Rolling Meadows woman says black widow hitched a ride on grapes

Halloween may have passed a little more than two weeks ago, but Shelly Cline says she got the scare of a lifetime Monday night.

The Rolling Meadows native said it was late night in her kitchen when she opened a bag of grapes she purchased and had stored in her refrigerator earlier in the day.

As she started washing the fruit, she said she was horrified to see a large black spider crawl out from inside the grapes and quickly walk really close to her finger.

“It was really scary,” she said Thursday while retelling the story over the phone. “My first thought was the grapes came from California and they have some really bad spiders over there.”

She learned later that a female Black Widow has venom considered 15 times stronger than a rattlesnake. One bite from a Black Widow can cause severe abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and in rare cases, death.

She said she jumped back and tried to turn the water on the spider to wash it down the drain. However, the water did nothing but “irritate it.”

“So I reached under the sink and poured bleach all over it and the grapes,” she said. “That seemed to kill it, so I put it in a plastic container and tightened down the lid.”

After putting it in the container, she noticed the telltale red hourglass on the spider's abdomen that indicates it was a Black Widow.

Of course, she said, then the spider woke up.

“It was in the plastic thing so I wasn't worried after it started crawling around again,” she said laughing. “It finally died overnight.”

She said she took the dead spider Tuesday to Mariano's Fresh Market in Arlington Heights where they refunded her money, gave her new grapes and a gift card for her trouble.

Vivian King, spokeswoman for Roundy's Supermarkets Inc., said the store took Cline at her word, and said it's the first time anything like this has happened.

“Our grapes are grown in the field and there's a possibility something could get in (them),” King said. “We wash the grapes when they come in and encourage our customers to wash them.”

Cline said she read on the Internet that this type of thing is happening more frequently because fewer pesticides are being used in the field.

“I couldn't sleep at all that night,” she said. “I mean, what happened if it got out of the bag of grapes? It could have been crawling around my minivan or in my house or something. It's so gross.”