Plan B Forum

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.

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