I just remembered what probably was an event that created my hate of the 8 legged beasts. I probably had purposefully not remembered it as a protection device.
I was in high school and had left a party from a friend's house. We had partaken in an illicit substance that was a bit hallucinogenic. This made me more adventerous than usual. It was a nicely moonlit evening, and I decided to take a shortcut through some old stomping grounds. In between our houses was a large reservoir on a hill surrounded by a few acres of undeveloped land. What was once small tidy bushes set 10 in a row, was now almost a forest of huge evergreens 20 feet wide and 25 feet tall each. I decided to walk down a rocky path, through the rows of bushes. There was barely enough room to walk between them, in between the carping branches, and the going was a little steep.
So I went off at a trot and after the 2nd or third bush, I hit a huge spider web. I felt a LARGE spider crawling on me and I swatted it away. Also I became enveloped in a messy web with plenty of bug corpses in it.
Well, that freaked me out given my mental state and I took off down the hill, flying through 3 or 4 more large webs each laden with a big fat crawling spider and tons of web debris. It reminds me of that Indiana Jones scene now that I think back on it. All these crawling insects on me and large ones at that. I remember that we had large spiders in those hills. Us kids called them violin spiders (which is slang for brown recluse), but since they aren't endogenous to San Diego, they were probably wolf spiders instead. Each about the size of a silverdollar.
It gives me shivers now that I remember it. I was horrified and came out covered with webs and dead insects, and a damaged psyche.
That hillside in my youth had these fascinating trapdoor spiders. Big black things. If you searched the ground you could find craterlooking indentations. If you lightly tapped the indentation, a big black thing would jump out and scare the poop out of you!
Ok, enough of that obsession for now...