew what would happen if it and its brother started running around the room. What was their venom like? Where were they from? Certainly not this world.

Leaping out of bed is a new touch, not mentioned in the Breakthrough version. There is no mention this time of the spiders' building "hutches" of silk; instead, he elaborates on the fear, mentioned in Breakthrough, that they would fall on Anne.

Spiders of course do not have abdominal stingers, but biology has never been Strieber's strong suit. At any rate, these are not ordinary spiders but spidery-looking demons -- like Shelob in The Lord of the Rings, who also had a stinger.

I did the only thing I could to protect my wife, which was to lie down on top of her so that my body was between her and the spider.

She opened sleepy arms, welcoming her husband to her in the night, opening herself body and heart to the man she loved.

I lay there, waiting for the spider to drop down on me. She lay there waiting for the act of love to commence.

In that instant, there was a feeling like weight lifted. My body felt free, my soul like the soul of a child. Like that, the spiders had gone. The night—the beautiful, earthly night, filled with sensual promise—had returned.

I wept and her comforting arms came around me. Joy filled me. We rode the small hours together in the boat of our love, crossing to morning.

In Breakthrough, the spiders vanished after he begged them for forgiveness. In The Super Natural, they disappear after he demonstrates his commitment to Anne by putting himself between her and the perceived danger. Breakthrough, written while Anne was alive, is understandably less forthcoming about their marital intimacies, falling back on the tried-and-true euphemistic "kiss" -- but even taking that into account, some discrepancy remains. In The Super Natural, the couple apparently spent the whole rest of the night together, "crossing to morning" -- raising the question of when Strieber managed to squeeze in the Bible study mentioned in Breakthrough.

⁂

The Afterlife Revolution (2017)

There were in my life two instances in which I was shown something relating to an underworld. The first occurred after one of the meditations with the people from between lives. They used to page through my mind, causing me to relive past events in startling and uncanny detail. One night, paging through my memories, they came across a moment during which I had been tempted to cheat on Anne.

Where the earlier two accounts have a single "life review" experience, this one has Strieber's meditation partners habitually dredging up a memory or two each night over an extended period of time. 

They hesitated. Lingered. I writhed in discomfort.

After the meditation ended, I went as usual to bed.

I hadn’t cheated. I’d only been tempted. So all was well— wasn’t it? [. . .]

Had he done wrong, or not? Did he feel guilty, or not? Despite his assumption that "all was well," he "writhed in discomfort." A temptation successfully resisted seems cause for pride rather than shame -- unless it was resisted only imperfectly.

A few hours later, I woke up to see something so horrific that for a moment I simply did not understand what I was looking at. But then the two presences hanging from the ceiling above our bed became clear. But they were impossible. Nothing like that exists.

Except that they did.

I was looking up at two bulging black spiders, each easily two or three feet long. Their gleaming abdomens were ringed with yellow tiger stripes. I could see the pointed stingers at the base of their tails. Worse, they were scrabbling against the ceiling, struggling not to fall on us.

Dear god in heaven, it had to be a nightmare. I rolled out of bed, my initial impulse to run. But then I looked back and saw Anne lying there peacefully asleep. A few feet above her, the most unstable of the two looked ready to fall.

Now that I was on my feet, their appearance seemed entirely physical. I could even hear the rhythmic scraping of their claws as they struggled to find purchase against the ceiling.

This is pretty close to the description in The Super Natural -- two spiders, with stingers, much larger than the ones described in Breakthrough. (Whether they are larger or smaller than the ones described in The Super Natural depends on how we interpret "stem to stern" in that book.)

The rest of the anecdote is the same as in The Super Natural -- he lies on top of Anne, spends the rest of the night not reading the Bible, etc. -- so there is no need to quote it.

Recall, though, that Strieber began my speaking of "two instances in which I was shown something relating to an underworld." The second (or, rather, first) of these turns out to have to do with the young woman with whom he may or may not have done something terribly wrong in Beverly Hills.

A few years before, there had been not a test but a warning, and I will never forget it in all of my days and beyond my days.

In the years after Communion was published, Anne organized many groups to come up to our cabin. Often enough, as I have reported in previous books, they met the visitors.

Once, we had a group up which included a young woman who took a shine to me. She was attractive and I was tempted. I did nothing, however. Later, in Los Angeles, we once again encountered her and I was again tempted. Once again, I did nothing.

We spent that night in the Beverly Hills Hotel, and no sooner had I fallen asleep than I found myself being dragged downward through solid rock. I was in some sort of cage and I couldn’t get out. This was more lucid than any lucid dream I could imagine. It felt real. As I shot downward, I realized that I was inside the legs of a gigantic spider. Nothing I did would release me. Those legs were like iron.

Finally, I managed to get out. I found myself back in my body, hammering my arm against the bedside table. The lamp was smashed, Anne was screaming —and I was shaking with terror.

I connected what had happened to the temptation the young woman had offered me, and resolved never, ever to even entertain such a notion again.

Two questions immediately suggest themselves: (1) What on earth does it mean to be "inside the legs" of a gigantic spider? and (2) Wasn't there a crappy Will Smith movie about that? My best guess -- and it is only that -- is that he means that a spider had wrapped its legs around him, so that he was "in" its legs in the same sense that you might hold someone "in" your arms. (Inside, though? "If ever you're inside my arms again..."?) If the legs were hollow and he was literally inside them -- well, he could only be inside one leg at a time, right? Nor am I at all sure how to square any reading of "inside the legs" with being dragged downward through solid rock. Anyway, the key point here is simply that something scary and spidery occurred right after he resisted (or didn't) this temptation, and that he took it as a warning.

If Strieber's encounter with this woman (let's call her Beverly) had indeed been followed by a very memorable nightmare about a giant spider, then he must surely have made the connection when, a few years later, he relived the encounter with Beverly and was again menaced by giant spiders. It's strange that he never mentioned this earlier giant-spider nightmare until The Afterlife Revolution. 

⁂

To me, the evolution of this spider story is evidence that Strieber is mostly honest, tolerably sincere, and completely unreliable. No deliberate liar -- particularly not one who happens to be a professional writer of narrative fiction! -- would have made the basic continuity errors we see here. If Strieber were lying, he would have kept his story straight. Before revisiting the spiders in his recent books, he would have looked back at the earlier account in Breakthrough, refreshed his memory, and made sure his newer version were consistent with it -- four foot-long spiders, faces three feet above the bed, reading the Bible, etc. But he obviously didn't check the Breakthrough version, because -- well, why should he? It was an experience from his own life, he remembered it clearly, so why would he need to look it up in a book?

In short, Strieber appears to be prone to what psychologists call confabulation.

⁂

Update: Strieber's novel 2012: The War for Souls includes a monster reminiscent of the giant spiders in his non-fiction. (The main character -- a horror novelist named Wiley who wrote a best-selling non-fiction book about his close encounters with aliens, complete with a "rectal probe" -- is a ridiculously transparent stand-in for Strieber himself.)

He fell against what felt like iron bars. Where he touched them, they became visible, and he saw that they were not bars, but the legs of what the kids called an outrider. And now the slashing sound was overhead. He was under the damn thing!

Cf. The Afterlife Revolution, "Those legs were like iron." 

He rolled. The slashing came down toward him. He lashed out at it, kicking furiously toward the sound. Where his foot struck, he saw a section of the creature-a gleaming abdomen striped yellow, then a complicated eye, then a hooked claw on the joint of a leg.

All three non-fiction accounts of the spider mention yellow stripes on the abdomen. Note that real spiders do not have "complicated" (compound) eyes.

Screaming now, he rolled.

There was a pneumatic, liquid hissing and boiling yellow sludge sprayed the ground around him. A stinger the size of his arm slashed his jacket and was gone.

But it was coming back, he could hear the mechanical slashing of the jaws, but more he could feel the thing probing with its legs, and he knew that the next time it attacked, that stinger would impale him.

As in The Super Natural and The Afterlife Revolution, the spiders have stingers like hymenopteran insects.

A roar, huge, echoing off into the woods.

Silence.

Nothing there. Nothing at all.

Just as in the non-fiction accounts, the spider suddenly disappears.

⁂

Update 2: It's October 2020, and I've just finished reading for the first time Strieber's non-fiction book Solving the Communion Enigma (published in 2011, when Anne was still alive). It features yet another retelling of the giant spider story.

Then I realized that something was happening, something quite new. My mind was sort of moving. I was seeing pictures from my own past. It wasn't as dramatic as I imagine the life review at  the time of death might be, but these images kept appearing, one after the other.

It was exactly as if I was looking at an illustrated book of my memories. But it wasn't me doing this. Somebody else seemed to be turning the pages of my memory.

At first the imagery was trivial. [. . .]  Then it became more complex, with images from related experiences superimposing themselves on one another. Looking back, I cannot even begin to describe them all. There were hundreds, thousands. [. . .] How lovely it was. How delicious my life had been, how beautiful -- and how much of it I had let pass by!

He gives several examples of these memories, none of them unpleasant. In the Breakthrough version, he was reliving all the wrongs he had ever done to other people, and he "couldn't make it stop," but in Solving the Communion Enigma, the review of memories seems to be positively delightful until they reach one specific memory.

And the, suddenly, I was focused on something very specific. It was the face of a woman. I knew it well. It was a woman I had wanted. Badly. And she had wanted me. We'd come close to connecting in a way that would have violated my marriage vow. I had really sweated over this. I had wanted her so badly. But I had not quite let myself slip into a love affair. Not quite.

But what was it that had stopped me, my loyalty to my vow or my love of my wife? A man might love his wife, but a temptation like this can be very powerful, and it certainly had been for me.

Then the memories ended. I slumped to the floor, devastated. I was pouring with sweat. Shocked and confused and telling myself, You weren't disloyal. You resisted the temptation.

I did not want to face what I had not resisted, which was the desire. I had been the instigator. My challenge to my vow and to the selfless love my wife has given me since the day we met was my doing. I had not been seduced, and that was very hard to face.

This sheds light on why Strieber felt extremely guilty about what had happened with this woman while at the same time insisting that he had resisted temptation. Shocked, wanting to forget the whole thing, but also remembering his desire for this other woman, Strieber goes to bed f"eeling bitter and confused and unsure of my loyalties," falls into a fitful sleep, and late wakes abruptly.

What I was looking at were two enormous spiders hanging on the ceiling. And I don't mean, for example, the size of tarantulas. These things were tremendous. Their abdomens were at least three feet long, gleaming black and banded by yellow tiger stripes. And what was worse, while the one over my side of the bed seemed stable, the one hanging over Anne was struggling and looked as if it was about to fall on her.

Instinct caused me to leap out of the bed, and as I did so, I though that this was one hell of a nightmare.

I stood there just absolutely agog because the things had not disappeared when I woke up. They still looked completely real. [. . .]

The one handing over Anne was trembling now. [. . .]

Strieber's instinct is to run, but he realizes that he must protect his wife, giving his life for her if need be.

As quietly as I could, I moved around the bed. I slid in beside her. She sighed and smiled, welcoming her husband. I slipped over her and held her to me, and lay like that, afraid to move. The core of my heart seemed to open, and I remembered why I loved this woman [. . .]

I was left like that. At some point, the spiders of nightmare had gone.

There is no mention of how he spent the rest of the night, whether reading the Bible as in Breakthrough or in some other way.