KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Northland couple is fearful about staying in their apartment because they say it's infested with brown recluse spiders.
Madelynne Garrett has lived in the Northland Passage apartments since January and noticed this problem just in the past three weeks.
"It wasn’t until a younger one was right by my foot in the bathroom and I like zoomed in with my phone and could see and make out that fiddle [a marking on the spider]," Garrett said. "Ever since I saw that one, I’ve looked at every single one we’ve seen and they’ve all been brown recluses so far, so that’s been terrifying."
A quick tour of Garrett's apartment revealed the spiders: One was crawling on her ceiling and dozens of others were dead on sticky pads placed throughout her apartment.
"We’ve seen about 32 in 3 weeks and that’s not mentioning what might also be in our storage unit closet outside," Garrett said.
According to SOS Pest Control, these spiders are tamer than the public perception.
"They’re not an aggressive spider. They do not want to bite if you put one in your hand and poked it, it would go the other way," Darryl Franke, president of SOS Pest Control, said.
However if you are bit, it can leave more than a mark.
"Some people don’t even respond to the bite and then other people like the employee we had lost a large chunk of flesh and muscle on the top of his foot," Franke said.
The wetter weather likely caused an increase of the brown recluse spider, especially in areas where there's vegetation.
"It’s a good year for spiders and so you will see an uptick in population because there’s more food," Franke said.
Garrett said she did reach out to management several times, but said she couldn't break her lease which ends in February and the company offered that she can move to another apartment but couldn't guarantee whether or not there would be spiders in there.
An exterminator did come into her apartment but Garrett said it wasn't specific to brown recluse spiders.
Garrett said they'll pay the 60 day notice fee but the company didn't accept that offer.
Northland Passage did not want to comment on this story. Its parent company, The Hayman Company, did not respond to our request.
