MAG 16: Arachnophobia

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Statement of Carlos Vittery regarding his Arachnophobia and its manifestations.

## Statement

Carlos Vittery doesn't like spiders. In the autumn of 1991 when he was 6, he went for a walk at his grandparents' place in the New Forest and accidentally crushed a spider, bursting its egg sack, spilling forth thousands of tiny half-formed spiders onto him.

In 2014 he left his place of residence when he realised just how many spiders were likely to be living in his back garden. So he moved into a 2nd floor flat in Archway, which didn't have a garden, and also got an old rescue cat, Major Tom, who would usually deal with any unwanted visitors that happened to get in.

In the early part of 2015 he saw a spider in his kitchen, one which made him more distinctly uneasy than usual. Sightings had been a bit more commonplace as the building appeared to have a bit of an infestation of small, silvery worms, kind of like maggots but a bit longer and Carlos assumed they made good spider food. As usual, he left Major Tom to deal with the spider. After a few hours, he opened the kitchen door and Major Tom fled but the spider remained. After an hour of frozen panicking, he grabbed a mug of coffee and crushed the spider, then cleaned up the next morning.

Major Tom took to spending most of his time outside after that. A week after this incident, Carlos went to watch TV. He saw a spider on the TV, silhouetted against the screen. He was sure it was the very same spider as before. After an hour, again frozen at the sight, he got up and, as though being guided, kicked the screen, crushing the spider and destroying the television. He threw the TV out and burned the shoe.

In the weeks that followed, Major Tom returned once but left again, giving Carlos a pitying look. Two weeks after the TV incident, Carlos headed to sleep and found the spider sitting on the wall above his bed. At this point he was sure it was the same spider that he had crushed when he was six. He reached out for it, again as though guided by another hand, and crushed it.

He planned to leave the flat as soon as possible, handing over ownership of Major Tom to the family on the ground floor, and seeking help from doctors due to a possible psychotic episode and for seeing 'ghost spiders'.

## Post-Statement

Jonathan Sims states that he suspects Carlos was delusional and needed medication and disbelief to get over his problem. Martin confirmed that Carlos lived at those addresses and John feels there are insufficient details to actually investigate.

He would have asked Tim to follow-up with Carlos but the man was found dead in the flat shortly after giving his statement. He apparently died of asphyxiation, from some "foreign organic material" that blocked his throat. And when he was found, he was totally encased in spider webs.

## Continuity

* **Related Entity:** The Web and The Corruption.
	+ The worm infestation Carlos notes in the building is connected to Jane Prentiss as described by Martin in MAG 22.
	+ Carlos is mentioned in MAG 123, where his name is found in the code of a Web-related website.

## Trivia

* Carlos' childhood experience about bursting a spider egg sack is likely based on voice actor Lydia Nicholas' (Melanie King) own experience where the same thing happened and left her very scared of spiders for several years.