Incy Wincy mortgage

[MajGenl.Meade]

Family flees dream home to escape poisonous spiders 'bleeding out of the walls'

Oct 10th 2014 1:26PM By RYAN GORMAN

A Missouri family was forced to flee their home when it was infested with thousands of brown recluse spiders.

Brian and Susan Trost bought the $450,000 home in 2007 and soon discovered they had as many as 6,000 poisonous housemates. Several years of exterminators failed to kill the pests off, so they left.

"It was shortly after we moved in they (the spiders) started bleeding out of the walls," Brian Trost told KMOV.

The creepy crawlers were all over the house, but appeared to be most concentrated in an atrium area leading to the basement of their dream home, the family told the station.

Susan Trost remembered one incident where her four-year-old son yelled "spider! Spider!" after seeing one of the poisonous beasts on a couch.

"Once we realized that they were brown recluse spiders, obviously, the horrifying reality set in for us," Brian Trost added.

The Trosts called in an expert who told them there were anywhere between 4,500 and 6,000 of the spiders crawling around their 2,400-square-foot country club home, they told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Susan Trost claimed to the paper she dodged one as it fell from the ceiling while she was in the shower and also saw their exoskeletons falling from light fixtures.

An exterminator ripped out their insulation and appeared to have made a dent in the problem, but was not able to eradicate the resilient arachnids.

"After the attic treatment, it seemed to help for quite a while, although we were still capturing them," she told the Post-Dispatch. "It just was a decline; they weren't gone."

The family left the home and allowed it to go into foreclosure. A subsequent lawsuit against the previous owners netted them a $472,000 judgement, but they have yet to collect.

The home now sits abandoned, covered in tarps.

[Jarlaxle]

Wouldn't the obvious fix be to "tent" the house...and just gas the spiders?

[rubato]

I'd buy it on spec. Fumigate, repair, and resell.

Drill some holes in the wallboard and ceiling so the gas would penetrate and maybe give it a double dose. Patch it up and sell that rascal.

yrs,
rubato

[wesw]

you d definitely want the double dose after the eggs hatched.

I wouldn t want to live there after that much pesticide was used.

[Long Run]

An updated story has the bank tenting the house and fumigating it for 2-3 days.

The owners who abandoned the house are probably out of luck on collecting from the sellers as the sellers went into bankruptcy (and probably don't have much in the way of assets even if the sale could be found fraudulent to survive bankruptcy). Apparently, home ruination caused by spiders is not covered in the homeowner's policy.

[Big RR]

I would think usually insect and other infestations (mice, rats, bats) are excluded from coverage under most homeowner policies, so I'd bet spiders would be as well, but it would depend on how it is written; if it said animal infestations, the spider infestation would probably be excluded; but if it said insect and rodent infestations one could argue that spiders are not included in the exceptions (as they are not insects nor rodents).

[MajGenl.Meade]

Vermin is the catch-all word for the exclusion. Almost anything smaller than a spaniel can be "vermin" - it saves listing crabs, lobsters, newts, etc.

Infestations are not a covered disaster under homeowners insurance, and the responsibility for cleanup falls under normal house maintenance. For example, a Farmer’s Insurance Group homeowners insurance policy’s exclusion reads like most, listing the following animals and insects in the exclusion — “bats, rats, mice and other rodents, bees, termites and moths, vermin, birds, fish, reptiles, insects and spiders.” Whether you have bed bugs or rats, getting rid of them is your problem and your problem alone.

[Guinevere]

As always, its not "insurance" but a payment made to the premium collection companies.

[MajGenl.Meade]

As always, its not "insurance" but a payment made to the premium collection companies.

Well you can tell that to our (past) various clients who've experienced total home destruction in fires and a tornado and had their homes replaced. They might not quite agree.

The one who went on vacation and left a window open and returned to find squirrels who'd trashed his house might agree though. Of course, if they'd chewed thru a wire and caused a fire, he'd have been OK.

[oldr_n_wsr]

My cousin got bit by a recluse spider. Nasty bite. Long time to heal.