I found a huge, hairy tarantula in my jeans after vacationing in Mexico
This guy was really buggin’ out — and rightfully so!
A wave of dreadful shock surged through a man’s body as he unpacked his suitcase following a Mexico vacation to find a nearly 5-inch-long, furry tarantula in his jeans.
“I let out a yelp!” confessed James Mugridge, 31, from England, to South West News Service. “It really was the last thing I was expecting.”
Mugridge — a business consultant who had caught a flight to Cancun with his girlfriend Emma Forrester, 27, for a two-week holiday on April 15 — had just returned to the UK when he made the creepy-crawly discovery.
While emptying his luggage, an unsuspecting Mugridge went bug-eyed when he saw the legs of the hulking spider, which is believed to have been a Mexican red-rump tarantula, peeking out of his denim pants.
But after peeling back the fold of the jeans with a pair of chopsticks, he realized that the eight-legged invader — known scientifically as the Tliltocatl vagans — had died in transit.
“I think it was in [the jeans] for a couple days at least,” said Mugridge.
During his Mexican excursion, he and Forrester took the two-hour drive from Cancun to Tulum, where they stayed at a number of jungle-style hotels.
While vacationing in the wild, the couple encountered several Mexican red rumps; however, they had no intention of taking one back home with them as a souvenir.
The twosome was utterly clueless to the fact that the critter had stowed away in Mugridge’s baggage.
“We’re lucky because the bag was supposed to come in the [airplane] cabin,” he said. “But there was not enough space, so they put it in the [cargo] hold.”
“Subsequently, the tarantula froze to death,” Mugridge added, “but in the cabin, I fear it would have been alive and kicking.”
Following the skin-crawling incident, Mugridge learned that the Mexican red rump’s bite is mostly harmless to humans.
“The sting on it is said to be worse than a bee sting, but it’s not fatal,” he conceded.
His revelation about his hairy hitchhiker’s fangs aside, Mugridge remembers the initial bolt of panic that struck him upon encountering the Mexican arachnid.
“I was absolutely terrified when I saw the little thing had made its way into my jeans,” he said.
