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It's hard enough to avoid those horrible wriggly things while we're awake, and now we have to worry that they're crawling into our mouths while we sleep? Little Miss Muffett was a piker. Fear not. This statistic average the average person swallowing eight spiders per year was not only made up out of whole cloth, it was invented as an example of the absurd things people will believe simply because they come across them on the Internet. As noted in Scientific American, this claim is highly implausible from a biological standpoint: So how did this claim arise? In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of facts that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous facts, among which was the statistic cited above about the average person's swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst's propagation of this false fact has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.
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